Film Review: Altered

These past few days have been sunny, clear and bitterly cold. I got up Monday and made a beeline to my local video store. I have a tendency to spend hours in video stores just making a choice on what not to get.

Sometimes I surprise myself and find something really good that completely escaped my radar. Sometimes I find something that really sucks and is a waste of my time and money.

The video store is like a game of craps. 7 and 11 will get you great entertainment. But, with all the straight to video releases out there, most of the time all I get is snake eyes.

But enough about me.

Altered is a movie brought to video by one of the writers of the Blair Witch Project. Not the most genius of films was the Blair Witch Project (3 people screaming at nothing and each other in the dark woods), but it did start a cult phenomenon that even I bought into at one point.

Altered (written by Jamie Nash) is about a group of five men whose lives were changed drastically when they were all abducted by aliens as children. Only four of them remain, fifteen years later, and they are bound together by revenge on those that ruined them.

Altered is a well written story and beautifully acted out scene for scene by actors I have never heard of. I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, I was entertained.

Adam Kaufman plays Wyatt, a member of the group of abductees who physiology was permanently altered by the alien abductors at age fifteen. He knows that where there is one there is more. He knows how they think and he knows they can't keep the alien they just captured without triggering an invasion.

So what was once a personal battle becomes a fight to save the human race in one beat. Gotta love those sci fi plot twists. This movie is not for everyone. It is full of violence, lotsa gore and pervasive language. Which means (unlike the Blair Witch Project) you see everything in its awful glory.

The special effects and creature effects were ok. Nothing to slam or shout about. It was the story and the actors that kept me interested. I took them seriously because they were believable. Some situations warrant that.

So how does it end? Not telling. The movie was too much fun to give spoilers out like hot cakes. Lets just say, the threat is over for now. mwuhahahaha.

Just kidding.