Phoenix's B-moive review VI

Phoenix's B-movie Review: The Colony


Hello boys and girls and welcome to another B-movie review!  It's been a while, and not because there aren't enough B-Movies to go around (for example Drive Angry), but it is just that I've been a little busy.  Specifically I've been busy watching countless hours of NCIS.  So of course I started thinking to myself, one of these guys must have made a B-movie when they were young and foolish.  DiNozzo looked like the most likely candidate for B-movie star power, and in that spirt I bring you Michael Weatherly in The Colony.

When I first hit play I thought that I must have done something wrong and that I had actually queued up a low budget porno from 1983.  I was watching this through Netflix 'play it now' so I figured their system must have been hacked.  On the screen was a naked women with giant blond teased and crimped hair randomly gyrating while being filmed by a camera man with severe ADHD and a high blur filter.  

About thirty seconds of watching the naked chick rubbing her oil covered skin I started thinking to myself that perhaps Weatherly was more desperate for work that I had originally thought.  Suddenly the scene changes, to a women who looks like a school teacher in an abandoned building making jiff pop popcorn for a pair of pigeons.  Strangest porno ever.   

Suddenly cops are knocking doors down to get into the building, she drops her popcorn and escapes in a flash of light.  In the bottom floor of the building are a whole bunch of random people just standing still doing nothing while the cops walk through them with deer in headlights expression on their faces.

The scene jumps once again.  We pan to the interior of a cheap version of a Stargate Gou'ald ship (which were fairly cheap to begin with) with the pigeon woman digging around in the fake guts of a guy on a table along with another woman.  They are wearing vests made of bubble wrap and those gloves that go up to the shoulder the ones that people use when birthing cattle, which means one of two things: A) they are insane B) they are aliens.  

Apparently they are aliens and the fake guy they are mucking around in is an artificial body that they are using to 'blend in' with the humans.  Okay.  I'll buy that.  So there are four aliens including the original 'researcher'.  They have found that they can mind control a certain percentage of the human population, but not the other and they want to find out how to mind enslave us all.  They use the word 'penetrate' a lot when talking about this plan.  So they pick up a few humans for experiments.

Human one: a dead homeless man.

Human two: a horny red neck at a bar.

Human three: a black ex-cop/security guard.

Human four: a random blond woman (no not the porno chick) who decides to go to an ATM in the middle of the night in the middle of no where.

Human five: Michael Weatherly.

Now Weatherly gets involved because he happened to be riding by on a bicycle, actually I have the feeling that he really was just out for a midnight ride when he accidentally wandered onto the set.  Thinking he was actually helping some poor woman being kidnapped he didn't notice the camera crew until it was too late.  Being such a low budget film they couldn't afford to reshoot the take, so they got him drunk and shanghaied him into finishing the rest of the movie.  He's only like 20 in this, so it probably wouldn't have taken more than a six pack of beer to get him on board.

Although he is trying to be a hero one of the male aliens punches Weatherly in the gut to get him to go away.  This is the start of a theme in this movie.  I had a feeling that this would be the case so I got out my bottle of Captain Morgan's and started a little drinking game.  Every time Weatherly takes a beating to the abdomen it's time for a shot.  Before the scene is over I've downed a quarter of the bottle until he's unconscious and I'm soon to be next.

Anyway, back to the porno.  Seriously.  The movie seems to have been randomly spliced with something by Traci Lords.  So there is another thirty seconds of random naked 80's chick in front of a green screen (no scene added, just left it green) before we are back to our four humans (dead homeless man not included) waking up on the floor of a cell on a ship that looks like it was painted by vandals.  Oh and by the way it is clear that Weatherly and Daniel Jackson have the same hair styliest, back in the early days of Stargate where Jackson had that floppy hair.  In fact if you're not looking too carefully it's not difficult to get Michael Weahterly and Micheal Shanks confused.  Clearly shows my taste in men...anyway, moving on.

They do the customary "Where are we?  What is this?  What happened?  Perhaps we've been kidnapped by aliens.".  Actually they didn't come to that conclusion till much later, in fact not until they are told that is what has happened.  They are being held inside their cage by a sliding glass door, which they assume is locked...but they never test that theory.  

Luckily Weatherly has a swiss army knife in his kaki pants and he uses it to open a vent that is large enough for even the 250 pound ex-cop to get into.  They get into a hallway where the aliens confront them and instantly punch Weatherly in the gut (another shot of rum).  They are taken back to their cell, when Weatherly protested they hit him again (more rum), and again (and again with the run), and once more for good measure (speaking of 'measure' how much is a measure of rum?  never mind I'm just drinking it straight from the bottle at this point to save time).  The aliens want to do some sort of 'reaction' experiments with them, however this is never really described.  

