Aliens in the Wild, Wild West

A complete and utter waste of time, Aliens in the Wild, Wild West follows an exasperated father (Mircea Constantinescu’s Roger) as he decides to punish his kids – scrappy Tom (Taylor Locke) and rebellious Sara (Carly Pope) – by taking them on a family trip to an old west ghost town. Upon their arrival, the bickering siblings immediately separate from their mom (Marioara Sterian’s Melinda) and dad to explore the abandoned landscape – with problems ensuing as Tom and Sara discover a mysterious device that transports them back into the late 1800s. It’s there that the brother and sister encounter a friendly alien that seems to want nothing more than to go home, with the pair’s efforts at assisting the creature helped along by a friendly cowboy named Johnny Coyle (Barna Moricz). Aliens in the Wild, Wild West is, from start to finish, nothing short of an ordeal to sit through, as the movie suffers from a dearth of positive attributes that’s almost impressive. (Everything here, from the chintzy sets to the amateurish performances to the laughable special effects, just smacks of incompetence and laziness.) The idiocy of the two central characters (eg Sara offers to unload her host’s dishwasher, Tom asks if anyone delivers Chinese food, etc) is the tip of the iceberg in terms of the film’s underwhelming, pandering elements, and though Pope can be surprisingly charming from time to time, Aliens in the Wild, Wild West is primarily a bottom-of-the-barrel endeavor that’s guaranteed to leave even small children bored out of their minds.

1/2* out of ****