Disturbing yet enthralling

Better Late Then Never

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

This one is beyond awful. The aliens look like guys dressed in frog suits with cheap Halloween masks and seem to have no purpose on earth but to twirl six guns (for real, that old fashioned swing the gun by its trigger guard thing), bust out windshields on cars (interstellar vandalism...huh?) and from time to time, shoot people for no particular reason (do these guys not have laser guns or any weapons other than what they find laying around?) Not to worry, tho...awful acting and cornball plot fill in the very large blank spaces between action scenes. You'll be so desperate for something to happen that you'll find yourself cheering the car destroying scene. And then turning the movie off because not even Rifftrax makes this steaming pile worth finishing.

My good friend Neb Rogers did some audio work on this film while attending UNCG's film school. The director asked him to create some audio effects for the gunplay scenes, which he did though few appear in the final cut. As you watch the movie, whenever you hear a crisp sound effect, Neb probably recorded it. The rest of the effects sound generic. Neb wasn't credited with his role nor was he paid, though he was finally given some credit on the IMDb page.I live in Greensboro, NC, where Alien Outlaw's "auteur" director Phil Smoot attended university. He directed this film and one other called The Dark Power in the mid '80's before graduating to work on direct-to-video horror movies, though never again with the level of creative control he had on these films. That's a good thing because more than twenty-five years after its release, Alien Outlaw is even harder to sit through than it was back then. It's inept in many ways a movie can be save the near-nudity of its leading actress and some cool costumes. Even the loving casting of Lash La Rue doesn't hide the technical limitations and lack of underlining story. Still, it's far from the worst movie I have ever seen.A poorly rendered spacecraft crashes in central North Carolina and three maniacal aliens hell-bent on destruction are unleashed. This movie like many of its ilk completely adheres to the strange cliché where highly intelligent life forms inexplicably attack people like savage beasts. How did they manage to travel through space if all they seem capable of is acting like mindless movie villains? This film does better than most in this regard by positing the possibility that these beings are only destructive with no other motivations. Maybe higher life on their planet built the crafts to get them out of there. Perhaps if there were any kind of plot, we could satisfactorily answer that question.Smoot deserves some credit by keeping the aliens focused on whatever their underlining objective is. He doesn't add a love story subplot like a lot of these flicks have, though he does show a bunch of rednecks drinking beer and chatting. This should be boring but one teases the other for his effeminacy, keeping it giggle-worthy. Interplay like that is only praiseworthy in trashy productions like this where it keeps us awake. Anyway, they're quickly killed off before the heroine Jesse Jamieson (get it?) and Lash La Rue's character make quick work of them. Their costumes aren't that bad either. They look like they were made from wetsuits and Smoot appropriately has them emerge from the water to attack various people. Alien Outlaw has been released on DVD in the U.S., and isn't quite as bad as its reputation would suggest. At least Jamieson wears really short shorts and the direction is competent if unspectacular. It's still a poor movie, but I wasn't bored enough to call it unwatchable. If you ever see this on a public domain boxset someday, it's worth a watch. Not Recommended 21st of 2011

Alien Outlaw, described as sci-fi/western, and unlike a regular B-movies, which usually get ratings below 4,5 this one has 6 something... Worth watching I thought. I was wrong. For 20 minutes I tried really hard to like this film. But I just couldn't force myself to see the rest of this uber boring crap without skipping and fast forward. I love B-movies but this is just boring 90 minutes. Dull uninteresting dialogs linking scene after scene after scene where just NOTHING happens, cause they are NOT showing the Alien Outlaw, which is just a guy with black gloves, some jacket with stuff attached to it to make it look "alien" and a bad mask on his head. OK, since you have already made this suit and it won't cost you more if you show it more, right?! So why do I have to wait for half an hour to get a peak on this so called Alien Outlaw?! No distant planets, no outer space, no laser blasters, no nothing. Just a very very bad UFO shot at the beginning of the movie, and then another shot where the UFO just GOES DOWN behind some trees and you hear a crash... Just like that. Why the hell the stupid flying saucer broke down and crashed you will never know. That's about the sci-fi, now about the western part. By western they mean that they have some horse scenes and some 6-guns. Some bullets shot but there is nothing that is even remotely close to a decent gunfight let alone a classic wild west showdown. NO WILD WEST here guys! They have some old cowboy stars, so I guess the movie is interesting for their fans, but I've never even heard their names since the credits of "Alien Outlaw". I guess they were popular in USA during the 40s and I'm sure they still have fans, so maybe for them this movie will be a curious one, but I'm quite sure they will be disappointed too, if not ashamed to see their childhood heroes in such a bad excuse for a movie.

Where else would you get a mix of aliens wielding .44 Magnums and old cowboy stars coming to the rescue? You owe it to yourself to see what kind of fun can be produced on a shoestring. Phil Smoot rocks! Check out "The Dark Power" for more proof... He really knows how to dish up camp with his over-the-top directorial style. This was Sunset Carson's, Wild Bill Cody's and Lash LaRue's last film before their deaths. They may or may not have been proud of that fact, but at least it gave another generation a bit of insight into the black-and-white "B" Western genre. A bit of trivia, this movie was filmed in and around the Glade Valley School in Sparta, NC. Sparta is the county seat of Alleghany County, the home of more Christmas tree farms than any other county in the country.