Director – Fred Searle, Screenplay – Craig McLearie, Producers – Scott Jeffrey & Rebecca J. Matthews, Photography – Theodor Brinch, Music – Edmund Roberts, Visual Effects – Lucid Studios. Production Company – Proportion Productions.
Sarah T. Cohen (Lyra), Amber Doig-Thorne (Norma), May Kelly (Ursa), Benjamin Colbourne (Phoenix), Matthew Baunsgard (Priest), Nikolai Leon (Leo), Leah Glater (Carina), Richard Kovacs (Micha), Bao Tieu (Lacerta)
A group of friends gather for Lyra’s birthday at her home in the countryside. They play a game of Truth or Dare where one of the dares is to sneak into the swimming pool on the neighbouring property. During the course of this, they venture inside the house. There they discover the owner’s basement laboratory that contains an egg brought back from the planet Lacerta by a space probe. They are trapped in the house as the owner Micha returns. The egg hatches into an alien that promptly slaughters him. The others flee as the alien comes hunting them.
Scott Jeffrey/Scott Chambers has become an incredibly prolific British low-budget producer and sometimes director in the last few years. He has produced a hundred films since 2016 and directed twenty of them, which include a series of monster, dinosaur, killer clown and Amityville films. He has also produced a series of twisted takes on fairytales and children’s films where his most prominent success ended up being Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023). ‘Alien Invasion was another of Jeffrey’s films. The film was a directorial debut for Fred Searle who had previously worked as an assistant director on assorted films for Jeffrey.
Alien Invasion is fairly much just an earthbound version of Alien (1979). There was a crapload of low-budget Alien copies made throughout the 1980s with the likes of Scared to Death (1980), Without Warning (1980), Galaxy of Terror (1981), Inseminoid (1981), The Deadly Spawn (1982), Forbidden World (1982), Xtro (1982), Titan Find (1984) and Deep Space (1988), Most of these brought the basics of Alien down to Earth and had the cast pursued by near-identical copies of H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph.
The mini-genre of low-budget Alien copycats petered out in the mid-1990s but Alien Invasion could easily be another of these. There is another Giger-lookalike alien creature running around attacking people. In fact, what we have is essentially no more than another Alien brought down to Earth film that takes place among the environs of an English country mansion (location shooting in East Sussex).
Alien Invasion passes as an Alien copy with little to distinguish it. The means whereby an alien egg is brought back by a space probe and ends up in a scientist’s country home is granted scanty explanations by the script. The film’s credibility takes a major nosedive when the group discover that the alien has a big vulnerability … to water, one of the most abundant substances in the universe.
Also of great frustration is the film’s lack of an ending – [PLOT SPOILERS] the girls are pursued by the creature, hide inside a car as the alien tries to batter its way in just as a UFO appears overhead, whereupon the film just cuts to credits. It is like an abrupt slamming on of the brakes without any resolution, not to mention zero explanation what the UFO represents.
It must be said about Scott Jeffrey and co that they generally provide a competent production, if one that is constantly on the low-budget side. Alien Invasion is passably well made on a level of technical proficiency – the only complaint one would have with the version seen is that the dialogue is awfully quiet and hard to hear. The cast are generally competent, with the line-up of girls including a number of repeat faces from Jeffrey’s productions. Of these, I am convinced Sarah T. Cohen is well capable of going on to bigger and better things.
Trailer here