Shocking Dark: The Aliens of Italy

Oh boy... Even the description of this movie regards it as a blatant rip-off of Aliens. It's such a rip-off in fact that I'm surprised they didn't get their asses sued for this shit.

What we have here is a story about a dystopian Venice where the water and air is polluted and people don't go outside. The majority of the film takes place in an industrial setting very reminiscent of the colony in Aliens. We also have a team of marines working with some evil corporation for some reason, and before you know it, you have some goofy looking monsters coming out of the woodwork.

These aren't aliens mind you, but some kind of mutant that kind of look like the humanoids from the deep mixed with some laboratory made monsters from The Return of Swamp Thing. They have facehugger-ish things, they cocoon you, and shit bursts out of your chest. How original!

We follow this group of soldier characters for a while, and they are total clones of the marines in Aliens. We have the Captain/Vasquez, a Hicks, a Hudson, a Drake, and even a Ripley and a Newt knock-off. Then, we have a mash-up of Burke and Ash from the first movie, who just so happens to be a replicant and thus our Terminator rip-off too. After all, one of the alternate titles for the film is "Terminator 2", even though this is essentially a dumbed down remake of Aliens. So many scenes are directly lifted from Aliens, it's not even funny.


I would say that 80% of the screenplay is taken from Aliens, 10% from Terminator, and the last 10% is bologna. In a typical Italian fashion, the filmmakers didn't know what the fuck they were doing when they made this trash. They were simply trying to cash in on whatever was popular at the time, and the movies that make up the basis for this turkey are awesome, so what could go wrong?


I imagine the conception went something like this:

The crew finds a decent location and says to themselves, "Hey, this looks like the setting from that movie Terminator!"

"Oh, you mean 'Aliens', right?"

"Yes, Terminator! And that's what we'll call our movie!"

So they watched Aliens (not Terminator) and wrote a transcript of that, lost a few key details in translation, and filled the holes with bologna. Mind you, the execution is somewhat entertaining, but so very inferior to the movies it homages that you might as well watch the real deal instead of this Italian misunderstanding.

Everything about this movie is unoriginal. The setup, the characters, the progression, the "twists", and the ending. If they can get away with it, anybody can, but the real question... is why bother?

#Review