Marcus: Invasion (2006)

How many of you have ever had an epiphany before? Have you ever had a revelation that what you were experiencing at that very moment was glorious, beautiful, magnificent, and that forever after you would remember that snapshot in time with relish? Have you ever been a part of something so immaculate that you reacted with an almost religious awe and a sense of appreciation for even being allowed to exist in the same moment and place as that which transfixed you? Well what do you suppose the opposite of that feeling is? Imagine that with a nice drizzling of week old placenta, and you get a sense of what it’s like to watch “Invasion.”

I almost feel like by talking about this B-movie will make myself physically sick, and I’m not just talking nausea, I mean a full blown malignant brain tumor type of sickness. It’s almost like acknowledging this film’s existence causes its death stench to cling to you and haunt you into the grave. Even as I recall it now my heart is beginning to shudder and slow down like a chubby kid 15 steps into a footrace.

The plot is as follows. A meteor with an alien parasite crashes into a rural California valley. A farmer calls it in to the cops, and when an officer is dispatched to the scene, the now infected farmer infects the cop, then the cop keeps driving and finds a prom couple making out and infects the dude, then the girl escapes in the cop car. She contacts the police station over the radio, then for the next hour she’s driving around deserted dirt roads trying to find an exit from the park that isn’t blocked by infected boyfriends, which is hard because apparently there’s only one, which doesn’t stop her from trying twice. And I’m not exaggerating about driving around for an hour straight. Mercifully, the film’s only about an hour and twenty minutes, so it ends pretty soon after that, but it’s still too long by the mere fact that it exists.

Now some of you might say, “But Marcus, surely it can’t be that bad, ‘My Dinner with Andre’ was almost two hours and featured nothing but two guys in a conversation while eating.” And to that I say, first of all kudos for knowing about “My Dinner With Andre,” and secondly, there’s a difference between a single scene movie that’s made up of interesting dialogue and one that’s a girl screaming “Please help me” into a radio for an hour. Oh, and did I mention the entire duration of “Invasion” is seen from the dashboard camera of the cop car? Did I mention that? Because it fucking is! So not only is it an hour of a girl driving around in a car, coming into contact with other people for a total of about 30 seconds, but you never even fucking see the girl! It’s just empty dirt road! I don’t think there was ever a better visual representation of the parallel between the script and the final product, sheer vapid emptiness. I think this review so far is longer than the script. It’s probably also better. That’s the one thing I’ll say about this movie that is in any way positive. Its existence proves that any of you aspiring directors out there can make a viable film. It doesn’t matter how blurry or shaky the camera is, or if the acting’s any good, because this movie proves not only that, but apparently it doesn’t even matter if you fucking point the camera at anything. And I know that none of you would be stupid enough to do that, so automatically you’d have something better than this filmmaking equivalent of a colonic cyst.

I don’t know if the film was trying to be uniquely realistic or just stingy. The whole thing is one continuous shot there are minimal lighting effects, save the car headlights, there’s no acting since the “actors” are barely ever in front of the camera, and I’ve seen better special effects in the recording Thomas Edison made of Fred Ott’s sneeze. Fred Ott’s sneeze was recorded January 7, 1894, literally one of the first motion pictures ever recorded. That’s right, the special effects in “Invasion” actually predate the invention of films, they are that bad.

Anyways, the end result is a movie that’s just as unique as any hipster (here’s a hint, if you’re part of a group that can be identified by what you wear and take interest in, you’re not a unique individual, you’re part of a club). But even that’s unfair to hipsters; sorry, hipsters (but not really, you plaid shirt, tight jeans, and thick-framed glasses wearing vintage trinket lovers). “Invasion” really doesn’t know what it’s trying to accomplish, and doesn’t even make an effort.

I’ll bring up one more terrible thing about the movie and end it there because, as I guessed, typing this has given me diarrhea. The film is bookended by two scenes featuring a woman who is about to hike into the valley, which has now been quarantined for 3 days. The movie informs us that the army nuked the whole valley the same night the invasion was reported, which we see in the last seconds that the cop car camera is running (how’d they recover the footage anyways?). So this woman, who’s been paying careful enough attention to know the army’s restricted entrance to this rural, Podunk little town, but not enough attention to know it was nuked 2 days ago, is about to begin her hike when an infected army official grabs her and kills her off camera, graciously saving her from the horrible slow decay of death by nuclear fallout. Oh yeah, and these two scenes were shot with a “night vision” filter and yet the lady’s wearing sunglasses and casting a shadow… so I retract my previous hipster comparison. This movie is more like a retired boxer (with, let’s say 40 concussions or so) who’s taken up writing novels than a teenager who’s struggling to define herself, but really needs to take her floral print sundress, bulky camera, and ukulele, and just get the fuck out of the photography section of the bookstore.