Aliens in the Wild Wild West (1999)

Posted on Dec 07, 2005 under Kidvid, Sci-fi |

Directed by George Erschbamer
Written by Alon Kaplan
Starring
- Taylor Locke
- Carly Pope
- Barna Moricz
- Markus Parilo
- Gerry Quigley
Produced by Cris Andrei
Executive produced by David M. Perlmutter, Lewis B. Chesler, Vlad Paunescu, Donald Kushner, Dana Scanlan, and Charles Band (uncredited)

I’m guessing it went like this: Taylor Locke had such a great time shooting Phantom Town (1999) that he said to his father, producer Peter Locke, “Hey, Dad, let’s make another a sci-fi western in Romania!”

Okay, there are some problems with my theory; for instance, Peter Locke’s name is found nowhere in the credits (unlike Donald Kushner, his partner at The Kushner-Locke Company). But it’s as good an explanation as any for why this movie was made. I mean, I can’t imagine that market research showed an audience clamoring for a second cheap Canadian-Romanian sci-fi western production aimed at adolescents.

This time around, a generic American family is again imperiled: As pubescent Tom (Locke) avidly documents with commentary on his video camera (a subplot which will necessarily drop out of sight rapidly), his older teen sister Sara (Carly Pope) gets into a major disagreement with their parents (Mircea Constantinescu and Marioara Sterian – just imagine the accents) about her good-for-nothing boyfriend which can only be described as “supremely bitchy.” Yes, Sara is another one of those teenaged girls who gets a free pass to whine all of the standard cliches like “We’re in love – something none of you know anything about!” and “I’m almost seventeen! You can’t stop me!” Frankly, I think that any character introduced like that deserves to become monster fodder somewhere around the end of Act 2, but rarely are my expectations met. (Even a good slap upside the head? Come on, people, we’re setting examples for the youth of America here! And the youth of Romania, too!) Dad, meanwhile, spouts just as many cliches back at her – “No daughter of mine…” and “While you’re living under my roof…” and such. A competent actor might be able to pull off such a string of well-worn parental dicta; unfortunately, Constantinescu (or whoever provides his voice in the obvious looping) barely manages to keep his accent and sentence inflection intelligible. It says something that Tom, who keeps up a steady string of TV-commentator patter all through the argument, is the least annoying character in the scene.

“Give us George Adamski. We just want Adamski.”

Dad decides that the solution to their familial discord is to drag the reluctant kids on a weeks-long vacation. That’s right, nothing helps ease tension like forcing unwilling parties to share the interior of a motor vehicle for weeks on end. By the time they reach a conveniently untouched western ghost town and get out to wander around, Sara is literally looking for a route to escape, and Tom looks like he’d take the same option if he were willing to give Sara the satisfaction.

While scurrying around the ghost town, the kids enter the old sheriff’s office, and Sara puts her foot through a rotten floorboard. Tom sees a metallic techno-prop in the space below the floor, and – no joke – he actually utters this line: “I wonder what happens if I press this button…”

With a flash and a CGI effect, the two are back in the vague 1880s. Sidestepping Sheriff Cane (Markus Parilo), who wonders how they got into his office, they find themselves in a former “ghost” town that is not only populated, but over-populated. Seriously. There are enough Romanian extra “locals” continuously crossing the main street to raise the question of whether any of them are supposed to have jobs or other places to be.

“Sorry, Johnny, but I usually date guys who aren’t quite as… musky as you are.”

Since Sara’s wearing tight jeans and a shirt that exposes her midriff, it’s no wonder that she soon elicits the attention of a couple of low-life poachers, Bloody Bob (Gerry Quigley) and Pook (Marcello Cobzariu), who try to force their attention on her, only to be stymied by the arrival of dashing, heroic Johnny Coyle (Barna Moricz). You can tell he’s a good guy, because he’s the only person we’ve met so far in this western town who’s wearing clean clothes and has recently bathed. Sara, of course, reacts to him with eye rolls and “Whatever.”

