Excellent but underrated film

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

While studying the effects of global warming on a pod of whales, grad students on a crabbing vessel and it's crew uncovers a froze soviet space shuttle, and unintentionally releases a monstrous organism from it. Harbinger Down is unfortunately a rip-off of the great 'The Thing' but also lacks any actual excitement in general. Lance Henrisken is the only good and experienced actor in the film but even he is just pretty forgettable as a whole. The special effects were pretty good but everything else? Were horrible and just terrible as a whole. (0/10)

I admit to having a huge love of John Carpenter's THE THING, a love which extends to the various THING rip-offs which have come out of the years. One of the cheaper of these is INANIMATE, a typical budget story in which a team of student researchers head into the frozen Bering Sea and discover a downed Russian spacecraft. It was originally launched as part of an experiment but has brought back something awful with it. The great thing about this predictable movie is the special effects, which look fantastic and were done without a single frame of CGI, something very rare in this day and age. The cast is nothing special, aside from reliable old-timer Lance Henriksen who actually gets plenty of screen time, which I was more than pleased about. The film is on the level of a typical B-movie but has enough suspense to see it through even if it is very familiar.

Bad/evil/dumb/sexist/egotistical characters are male. Maybe except the "evil" Russian lady spy, who's portrayed as super butch - easily overpowering any man. Sure, that's cool but it's so badly done and looks so fake. They're practically all caricatures. It's done in really poor taste. It isn't subtle in any way. I felt humiliated while watching it. The computer generated scenes look fake as hell as well as uninspired. I can't be bothered to explain my disdain for this movie any more, it simply isn't worth it. Really boring trash unworthy of any praise at all.

In one sense, this is a special case. In another, it deserves the same critical treatment as everything else. Low-budget, independently- produced movies need to compete on the same playing field as the big stuff. We don't want Kickstarter funding to become an excuse. On the other hand, some of the crueler reviews have, I think, a rather rose- tinted view of what 80s creature features were really like. They weren't all Aliens. That's magic in a bottle, and it isn't available to order for any amount of money - or Hollywood would be able to buy it, which it's becoming increasingly clear they can't.So, with these mixed views in mind, I rather liked Harbinger Down. If it sets out to avoid becoming saturated in embarrassing CGI, it succeeds, but naturally more is required than that. The performances are fine, given the painfully thin script - people knocking the actors need to consider the writing they've been given. The script is perhaps most kindly described as functional, and barely so. Henriksen is, of course, a massively experienced guy, and always a pleasure. The cinematography is absolutely rock-solid and a great advertisement for both Benjamin L. Brown and the staggeringly low-cost camera it was shot on. Both the pictures and Christopher Drake's score, and of course the creature effects, elevate the film way, way above the depths to which many low- budget sci-fi movies fall.So let's not be too harsh on Harbinger Down. Behind-the-scenes shots suggest that the creature effects could have been made more of on screen, a fair criticism that's been raised before, and the script is a letdown. But again, it's a genre creature feature. For a bit more creature and a bit more story and characterization it could have been better, but on the off-chance that some sort of renaissance of the golden age of sci-fi and fantasy filmmaking can be launched from this movie, or movies like it, I'm enthusiastic. If Blomkamp does get to do Alien 5, he'd be an idiot not to involve Woodruff and Gillis.