Alien Storm (2026)

This was a screener request from producer Sonny Mahal, and since I'd been meaning to catch a Mahal Empire film anyway, this seemed like a perfect opportunity. Then when I saw the runtime of 75 minutes, it seemed like an even more perfect opportunity--which is that even a thing? Once something's perfect it can't be more perfect, can it?

Alien Storm is about a global alien invasion where the aliens are using a fog to cover large urban areas and knock out electricity and communications, then swarm in and kill as many people as they can. When the fog hits Las Vegas, it does so as airline CEO Frank McConnely and his wife Ophelia (Robert Standley and Laura Mason) are hosting a bougie party at the mansion he probably bought through cutting his employees' wages and his stock buyback bonuses. Luckily, all that money he made off his employees from their labor allowed him to also build a bunker in his mansion, and buy a bunch of firearms to go with it. But will all this be enough when the aliens come marching in looking to kill everyone in their path?

On a recent Bulletproof Action podcast episode discussing the Dolph Lundgren classic Showdown in Little Tokyo, Ryan Campbell said something to the effect of "if your movie's only 75 minutes, it's automatically at least a 7 out of 10," and this film is no exception to that rule, it's definitely in that 7-8 out of 10 range, or a solid 4 out of 5 stars. The runtime isn't the only thing it has to hang its hat on, we also have great practical gore effects, fun performances by Tom Arnold and Kevin Sorbo in their short time on screen, and fantastic-looking aliens that really feel authentic. The one issue I had with it was I didn't find the two main characters, the CEO and his wife, all that likeable, but even with them the actors playing them, Robert Standley and Laura Mason, gave us some great moments--it's just, how much am I relating to a CEO and his wife with a bunch of guns ordering people around in their mansion and accompanying bunker? This brings me back to the runtime though, even if I don't like the main characters, I'm not with them long enough for them to really get under my skin, and in the meantime I can enjoy everything else that's working for me, and the next thing I know the credits are rolling and I can say I had a fun time. If you're looking for a fun watch that doesn't ask a lot of you, this is worth checking out.

Recently I watched Edward L. Cahn's Invasion of the Saucer Men, which plays out similarly to this, the only difference is our heroes were two teens who accidentally ran over an alien on their way back from their make-out spot, and spent the movie trying to get people to believe them. It's easier to relate to teens than bougie CEOs and their spouses I think. Even when the actors tried to infuse some humanity into their characters after their daughter dies, it's like "that's great that we see the CEO and his wife's humanity, but does he see his employees' humanity when he's removing them from a spreadsheet to inflate profits so he can get a better bonus from the board of directors?" Hey, bunkers and guns cost money, right? Thinking about leads that would've worked better, their kids Grace and Bernie (Molly Jean Edwards and William Delesk) are a great place to start, but this movie actually takes that in a different direction on us, which I can appreciate. Another possibility for me was Elley Ringo's reporter character, Jenna Fishel, who had a lot of main character potential, and I think could've carried the film. Imagine a situation where she's there in part to hook up with Tom Arnold, but also to investigate how McConnely's company is ripping off customers with various add-ons and upcharges, while firing workers who try to unionize, and suddenly she's stuck in this alien invasion scenario. Now we're all in and want to see how she manages.

One of the biggest criticisms of my reviews is that I appear to be obsessed with runtime, and that's fair, but I think this film shows how a shorter runtime can really help the overall enjoyment of it. Going back to Edward L. Cahn, most of his films in the 50s and 60s also ran between 65 and 75 minutes (for example, Invasion of the Saucer Men was a cool 69 minutes--hey oh!), and that made sense, because not only did it help the budget, but it was easier for theaters at that time to fit in multiple showings and turn over the screening rooms, thus making them more money; plus the growing TV market could fit those movies more easily into various time slots. Now it's more about the fact that we have so many options for entertainment--a kid in a small town in the 60s may have only had that local indie theater for entertainment, while today they have myriad options at their fingertips (and unfortunately that local movie theater probably went out of business as a result)--so we often need entertainment that doesn't ask a lot of our time. That's why people binge a lot of TV shows, maybe they spend hours in total doing it, but each 45-minute episode doesn't seem like that much on its own. And I think this can lead to a rising tide raises all ships effect, because if I see this at 75 minutes and have a good time, which I did, I'm going to look on IMDb and see what other movies the people involved have done, and may be more likely to pop back on Tubi and fire up another not long after. For aspiring young indie filmmakers out there, remember, less runtime is better.