They nevertheless accept Johnny’s offer of a place to stay, and on the wagon ride back to his place with his mother (shut up – a lot of perfectly nice and normal guys live with their moms), they find themselves buzzed by a poorly-rendered CGI UFO, which then goes and crashes over yonder over the bluff. But they don’t follow up and investigate it, because there are more pressing matters to attend to, to wit, accosting Johnny and his mother (Gloria Slade) with a string of twentieth-centuryisms. Congratulations, Tom, my respect for you is now sinking to levels that approach your sister’s. She, at least, is a self-absorbed and conceited twit, but you were the one who realized that you had time traveled, and yet you keep spouting TV-commercial lines and contemporary pop-cultural references for absolutely no reason. We’re not yet approaching the levels found in Unidentified Flying Oddball (1979), but there’s still plenty of room for condemnation.

Oh, and the other reasons they didn’t immediately check out the downed UFO is that the plot calls for Bloody Bob and Pook to discover a full-sized alien (Ovidiu Bucurenciu) caught in one of their bear traps. She’s hairy, ugly, and without any sort of phaser, so that leaves the poachers free to truss her up and cart her back to town to exploit for her sideshow appeal.

“E.T. phone barber!”

By the next morning, Johnny’s hormones have managed to convince him that Sara is not only not a completely incomprehensible foreigner but also not a bitch to the very core, and he keeps trying to make innocent country-boy moves on her as they head out to find the saucer. Which they do. They also find, amidst the mixed plywood sets and CGI mattes, a young alien (George Ilie) who looks like E.T. wearing a gorilla suit. And they also find a universal translation device, which is also the gizmo that brought them back in time in the first place. I guess it’s the interstellar version of a swiss army knife. They call the young alien “Jiffy” because they can’t pronounce his full name (although “Jiffyvawa Zudo” doesn’t look any tougher than a lot of the Romanian names in the closing credits); the large alien captured earlier is his mother. Oh, and she’s only got about eighteen hours before the atmosphere pack on her back runs out of the sulfur-based gas mix she needs to live. Hey, at last we have a plot!

Granted, it’s a plot that has to be spurred along by arbitrary developments like the kids taking young Jiffy back to the homestead to hide him in the barn instead of leaving him in the relative security of the saucer. Or like the poachers taking the mother alien into town to conspire with the sheriff to sell her to P.T. Barnum, just so locking the alien in the town jail can lead to rumor-mongering among the locals.

It looks us a long time to get to the crux of the plot – They’ve got to rescue Jiffy’s mother! – and it’s a pretty thin storyline even for an eighty-minute feature, so a couple of subplot take an unwieldy amount of time. In one, the sheriff finagles with the Barnum representative (Marius Florea) to make sure he gets paid before the critter’s air tanks run out; in another, a whacked-out local preacher (Ion Haiduc) incites the locals against the sheriff, because he’s obviously in league with Lucifer. Both of these drag on far too long compared with their importance, which is mainly, “Whoa! We have to fill how much time?”

“There will come demons! Demons flying out of the sky! And they will call themselves ‘American movie producers!’”

I would be remiss if I didn’t note this disquieting development: I recognized Ion Haiduc. I know him from Phantom Town (1999) as the cowboy stuck in a behavioral loop, and from The Shrunken City (1999) as the truck driver. Do you understand what I’m saying? I’ve seen enough of these shot-in-Romania direct-to-video flicks that I’m getting to recognize the Romanian bit players! I need a vacation…

Anyway. I’ll not bore you (too late!) with the full plot to the end. Suffice it to say that the aliens are saved, in large part by the impassioned plea which Tom makes to the locals to be accepting and nonjudgmental of hairy, fierce looking aliens. Remember, these are people who wouldn’t share a bar with an African or an Indian or a Chinese laborer, but they open their hearts and decide to rub shoulders with buttt-ugly aliens because a stranger kid who talks like a used-car salesman on crack tells them they oughtta. You know, my suspension of disbelief only stretches so far.

Oh, and somewhere along the way Sara stops being a bitch. For no particular reason, mind you; it’s not like she had some great realization and decided to cut back on the self-obsessed teenager routine. No, it’s more of a plot-obligatory thing; she opens up to Johnny, begins to care about something other than herself, and even hugs her parents when they finally get back. There’s not even a satisfying slap as a step in her journey to non-bitchhood.

“Come and knock on our door! (Come and knock on our door!)…”

So yes, everything ends with the aliens getting off earth safely and the kids getting back to their own time safely, leaving behind one western town which has discovered the virtues of tolerance and openness and kindness. Which, I guess, explains why there’s nothing but a ghost town left in the latter end of the twentieth century. Towns like that get their asses kicked.