There’s a fine line between retro fun and warmed-over cliches. Alien Warfare could have landed on the right side of that line, instead, it lands with a dismal thud on the other. This should have been a simple, fast paced shoot ’em up, but it manages to take almost every wrong turn possible. Starting with the horrible CGI object hurtling to Earth during the credits.

Navy SEAL Chris (David Meadows, The Manson Brothers Midnight Zombie Massacre) gets a call from headquarters to assemble the team for an important mission. And to bring Mike (Clayton Snyder) along, something he’s not happy about. Mike is Chris’s brother and was discharged after he got a little too trigger happy and their mission ended up with dead hostages as well as dead terrorists. Of course, we see it all in flashbacks.

Eventually, we get to the mission at hand. Something has gone terribly wrong at a top-secret facility, all the humans seem to be gone and something else has turned up. I’m not saying it’s aliens, but…

Now anyone who’s been into the genre for more than ten minutes has seen this plot a thousand times. Never mind the big-budget version like Predator, there have been endless direct to video versions of this plot. So even though this was director Jeremiah Jones first feature he certainly had plenty of examples of how to do it.

Granted he didn’t write the script for Alien Warfare, but he doesn’t do anything to help fix it either. The dialogue is horrible, over the top versions of already cliched lines. Like the government officials that can’t stop referring to the SEALs as “meatheads”. Or their bad attitudes and comments to superiors that would get them in a world of trouble.

It takes almost half of the film before we get to the aliens. The guys do discover a survivor, a hot female scientist, (Larissa Andrade), of course. She fills them in on the alien device, referred to as The Device, they were studying until it started turning people into piles of ash.

Much could have been forgiven even at this point if Alien Warfare delivered solid action scenes. But it doesn’t. They’re few, far between and badly staged. The aliens and their weapons look laughable, on a level with a bad episode of Power Rangers.

Alien Warfare is on Netflix, but it’s is one to avoid at all costs. It’s so bad there isn’t even a trailer available for it. I did, however, find a short clip with Greek subtitles…