“I’m an electrician, not a magician.”

Justin’s rating: The least excited the government has ever been in investigating alien attacks

Justin’s review: An asteroid smacks into the earth and unleashes an alien lifeform that grows by eating electricity. Bad news for us, but it’s a fortuitous turn of events for a poor critter that was, just hours before, starving and clinging onto a careening space rock falling well out of range of its cell phone reception. Now it’s on a planet stuffed to the gills with electrical yummies, and it’s ready to hit that buffet as hard as it can.

Meanwhile, a new power plant is opening up in the nearby town of Liberty, Generic State. We know this because what feels like the entire first act of Not of This World is devoted to the black tie ceremony and dance for the plant. Whenever a movie is padding out scenes this early on, it’s a clear sign that the pacing isn’t exactly going to be breathless.

Power plant engineer Linda is played by Lisa Hartman, an actress whose main claim to fame is starring in a ’70s spin-off of Bewitched. She joins a whole lot of other forgettable characters, save for farmhand Henry (Batman’s Tracey Walter AKA “Bob”), who is a genuinely good actor doing a whole lot with very little.

With the alien critter growing ever larger with each kilowatt consumed, the main threat is finally realized: If it manages to make it to the power plant, the whole world will be toast. But humanity might have a chance because there’s a whole lot of small town color to fill up scene after pointless scene. That should slow the beast until a solution is found!

The main draw of this movie is, of course, the alien — and it’s an odd beastie indeed. For starters, it easily dies… but then comes back. It can impregnate people with electricity and then explode out of them. It needs AND exudes high voltage. It can mess with electronics and use telekinesis. We’re told at one point that it’s part organic and part machine. And it keeps changing form, always looking like some sort of child’s drawing of an insect. So I spent a lot of time in this movie really fuzzy about its abilities and motives, especially when the plan to kill it was to feed it even MORE electricity.

By the time we get to the climax of this film, it’s clear that nobody had any idea how to make this epic and gripping. They pretty much made a lame slug-like alien and stapled it to the side of a fake transformer, then spent 15 minutes having the characters throwing switches and shouting about how this is the last chance while clearly fake electrical arcs shoot everywhere.

Not of This World is so aggressively middle-of-the-road bland that not even Goldilocks would settle down in its bed. If it was a lot worse or a lot better, I would’ve been more entertained. As it was, I kept checking the run time and regretting the decision that led me to sitting through this. Then again, what should I expect from the director of Alligator II and Crash & Byrnes?

Intermission!

• Why does this Japanese guy sound French
• Power plant openings have black tie dinners
• Always compliment women in the most sexist way possible
• Movie Japanese characters have to mention Hiroshima at least once in a conversation
• “You don’t pay a man enough to get drunk!”
• Heh shocked piggies
• The baseball player fiddling with the alien with its glove
• Alien burns are very decorative
• Ugh the bat pun
• Microsoft Flight Simulator! The old version!
• Nice shooting, grampa!
• Better take your little kid with you to see the corpse, just so that he can be properly traumatized
• Smarmy guy is super smarmy
• Yes, let’s all argue about space spores and UFOs for several uncomfortable minutes
• Them’s some weird kisses, mister
• That horrible pseudo-Jaws score
• Dot matrix printer alert!
• Yeah let’s pick up pieces of the alien and bring it into our house in a jar. Good thinking, kid.
• Why are you abandoning your truck now? With the key inside?
• “We’re with you man!” Thumbs-up!
• The power plant is sort of just a big room with random power plant props evenly spaced out