fredrick wolcott Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Kim Voynar and I watched one of the AFI Dallas midnight movies together, Beings, and it was one of the more unusual moviegoing experiences I've had. I don't just mean that the film itself was strange, either -- read Kim's review to find out about the movie. First of all, it was the only screening I've ever attended where the theater door was guarded by some serious men in black with sunglasses, looking very CIA-esque (or MiB as the case may be). Second of all, the filmmakers decided to bring in some help for the Q&A session. Normally, post-movie Q&As include the filmmaker and maybe some of the cast and crew talking about the filmmaking process, and maybe that hilarious practical joke that such-and-such actress played on everyone. This time, however, the Q&A addressed the movie's theme of alien abduction, and included input not only from writer/director Fredrick Wolcott but from Alien Agenda author Jim Marrs and the Texas director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), Ken Cherry.

Before diving into the subject of alien abduction, Wolcott talked a little about the filmmaking process for Beings. He intended from the start to make a science-fiction film of some kind, he wasn't sure of what his focus would be. "I watched every sci-fi movie I could, and then sat down and wondered, what can I do that would work with a low budget? Maybe an alien movie ... but shot from the point of view of the aliens."

Wolcott interviewed a lot of self-professed alien abductees as research for Beings. Most of them told him they felt discombobulated and confused during their alien experiences, and he wanted to elicit as much of that response as possible in the film so that audience members would feel as though they themselves were experiencing alien abduction.

There's nothing like a good midnight screening of an alien abduction flick to really get your film festival off to a good start, so when I saw Fredrick Wolcott's Beings on the schedule, I knew I wanted to check it out. The film was preceded by a fun little short called Coming to Town, which is about two Santas -- a naughty one and a nice one. The nice one is the jolly old St. Nick we know and love; the naughty one drives an old, beat up car while chugging booze from the bottle, accompanied by a grungy drunkard of an elf and a violent, nasty little leprechaun. Naughty Santa has come to answer a plea for revenge from a chubby girl who's being bullied, and the result is darkly hilarious.

Then we settled in for Beings, which was preceded by a warning that the film could cause seizures in people with epilepsy and severe vertigo for the rest of us -- and the warning didn't lie. The first ten minutes or so of the film, I started to feel dizzy and nauseated just from the motion and flashing on the screen. The premise of the film is that a UFO has crashed in a sea in Russian territory. The spaceship was equipped with video surveillance equipment throughout the ship, and Russian scientists have been able to restore video footage from the alien vessel (in a handy plot twist, the aliens used video technology surprisingly similar to our own).

The footage the scientists retrieve is terribly disturbing -- so bad that the Russian government decides to share it with the president of the United States. It shows four young college students, two male and two female, who have been abducted and held aboard the ship, being subjected to experimentation by the aliens. From this point, the point of view of the film shifts to the retrieved footage, so that we are watching the events unfold from the aliens' perspective.