There is a large, Herculean elephant in the room that we have to address, and I'm probably walking in it by addressing it, but let's do it anyway. Mr. Kevin Sorbo, Hercules himself, has a small role as the president, but does a great job. The movie uses this ingenious plot device to give us an info dump that fills us in on the movie's backstory, which Sorbo plays a great part in making work. Essentially, Sorbo's staff has been doing a horrible job keeping him informed, and now that the excrement is coming into violent contact with the air circulating device, they have to tell him everything they haven't been telling him, and we get to hear it. In the process, he reminds us of what a great straight man he was on Hercules as he's like "what the hell is wrong with you people?", which was a lot of fun for me to see, and made the whole thing work. In the past however many years he's become a right wing meme of himself, to the point that I almost wondered if he was posting things like "secure our boarders" [sic] just to give the left wing grift more content. Like you can see Keith Olbermann's people being like "what should we post about today?" "Let's get Sorbo to make another crazy uncle post." "Great idea!" The thing is, while I couldn't give a shit less about Olbermann, I'm a fan of Sorbo's work, and would love to see him in more stuff like this, and I don't think I'm alone in that. I'm not trying to do the "shut up and dribble" thing, if he feels that strongly about his beliefs and wants to Tweet about them or whatever, more power to him; and I don't even know if posting less of that kind of stuff would get him more roles, but maybe it's just a reminder to him that Hercules had a large, diverse fan base from myriad backgrounds who enjoyed the show because of him, not in spite of him, and I think if he catered less to a small segment of that fandom and more to all of us, I think he'd find that more of us than he thinks would come back and embrace his work again.

Finally, usually this paragraph is designated for a tangential fact about the movie that relates to something else in my life, but I wanted instead to discuss the movie more. I understand that practical effects are not always practical in the modern age, especially with tight budgets and tight shooting schedules, but I feel like this movie gives other filmmakers a great road map on how to make it work. Shooting guns, probably better to keep CGI, when you're working on a tight shooting schedule, it's one less danger to worry about. Probably can say the same thing about explosions. Gore effects though are a lot of fun when done practically, and while they may take a lot of time to put together, I think the payoff is much greater than the payoff you'd get by shooting real blank rounds versus CGI rounds. And then you have the aliens. Real people in real suits is so much more fun than ones created through CGIs. Maybe you use the CGIs to enhance them, but when the overall effect is done with a real suit, you can't compare it, it's like high-fructose corn syrup versus real cane sugar. Again, going back to runtime, if you cut it down from 95 minutes to 75 minutes, the money saved from fewer shooting days can go into creating a few real alien suits, and I think if you asked moviegoers which they prefer, 95 minutes and CGI aliens or 75 minutes and real alien suits, they'd choose the latter. 

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can get this as rent VOD on Amazon for $3.99. If you're looking for a fun time, and want to support indie films, this is a great option. Thank you to Sonny Mahal for sending this over to us, I really enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to checking our more Mahal Empire films!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24070874

Ablaze (2001)

Being that we're making a final push to get the rest of Michael Dudikoff's DTV oeuvre up at the DTVC, I knew I'd have to do this bad boy sooner or later. Let's get through it together, like we're peeling off a Band-Aid, all at once.

Ablaze is a convoluted mess of a plot about a fireman who does police work with Ice-T and works in a fire station with Michael Dudikoff. Either that, or it's about Tom Arnold, who owns both an oil refinery and a hospital that makes patients pay for play (this film might have been ten years before its time in that aspect!). In a stroke of what would've been irony had it not been in a contrived movie, Arnold's refinery has a massive explosion, causing an enormous disaster in the city, and his hospital is the nearest source of emergency care, causing altruistic doctor Amanda Pays to dump Arnold's bottom line based health care in favor of humanitarian medicine. Then something called a firestorm threatens the hospital, and Dudikoff has to bring the firemen in to save them.



On the sleeve the disc came in from Netflix, the synopsis read like this:

A by-the-book investigation into a hotel fire generates quickly into a mad rush to find a deadly arsonist as killer infernos begin raging all over the city. The cops soon discover that someone is creating deliberate death traps -- picture-perfect fires for a serial arsonist turned serial killer! Heading up the investigation is none other than Tom Arnold. (That's like tossing gasoline on a smoking ember, isn't it?)

Had that been the actual movie, it might have been great, and in the first ten minutes, where there's this too sweet chase with Ice-T and our fireman hero going after some serial arsonist, it looked like that's what we were getting. But that wasn't the movie, and instead we got a convoluted disaster pic with no identity, manufactured tension that often made no sense, and a great cast that was essentially wasted-- and when I say wasted, I mean they weren't in the movie nearly enough. Dudikoff, Ice-T, Tom Arnold, and William Zabka were all wasted, receiving little to less screen time. Amanda Pays had a little more to do, but it wasn't enough to save this from leaving me thinking "what's the point?"

I think Soldier Boyz thinks this was the dumbest movie Michael Dudikoff has ever done. A former special forces soldier recruiting kids from a juvenile prison to rescue a girl from Vietnam thinks Ablaze was ludicrous. Usually I applaud Dudikoff for playing it straight and lending bad films like these credibility, but in the case of Ablaze, it ended up being a bad look for him. This was not a movie that needed credibility, it didn't need humoring, it needed someone on the other side sharing in every moment that left us nonplussed, not pretending that we shouldn't be stunned or not knowing how to respond. Tom Arnold, for instance, did do that for us. In every scene he was in, you could see him mailing it in with fourth class postage, and that's what this film was worthy of.



