THE SALENA INCIDENT

CONTAINS THREE DOLLARS' WORTH OF SPOILERS, WHICH PUTS THEM IN CREDIT

I'm all for making it easier for talented people to get their movie made and distributed. Unfortunately the price you pay for the democratisation of the film-making process is that it also makes it easier for complete dunces to get their movies made and distributed as well, now that there are fewer gatekeepers, whether financial, technical or human, along the process to keep the aforementioned dunces out. In addition, the proliferation of cable and satellite channels and results in an increased demand for product, the cheaper the better and who cares whether it's any good or not, because people will watch anything. And then there's the demand for boxsets of cheap DVDs - 10 films for £9.99 - and they don't need to be any good because what have you lost apart from 99p and eighty minutes of your life?

So you end up with something like The Salena Incident, in which a spaceship crashes into the Arizona desert and an Army team sent in to investigate gets brutally killed. Cut to a prison transport bus filled with the requisite ethnic mix of badass convicts - noble black, mob accountant, racist idiot, Hispanic thug - and a couple of monumental cretins as guards, which is brought off the road as part of an escape bid by the mob guy aided by two screeching bimbos. Who or what was in that crashed spaceship? Which of the convicts will escape the bloke in the $5 monster suit? And will the one sensitive guard get off with the cute prison doc?

It's dull, it's indifferently made, the effects (both monster and spaceship) are dismally inadequate and the characters are varying degrees of hateful (ranging from Quite Hateful all the way through to Thoroughly Hateful) except for the one sensitive guard and the cute prison doc. It tries to suggest it's all real by being part of the Great Human-Alien Conspiracy through inclusion of "interview footage" with an obvious nutter. More likely it's part of the Great Studio Conspiracy to turn our brains into pot noodle. Rubbish.

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