A lot of fun.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

"Xenogenesis" is a 12-minute live action short film from over 35 years ago written and directed by James Cameron and Randall Frakes. And while one of them went on to become one of the most defining filmmakers of the last decades, the other quickly disappeared and did not manage a great career. This does not mean, however, I am a big fan of Cameron. Actually, I am not. I found "Terminator" and "Avatar" okay, but never really liked "Titanic". Anyway, one of the actors in this short film here went on to write parts of several later Cameron films. Still "Xenogenesis" looks a lot like style over substance for me, like Cameron's other films as well. It's all about great special effects and the story and character development clearly suffers from Cameron's focus on technical aspects. I can forgive him here as he was in his early 20s when he made this one, but I cannot forgive him for most of his other works. Not recommended.

Yeah, before when James Cameron made The Terminator, his first time of making a sort of film was none other than this one. Let's go to history. Cameron was a truck driver around the mid-late 70s (no kidding, it's true), but he was inspired by Star Wars so much that he wanted to make a short film, with his friends, to enter the movie business. He convinced several local dentists to invest of $20,000, wrote a screenplay with his friend, he make small robots (obviously for the stop motion animation) all by himself, studying how the effects work in Star Wars were and practiced the stop motion shots in his living room. It was that point when they were all finished. He tried to show the short to other studios that if he can make a feature film out of it, but it got backfired. However, he and his friend, Randall Frakes, did got a job to make miniature spaceships for Roger Corman's film Battle Beyond The Stars, and Cameron became one of Corman's visual effects specialists. Now...let's go to the short itself.There were some things that will later on be borrowed from Cameron's other films like a cyborg hero (T2: Judgement Day), a strong female protagonist (any movie he made), camera shot of what's the hero doing in a vehicle or a machine (The Abyss), and bio luminescence (The Abyss and Avatar). I'll say for a short that cost like so cheap to make, the effects were surprisingly good and the way they handled the live action bits and the stop motion bits, together, looked spot on. However, don't expect the quality or the acting to be amazing because the quality is VHS like and the actors aren't professionals, which does kinda show.But that doesn't ruined the short at all. For what it is, it's surprisingly good. You can easily find it on YouTube, so it's not hard to find it on the Internet. This is for the ones if they want to know more about the history of James Cameron and how he became to what he is today. For everyone else, it's at least worth a look.Score: 7/10

It's always tragic when a giant cleaning robot mistakes you for a pile of dirt. What's a fellow to do?That was the plot... It's not a comedy at all, and it's pretty good.This short is fantastic for three reasons: 1) For a 1978 film, it's brilliant. 2) For a student film, it's brilliant. It looks like a clip from a real (altough cheap) movie. 3) For a low budget film it's brilliant. The stop-motion technique is great, and camera-work which makes small robot models look giant is perfect.Only one problem. Ending... Not to spoil anything, but the trip is definitely way better then it's destination. Maybe it was budget or lack of ideas but everything else works just fine.Here, you can see the origin of Repley and her lift fork (Aliens 2; battle with the alien mom) or few ideas (concepts really) from Terminator universe and I don't mean the time travel.The short also has a great comic-book style intro that (somewhat unnecessarily) sets up the actual plot and is never referred to again.The budget is on the short side, but it does add some fine camp value and a slight resemblance to (different) J.C.'s Darkstar (btw, which would've been much better if it had a-n-y action to go along with it's snark).For fans of Mr. J.C. this is a necessary viewing.

Xenogenesis is a student film by James Cameron, later in his career known of the Terminator movies and of course Titanic. It's only 12 minutes long and after rather nifty opening narration we get about 10 minutes worth of battling robots.It's rather easy to see, that Cameron is a trained special effects maker as the robots and settings do look rather good despite of the obvious small budget. But as it is special effects don't make up the fact, that there isn't actually much of a plot or purpose in the film other than to test out some film tricks.For James Cameron fans Xenogeniesis is rather interesting treat and a showcase of where he did depart. What is more interesting is the fact, that Cameron hasn't changed much as storyteller: the themes of Xenogenesis are pretty similar to his more bigger budget movies: tough female character, love and machines as in how machines can be either benefit or a threat.Xenogenesis isn't the best, or even a extremely good film as such, debut movie ever, far from it, but it is rather interesting piece of film as a point of origin.