I shouldn't be so harsh on Ablaze, because in watching it again yesterday for the blog, I could see where it went wrong. It was this constant adding of pieces, tacking things on, trying to fix things, but only making them worse. It was someone thinking he or she had a concept for a disaster movie, but not seeing that it was an idea sautéed in wrong sauce. The thing that I think was unforgivable, though, was gathering this huge cast and pretty much having them there for their names on the box.

I was joking with a buddy the other day about how growing up, we all feared that going into high school, we would get picked on by kids who were like William Zabka. Of course, we grew into teenagers, actually went to high school, and learned there were no William Zabkas, and the only fears we had were of the teachers catching us making a dime-sack transaction in the bathroom. Still, Zabka to this day resonates as one of the ultimate 80s baddies. I mean, we almost expected to see his face during the big Darth Vader reveal at the end of Return of the Jedi. In Ablaze, he does play a bad guy, Tom Arnold's right-hand man, but he's as wasted as everyone else, getting killed off early on.



As much as this movie was bad, it was also weird, but weird in a bad way. One of the weirdest was the running story of an aging starlet in purple, snake skin print leather pants, who was acting as a nurse or something. She helps out a kid, talks to our hero, then, inexplicably, disguises herself as a patient and walks out into the inferno between the hospital and the waiting firefighters, and gets herself burned to death. None of it made any sense, and just added to my disdain for the film-- though ladies, you shouldn't let this paragraph deter you from wearing purple leather pants if you're ever so inclined.

This is available on DVD through Netflix, or to buy in a lot of bargain bins (I found it at Big Lots, though of course I passed on it). Seeing all the names will probably be enticing. Don't let them fool you, this is a 90 minute painfest with little to redeem it. If you're a major chase scene connoisseur, you may want it for the opening scene, which was legitimately good, otherwise, stay away.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0217979/

The Stoned Age aka Homo Erectus (2007)

I had my eye on this one for some time mostly because it had Gary Busey and Tom Arnold listed in the credits. It just seemed like a good deal. Of course, I had to know going in, with this being a National Lampoon's DTV, that I could be in for some pain, but I figured the price would be worth it if it was sufficiently Abusive.

The Stoned Age is about some dude living in prehistoric times who thinks outside the box, which makes him an outcast. He's in love with a chick from his tribe, but she loves his alpha male brother. Anyway, the tribe is beaten in a battle with their rival, and the girl is taken, and he goes to save her. Suddenly the movie has no identity and goes on longer than it should.



This was supposed to be a comedy, and for the first twenty minutes or so, me and my roommates were entertained. Then it got weird. The main character clubs a girl he likes, and she falls off a cliff, and then the tribe eats her. I'm not kidding. And it just gets weirder from there. Towards the end he meets up with some Amazon women, and they clean him in a pool naked, and there's a bunch of nude women with really hairy vaginae all over the place. I just didn't get it. There's a point where someone needs to come in and say "Enough!"

Gary Busey was barely in the film, but when he was, he was great. My roommates didn't think so. Busey freaks them out. The reality is Busey probably freaks a lot of people out. I'm just one of those nutty dudes out there who digs him. Other than the first twenty minutes, which was pretty good, the only redeeming feature of this movie was the few minutes Busey spends on screen, and it's because of this that I devoted all three images from the film to his brief appearance. I think Hallettsville in my instant queue may be my next Busey film for the DTVC. we'll see what happens.



Tom Arnold also was barely in the film. He played a gay man in the tribe, who is convinced by the main character to come out of the closet, and is then beaten to death and eaten by his fellow tribesmen. I didn't get it. Arnold was funny. He didn't over do the flamboyance at all, which was good. But why it was supposed to be funny that the tribe beats him to death and eats him is beyond me. Maybe it just sounded good at the time. And why didn't Arnold, who is funny-- at least he was here-- step in and say: "fellas, enough!"

My roommates weren't familiar with National Lampoon's horrible DTV reputation like I am. They were like "The people who did Animal House and Vacation did this?" Yes and no. They just seem to put their name to any old kind of DTV crap and trade on their reputation. I mentioned to them the Paris Hilton film National Lampoon's did, and they got the idea. That being said, I am interested in the National Lampoon's Van Wilder: Freshman Year. Maybe I'm just a glutton for punishment.



I know I brought my roommates up a bit here, but that's because they watched it with me, so they shared in the painful experience. They did, though, have some fun at my expense. There's a character named The Old Fool, who's like in his seventies, and the movie makes a joke that he's "30 years old", something to do with life expectancy in the Stone Age. Anyway, when we watched this, I was only a couple weeks away (now only twelve days!) from my own 30th birthday, and my roommates thought the image of this really old man at thirty was hilarious. Go ahead, laugh it up, fuckers. [Ugh!]

Don't go near this sack of asscrack. If you see National Lampoon's and think "I bet this is funny", don't, and instead think "I read that this was a useless sack-of-asscrack, and I should steer clear of it." Sometimes it's for the best.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0484207/