"Area 51" Review By Damien

Hello loyal subjects, it is I, Damien, here to advise, control, and direct. Via movie reviews. I watch the movies so you don’t have to. And this week I watched “Area 51”, which is four bucks on Amazon strewing, and also available for free on Netflix.

And it’s overpriced.

Area 51 was written and directed by Oren Peli. If you google “Oren Peli”

I'm Oren (duh)

you will instantly see a picture of a man who looks like he is named “Oren”. He is worth fifty million dollars and nothing in this review will have any effect on him.  He is the writer and director of “Paranormal Activity”, which, for a found footage movie, did not suck.

Area 51 sucked. But let’s not focus on the negative. We have all eternity for that (Preview- You and Me minus Me watching “You Me and Dupree” for 100 years- with occasional breaks for forcible sodomy). Area 51 did some things right. It didn’t overuse certain horror tropes. For example, at no point in this movie did Sean Bean die. He just wished he was dead while he watched it. I assume that this movie was footage found by Sean Bean. It makes it more entertaining to imagine him watching it.

So aside from that, it was all pretty much what you would expect minus anything remotely scary. 

There were teenagers with portable cameras who had a plan to break into Area 51. This was inspired by their friend (played by Reid Warner), who was clearly under Alien Control the entire movie. Through a series of time filling drivel  compelling escapades the teen (or young adults-it doesn’t matter) make it to Area 51 and the third act of the movie begins. This is the only portion of the film that has special effects. Nothing remotely scary here either, just a lot of alien technology. I kept thinking that at some point the teens would come across scientists dissecting an alien, a live alien, and that the film would end with the teens being captured by an alien that they set free and they would find themselves on a dissection table. Or whatever a table that dissections take place on is called. 

 SPOILER-  that doesn’t happen.

 In fact, the ending is simply that, it’s the end of ninety minutes of nothing. No big twist, scare, or fulfillment of any subtle promise made earlier in the film. In similar films, like the Blair Witch Project, the last thirty seconds of the film justify the first ninety minutes in a spectacular way. Not so much here. This movie would have been better if the first ninety minutes were the characters driving to area 51 while watching “Paranormal Activity” on an iPad. At least Sean Bean would have seen something entertaining.

On a side note- there was one scene in the movie where a woman’s breasts were thrust in front of a camera. It reminded me of the scene in “Airplane”, where for no reason breasts filled the camera. I could not help but think that somewhere on the west coast, the day before this scene was shot (for Area 51), this woman had a conversation with a friend, perhaps a lover, where she said “tomorrow I’m going to be shooting a scene for a major movie! It’s being done by the director of Paranormal!” Maybe she called her dad and told him. She was not credited in this film.

One Star. One Star for crushing the dreams of this uncredited actress, you sick bastards. That was the only angst this movie caused. And we don’t even know her name. 

Don''t forget to worship me. 

Damien, out. 

"One Star"