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Directed by Robert David Sanders. Starring Barbara Streifel Sanders, Joseph Dunn, Ian Malcolm, Michael Caruso, Caroline Rich, Anthony Tedesco. USA 2009, 81 mins. Cert : 18

Release Date 30th August 2010

It’s Christmas Eve in downtown L.A. and its unusually hot, there’s a proliferation of strange seismic activity and power surges are wreaking havoc with all forms of technology. Our focus is on an ensemble cast of characters holed up in a hotel who are adversely affected when all the power goes out. Among them are a young actress going through a divorce, a couple with two young kids who only occasionally remember (as the movie unfolds) that both kids are missing in a monster-dominated building and a goofy Hollywood bodyguard. The source of all the bizarre earlier activity turns out to be an invasion of slimy, toothy, tentacled extraterrestrial creatures on an apparent mission to overrun the Earth.

Of the many films with the title THE BLACKOUT, this is by no means the worst. It scores points early on both for killing an annoying kid (off-camera) and for revealing its threat to be a bunch of unashamedly vicious old-school man-in-a-suit creatures accompanied by some crawling icky things that pleasantly echo the brain monsters in FIEND WITHOUT A FACE.

In fact, THE BLACKOUT does quite a few things right, which makes it an extra shame that its overall impact is neutered by universally unsympathetic characters, mostly amateurish acting and terrible dialogue (“He takes out the trash, he doesn’t sleep with it!”). We could easily overlook the now traditional “Dammit!” no-signal moment (though here there’s a good reason for it) and the embarrassing looking low-budget CG explosions / digital gore embellishments, but the obnoxious folks in front of the camera will have you immediately rooting for the monsters.

Overlooking repetitive scenes of these bickering losers coming to blows in moments of panic, the movie does impress with its green-eyed, refreshingly retro creatures (somewhat reminiscent at least facially of the Syngenor in SCARED TO DEATH) accumulating a high bodycount and ripping off heads without hesitation. There’s potentially a great monster movie lurking within this under-funded, poorly cast flick - and it certainly has ambitions beyond its budget. The downbeat final reveal, for instance, (echoes of RESIDENT EVIL and CLOVERFIELD) would be an awesome revelatory moment were it not for the fact that it is achieved mostly with glaring, cheapjack CG.

Steven West.

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