As one experiment they manage to mind control the cop (they only have control over the cop) and have him talk smack to Weatherly.  Weatherly tries to reason with the cop peacfully and for some reason the Red Neck comes over and socks him in the stomach (sigh...another pull of rum for me).  Weatherly doesn't fight back, he just says that he's not the enemy, the Red Neck agrees and suddenly they are friends.  

More porno.

They take the cop off for some sort of mind scan.  Meanwhile the Red Neck fakes being hurt so that they can lure an alien into their cage to try and beat him up.  I'm sure you know how this works out, that's right, Weatherly's abdomen suffers more abuse and so does my liver.  They drag the Red Neck away leaving Weatherly and the Girl in the cell.  As the sliding glass door is closing Weatherly slides his swiss army knife (I'm never going anywhere without one of these things) into the door and it fails to lock.

Weatherly (officially 'Kevin') and the Girl (don't remember her name) wander the ship and find the aliens real bodies.  They look like a cross between a H. G. Giger alien, the thing from Independence Day, and a Muppet.  The pair is discovered by one of the male aliens and Michael and I endure six more shots to the belly.  At this point Weatherly should be vomiting blood and I actually am.  They drag him back to the cell and back to the porno.

In the cell Weatherly reasures the Girl that they aren't going to die and then randomly tell her about the first girl he kissed when he was 11.  The story gets stranger as he tells it he kiss the girl and then she asked him if she wanted to take a bath with him, to which he agrees.  Then he talks about how when the girl got undressed (we are led to believe this is the first naked girl he's seen being a young boy) he's so surprised he...pees in the bath tub.  What this story has to do with ANYTHING I can't tell you.  He doesn't get punched in the stomach, but I decide to take another shot of rum just to dull the pain of having listened to this story.


The main researcher alien (female) is getting more an more attached to Weatherly cause he keeps selflessly getting beaten senseless to protect the Girl.  Later when they are threatening to crush the Girl with an egg crate (which is supposed to be some sort of electromagnetic plate that weights 300 pounds...don't ask) he puts his leg in the way and breaks it to save her.  I debate for a moment if this counts as a drinking moment, but then I realize that all the rum is gone (Why is the rum always gone?  Because 'Kevin' doesn't know how to avoid getting kneed in the stomach, that's why!).  

Suddenly the aliens realize that they can now also mind control the girl, but they don't know why.  A few random scenes go by in which Weatherly's character gets more abuse, I'm out of rum, but I have some vodka in the cupboard so the games continue.  

Back to the goddam porno.  I swear the editor put these shots in as a joke and was shocked when they made it into the finale cut.  I swear no one watched this movie after it left the cutting room floor.

So every hero has an usual weapon in these B-movies right?  Bruce Campbell had his chainsaw, Michael Shanks had his can of bike tire repair spray, Nathan Fillion had a propane tank and a grenade.  

Well Michael Weatherly has the greatest weapon of all: love.  

Yup.  He saves the world with love.  Despite (or perhaps because of) his lime green v-neck shirt, and an inability to not be beaten senseless by everything and everyone that crosses his path the researcher alien female has fallen in love with him and decides to betray her whole race for him.  She kisses him and of course we cut right to the porno once again only this time there are some male hands on the woman...I honestly can't think of any reason for these sexual flashes other than a pathetic hope that men will watch this film and say "I don't know why I liked this film, but it was great!".   Hint to the director: subliminal messages are supposed to be subtle.

Anyway, the other aliens kill Weatherly's human Girl (at some point they had fallen for one another...apparently).   The researcher alien kills off her coworker's bodies.  Meanwhile Weatherly, the Cop, and the Red Neck are running around trying to kill the aliens in their artificial human bodies.  Weatherly mostly just gets beat up, at this point I'm having trouble following the action as I am totally plastered.  

Some how the researcher alien puts her mind in the dead Girl's body and at the same time brings the Girl back to life so that they are both in her body.  So in the end Weatherly gets two girls for the price of one.  Which sounds cool at first, but trust me I'm sure that's just going to be a headache down the road.  They blow up the ship that they were on after beaming back to the planet and the alien invasion decides to 'go away' cause they think the humans must be dangerous.  Weatherly and the alien/girl chick decide to go back to his place.  And that's the end.

It is going to be hard in the morning to tell if my head hurts from trying to figure out the plot or from downing two bottles of rum and half a liter of vodka.