ALTERED: DVD Review

Altered is Eduardo Sanchez's sophomore effort as a filmmaker. Seven years is a long time to wait for a director's second film, especially when Sanchez's debut was the highly successful The Blair Witch Project which he co-directed with Daniel Myrick. One might think that a film that raked in as much at the box office as Blair Witch would provide it's directors with ample opportunities to make more films, but perhaps not. It's unlikely that Altered would have reached Blair Witch's blockbuster status, even if it hadn't been released direct to DVD, but Sanchez's new film is still a respectable little science fiction thriller that gets the most out of its small budget.

Fifteen years ago, five friends were abducted by extraterrestrials. Timmy did not survive the experience, while Wyatt (Adam Kaufman), has since become a virtual hermit, cutting himself off from everything and isolating himself in a fortified and booby trapped home for fear that the aliens will come back for him. The other three -- Cody (Paul McCarthy-Boyington), Otis (Blair Witch alum Michael C. Williams) and Duke (Brad William-Henke) -- have spent many a night searching the woods around Nixon's farm and laying traps for the creatures that abducted them. Tonight they get lucky.

With the creature securely bound the three seek help from Wyatt who is none too pleased to see his old buddies, and when he sees their prisoner his blood practically runs cold. "You kill that thing," he says, "and the rest are going to come and put us down, and I don't just mean us..." Wyatt, has a deeper understanding of the aliens than the other three. He and Timmy were kept aboard the alien vessel the longest, and Wyatt proved impervious to their weapons and mind control tricks. Because of this the aliens seem afraid of Wyatt, but he also knows that killing one of them might spur the others to wipe out the human race in retaliation. Things quickly spin out of control as the alien places Wyatt's girlfriend Hope in a trance, and gives Cody a nasty bite with some far nastier side effects, and the four friends must balance their need for revenge against the possible extinction of humanity.

Comparisons to Sanchez's first filim seem inevitable. The wilderness setting of Blair Witch is ratcheted back here but only slightly, moving the action from the middle of the woods to rural America. Both films use setting to isolate the characters, making their situation all the more desperate. Dark city streets can be scary, but being in the woods in the middle of the night somehow spurs on a deeper more irrational fear. The plot is more than a little reminiscent of Fire in the Sky (in which a group of men claim their friend was abducted by aliens) with an X-Files level of paranoia and extraterrestrial malice mixed in. If you're looking to get your creep on, this movie should do quite nicely.