“There’s nothing like the smell of middle-aged testosterone in the morning.”

Drake’s rating: Is this a known unknown or an unknown unknown?

Drake’s review: There’s a long history of filmmakers borrowing ideas from other films when creating their own movies. The Magnificent Seven, for example, is essentially a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, set against the backdrop of the Old West. Roger Corman took the same idea and, mashing it together with Star Wars, turned out Battle Beyond the Stars. Heck, Star Wars itself is heavily influenced by Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress as well as literary sources such as Frank Herbert’s Dune novels and Jack Kirby’s Fourth World comic books.

There are scores of other examples, of course, because there’s a natural inclination to take an idea from something you appreciate and mold it into something new.

Sometimes, as with the examples above, it works out pretty well. Other times, this adoption of ideas is less a creative exercise in exploring fun concepts and more a crass attempt at cashing in on concepts the filmmakers would never have come up with on their own. I have to admit, though, that Attack of the Unknown is not just a brazen rip-off of Independence Day. No, its ambitions reach much higher, and so it happily steals from half a dozen other movies as well and mashes all those stolen parts into a pile of goo that slow drips from one scene to the next at a glacial pace, akin to a game of shuffleboard played by octogenarians at the local retirement home.

This film starts with a SWAT team tooling around Los Angeles in their white Mercedes panel van busting drug dealers. When they capture a drug kingpin, they have to take him to a detention center. Unfortunately pesky aliens arrive and start EATING OUR DOGS!

Wait, hold on. My cat is playing with the remote again, and the TV switched over to the news. I swear, real life is weirder than this flick these days.

OK, so the aliens don’t want our pets, they want our blood, since they’re space vampires. And not the sexy kind, like Mathilda May, but the kind who look like their design was based on sketches retrieved from the wastebasket next to H.R. Giger’s drawing board.

So the E.T.s arrive in their CGI spaceship and blast L.A. with their CGI lasers, causing CGI explosions and CGI fires. Trapped in the detention center, the SWAT team now has to fight a couple of aliens while being led by a drowsy-looking Richard Grieco, who appears to be channeling Al Pacino’s sleep-deprived cop in Insomnia.

Or maybe he was just dozing before, after and during takes while shooting this flick.

That Attack of the Unknown rests on the non-existent star power of Grieco was probably a bad sign, since Grieco looks less like a cop and more like the guy who’s still playing guitar in the Motley Crüe tribute band he started in high school. Glutton for cinematic punishment that I am, however, I pushed through and continued to watch even as Tara Reid (Josie and the Pussycats) showed up in the most blatant and unnecessary flashback sequence ever committed to film. Or digital video. Or whatever format this was shot on.

At least Robert LaSardo (Death Race) looks like he’s having some fun as the drug kingpin. Unfortunately, he’s the one bit of energy in this lethargic mess of a movie. Honestly, if you’re going to make a bad movie (and there’s no way that Attack of the Unknown was ever going to approach “mediocre,” much less “decent”), at least pretend that you’re having a good time. Instead, this flick wallows in its shallow pool of inadequacy and drags the audience down with it as it sinks into the muck, leaving behind nothing but the sad realization that you’re never going to get the precious 103 minutes it took to watch this thing back again.

Intermission!

• This is a Spicy Ramen production. And now I’m hungry.
• Richard Grieco looks like he stopped shaving about the time his agent’s phone stopped ringing. So somewhere around 1992.
• Criminals turning down a weed hit. In two minutes they’ll be in a full-auto firefight with SWAT, but they nevertheless carefully follow their state’s cannabis laws.
• That “SWAT van” looks like it was borrowed from the producer’s pool service.
• They look as much like SWAT as I do. Which is to say, not at all.
• They go to a strip club and drink vodka and Red Bull. Because they’re the bad boys (and token girl) of the LAPD. Just kidding. It’s not like they’re Rampart Division.
• And now there’s a yuuuuge CG spaceship hovering over the city, which shoots laser beams at the freeway. Something every L.A. commuter probably dreams of doing.
• Oh, no! The aliens got that guy! If you ever watch this (and I don’t recommend you do), you’ll be saying that a lot since none of the characters will have names that you’ll recall.
• So, what movies does Attack of the Unknown rip off? Well, Independence Day (obviously), Alien (of course), Aliens (ditto), Assault on Precinct 13 (sure, why not?), Predator (but somehow not AVP), War of the Worlds (the Spielberg one), Face/Off (believe it or not) and Forbidden World (oh, come on!). If you watch this (still not recommending you do) and spot any other flicks in this junk pile, be sure to let me know.