Cody watches a sci-fi thriller from Australia.
I recently discovered the works of Australian filmmaker Nathan Hill, who has been writing, directing, producing, and acting in films since the 1990s. Almost exactly one year ago today, I wrote about his thriller Lady Terror, which was his tribute to the Corey Haim / Corey Feldman / Nicole Eggert erotic thriller Blown Away. Now I’ve just watched his sci-fi thriller Alien Love, which he wrote with his Lady Terror collaborator Simon Salamon – but while Hill was at the helm of Lady Terror, for this one he passed the directing duties over to Simon Oliver, who has made a lot of documentaries on subjects like aliens, UFOs, and the Illuminati.
Much like Lady Terror was reminiscent of Blown Away, Alien Love reminded me of another movie throughout: Peter Medak’s Species II from 1998. That’s because both of these movies are based on the idea of a male astronaut returning to Earth after having been either infected by an extraterrestrial organism or entirely replaced by an alien during a trip into space, then causing trouble with the ladies on the astronaut’s home planet. Things get especially messy when these aliens start procreating with Earth women.
Hill stars as Australian astronaut Ryan Van Hill-Song, who works for NASA and gets launched into space. Unfortunately, there’s some kind of complication and NASA loses contact with Ryan for “sixty seconds or so” while he’s up there... and when he gets back to Earth, there’s something different about him. He acts odd, he listens to annoying frequencies on the radio, he starts wandering around town, he gets into random vehicles. During his wandering, he even stops by an Aliens Anonymous meeting, where people discuss such things as alien and UFO sightings, and talk about aliens being held captive in Area 51. He doesn’t remember what happened to him in space, so at one point there’s a suggestion that he should try hypnotherapy to “wake up his brain.” But that doesn’t do much.
All of this is quite concerning to Ryan’s wife Sadie (Ira Chakraborty), but while she spends a lot of time worrying about Ryan and wondering what’s going on with him, there are also nice moments between them where there's still some romance there and they get intimate - leading to a pregnancy that any viewer will strongly suspect is a bad turn of events, because we can be fairly sure that Ryan has either been infected by some sort of alien parasite or completely swapped out by an alien. Ryan doesn’t act quite human anymore... but then again, he’s not the only character in this movie to exhibit strange behavior. One might wonder if Sadie has also been replaced by an alien in the sequence where she catches Ryan with another woman and angrily walks him home, just to sadly lay down on the couch for a nap. Not exactly the response you would usually expect to get when you’ve been caught with another woman.
Despite having an intriguing set-up, Alien Love doesn’t do a whole lot with it. Just like Sadie doesn’t do a whole lot when she catches her husband as he appears to be about to cheat on her. Ryan just does a lot of walking around and jogging. Even when there’s an alien on the screen, it just keeps going with the walking motif. Then things wrap up with an ending that is simultaneously depressing and anticlimactic.
There are interesting ideas in Alien Love, but it doesn’t feel like the movie reaches its full potential. The filmmakers clearly didn’t have much money to work with, so no one should expect the story to reach Species II or The Quatermass Xperiment levels of activity or effects, but I’m still left with the feeling that Hill, Salamon, and Oliver could have done more with this concept. I found Alien Love to be underwhelming – but on the bright side, if you decide to check it out, it has a running time of just 78 minutes.
Alien Love is currently streaming on Tubi.
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