ufo Tagged Articles at Cinematical

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.

Try to fit this title on a marquee: Three Men Seeking Monsters: Six Weeks in Pursuit of Werewolves, Lake Monsters, Giant Cats, Ghostly Devil Dogs, and Ape-Men. It's the name of a book by Nick Redfern that Universal has just bought the rights to. Now get this: the book is non-fiction. Redfern is a Ufologist and his book tells of his adventure with two buddies as the trio visited legendary mysterious places around Great Britain, including Loch Ness. The best part is that Redfern is a punk, one of his friends is a goth herpetologist (a reptile and amphibian expert) and his other friend is 6'6" and 400 pounds. Basically, this is the book I was craving as a subculture-centered, Fortean-minded, mysteries-of-the-unknown-obsessed teenager.

Fortunately, I never knew about this book (actually it came out many years after I'd stopped reading about UFOs and such), because if I was a fan and had looked forward to it being adapted into a movie, I would have been very disappointed to learn that Jon Heder is set to star. The one-note Napoleon Dynamite actor, who is surprisingly not yet a has-been despite not yet starring in another hit since his cult-fave introduction, will be producing with his brothers, Doug and Dan (his twin! there's two of them!), and he is expected to play the author (who is bald). I'm not sure who he could get to play the big guy, but for the goth herpetologist let me suggest Heder's School for Scoundrels co-star Todd Louiso, who has at least played a snake expert amusingly before, and who I can totally imagine dressing up to play Vampire: The Masquerade.