Alien Agenda, The: Endangered Species (1997)

Posted on May 02, 2001 under Sci-fi |

Written and directed by Gabriel Campisi, Tim Ritter, Ron Ford and Kevin J. Lindenmuth
Starring
- Debbie Rochon
- Joseph Zaso
- Candice Meade
- Joel D. Wynkoop
- Alejandro Arogonez
Produced by Kevin J. Lindenmuth

Before I get into the review proper, I have to mention that Paul Scrabo, producer of the indie TV series Front Row (available streamed from http://www.scrabo.com), sent me a copy of the episode in which host Rich Scrivani interviewed Kevin Lindenmuth. It was informative, instructive, and fascinating, and proved to be wonderful background for this review.

On the other hand, this review also wouldn’t have taken place without Kevin Lindenmuth himself out-of-the-blueing me with a few screeners in the mail, which I’ll be reviewing in the next, you know, while or so. Thanks, Kevin.

Shall we, then?

“Hey, lookit! There are letters all over the place here!”

The Alien Agenda series was Lindenmuth’s brainchild, an attempt to work with other micro-budget filmmakers around the country on videos that were something more than an anthology, something not quite as cohesive as a feature. The premise is Lindenmuth’s, which in a nutshell places humanity in the middle of a covert war being fought between the Greys, who use human agents for their dirty work, and the Morphs, who can appear in human form except in the radioactive environments prefered by the Greys — thus necessitating that they also use human agents.

The first thing we see is really one of the highlights: short clips of interviews with various shills about the whole idea of aliens on earth, ranging from complete level-headed skepticism to redneck paranoia to personal family experience that leaves you wondering as to the trustworthiness of the tale-teller. This same trope was used again, to equal effectiveness, in The Alien Agenda: Under the Skin, and it adds a cinema verite sheen to the proceedings.

We open in New York in the far-flung future of 1999, following tabloid TV reporter Megan Cross (Debbie Rochon) as she starts noticing strange goings-on in her own life. Specifically, her significant other John (Joseph Zaso, last seen around these parts in Evil Streets) is sneaking around, and it looks like he’s having an affair. When she confronts him, he claims that she’s his sister. But she’s still edgy, since she’s unexpectedly pregnant — and when a crazed woman bursts into the apartment, gunning for John, he exhibits some rather alien abilities to dispatch her.

Forget the Alien Menace — fight the Hairspray Menace!

Yup, she’s been bedding down with a Morph — and after he tells her of the war between them and the Greys to reassure her (yeah, like that’s going to work). She takes it about how you’d expect: she grabs the intruder’s gun and blows him away.

Let’s fast-forward to the winter of 2005, and a downed chopper in the mountains of Las Vegas. Two guys get away from it, with a mysterious box that they hide deep in the snow; they they’re beset upon by two attackers, who kill one of the fugitives; the other vanishes into the woods.

Five years later, the survivor, Fritz (Alejandro Arogonez) shows up in Las Vegas. He calls in to the human resistance headquarters and speaks to Megan (who’s working with the resistance now, see — and by the way, the baby was miscarried), but before he can answer, he’s on the run from the Men in Black — or, as he refers to them, The Law.

From the pilot for Fox’s When Disassembled Appliances Attack!

He goes to the resistance safe house, manned by a girl with parakeet hair, and it’s there we get a little more exposition: He used to be a Lawman himself, which explains the alien triangle-in-circle tattoo on the back of his hand. And what he was transporting was something called the Drabodok Stone, a crystal which the Greys use as a power source and a weapon.

He goes back out into the mountains (now minus the snow), finds the hidden box, and as an experiment he touches his tattoo to the identical symbol on the stone. Whoops, a big alien head shows up and tells him he’s just primed the stone to obliterate the earth. He fights off more men in black, and makes it back to the not-terribly-safe safehouse, where he’s again found by the men in black. Plus a saucer sets down in the back yard, and two stop-motion robots disembark and “digitize” him for transport back to their planet. But they didn’t get the stone; he left that with the parakeet-haired girl.

Come with me now, then, to Florida, where a nuclear accident has rendered the southern half of the state a depopulated militarized zone. The resistance gets ahold of their agent there, Cope Ransom (a very scuzzy-looking Joel Wynkoop), to go into the forbidden zone to look for a downed saucer and salvage anything intact from it. So over the wall he goes with his radiation detector, into the soggy leftovers of Floridian society. If nothing else, it’s a pleasant change from the standard Australian outback/Utah desert look for such wastelands. Along the way, he encounters a mutant alligator, cannibal kids, a survivor waif who turns out to be a pawn of the Greys (as evidenced by the worm critters that spew from her gut when he stabs her), and the ghosts of his own memories of the good old days, back when he had a wife and kids.

I know Mormon missionaries are always supposed to have a companion, but this is just wrong.

Eventually he finds, not a saucer, but a complete alien base, and gets taken captive by a man in black. And not just any MIB here; this one’s completely psycho, as evidenced by his enjoyment of pain (like, say, salt in other people’s wounds) and his attachment to a silver-painted department story mannequin. Ransom manages to burst his bonds and knock the MIB around, and then escape after leaving an explosive charge behind… but the Greys have learned how to push the “stop” button, and when he makes it home, he finds the MIB waiting for him.

And now, back to New York, where Megan and her immediate supervisor exchange paranoid accusations. See, someone’s been tipping off the other teams — thus the disappearances of Fritz and Ransom. Is someone working for the Greys? Or the Morphs? Or both? Or neither? Perhaps a really talky cat-and-mouse scene right here would be a great way to end the movie.

Looking back, it’s easy to tell where the breaks are between the different directors’ work, and not just because of the changes in location. The individual segments have very different tones, as well as different technical specs. The interview segments were provided by Ron Ford; Kevin Lindenmuth provided Megan’s story, which attempts to tie the proceedings together; Gabriel Campisi directed the story of Fritz and the Law, and Tim Ritter gave us Ransom in Florida. It’s pretty visible that Lindenmuth worked hard to get the pieces to harmonize, with varying results (especially in the case of Campisi’s segment, which was actually completed in 1992; the mythology behind it is completely different, and the identification of the house as a “safe house” was obviously inserted into the phone call segment).

One of the stomach ailments which Pepto Bismal does not specifically claim to treat.

The other thing that becomes readily visible is each filmmaker’s strengths and weaknesses. What I would really like to see is the three main directors (Ron Ford’s not included) on set at the same time, working together: It would combine Lindenmuth’s technical expertise in getting a good, clear, true-color image from video equipment, Campisi’s better shot composition, and Ritter’s sense of pacing and ability to think of truly memorable images to put on the screen.

What the whole tape ends up being is the middle of a story, one which is not actually begun or ended in the other installments in the series. They’re dissociated glimpses of an inarguably interesting mythology behind everything, but the glimpses are really too brief.

And I’m still pissed that the whole half-alien baby angle was ditched so abruptly.

Some Notable Totables: