Writer: Greg Connors
Director: Greg Connors
The Dark Lurking – aka Alien Undead – is an Australian SF horror movie that could be classed as a zombie story, but only in the loosest possible sense.
The film takes place on a bio-research lab based on an alien planet. The exact nature of the research is unclear, but whatever it is they’ve been working on has escaped. Aggressive humanoid creatures are swarming the the base and anyone they infect turns into one of them. The story follows a small group of survivors, some civilians and a couple of mercs, as they try to stay alive and escape.
For the first ten minutes or so the film works pretty well. Some interesting sets, tense directing and terse dialogue make a promising start. Then the main characters get together and have a conversation.
Which is where it all falls apart.
The acting is almost impressively bad, especially the line delivery. I did wonder if the original dialogue had been dubbed over, but apparently not. It’s notable that the official trailer (see above) contains almost no clips of the actors speaking.
The story rapidly deteriorates into little more than running around corridors and ventilation shafts shooting at the creatures. They do of course meet up with the evil chief scientist who (shock horror) wants to use the creatures as weapons. Eventually he reveals the farcical back story in a big infodump involving Hitler,cloning and angels! It gives the audience a good laugh but other than that it doesn’t actually have much effect on the course of the film.
Despite all that, Alien Undead does have some points in its favour. The pace is good, the direction is appropriately claustrophobic and the creature makeup impressive. The mix of the supernatural horror and SF is also a combination that could be interesting if handled with more subtlety. Unfortunately these positives can’t make up for a ridiculous premise, poor script and worse acting.
If you’ve had a few beers and fancy a laugh then Alien Undead might fit the bill. Otherwise don’t bother.