If you had told me that MST3K director Bill Rebane, known for The Giant Spider Invasion and Monster a Go-Go, had one movie that I might slightly enjoy, there's a chance I would not have believed you.
It's true, and I didn't love this movie or anything, but The Alpha Incident is at least halfway decent, and I'm frankly impressed, because Monster a Go-Go is simply one of the worst movies, not even a good MST episode, just so boring and pointless. Let's get into it shall we?
The Alpha Incident is a late 70s minimal conspiracy thriller, a mystery a bit, and something which I do normally like: dialogue based, extremely minimal, and built around the suspicions and threats of characters.
Early into the film, Ralph Meeker as Charlie is in a small town at the train station which is transporting unknown cargo, and gets informed of some sort of microorganism outbreak there. He is a military guy I think, and he is given the order to hold the people of the town in place, since they need to be quarantined. What happens next is the long, tense, character and dialogue driven part as the 5 people interact in a small variety of sets and places, and we learn more or less about the situation depending on what happens.
The thing about this movie, is that pretty clearly to keep a story like this propelled, it needs one heck of a good script. Not just anyone talking is interesting. This movie was not quite well written enough to be as gripping as it could have been, and they didn't have enough for the characters to do in order to drive the tension up. The five of them are hungry and tired, yet the tensions don't rise beyond a basic level, and the characters instead read as overall bored.
Given how unattainable the prospect of movies like this is though, this is at least a valiant attempt, and there were awesome segments. The end is a bit predictable, but overall I liked this more than I should have.
I have not yet announced that I'm watching these on DVD, a very special DVD, because this is movie 2 after Alien Contamination with my new boxset Nightmare Worlds! Rejoice everyone, because I've watched a bunch of these already and this should be a painless set, but also, two movies that are at least pretty good so far! This can have 2 stars. Maybe 2.5.
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