The Alpha Incident (1978)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Absolutely the worst movie.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

A virus from space is released accidentally while in transit on a train. It results in a group of people in a remote train depot being subject to quarantine and left isolated, while the scientists try to work on a cure.The Alpha Incident is a paranoid sci-fi film in the same vein as The Andromeda Strain, with elements of George A Romero's Night of the Living Dead and The Crazies thrown in for good measure. It isn't a patch on either of those films although it's fairly decent, all things considered. It's admittedly quite badly paced, however, with a little too much talk to pad things out. Still, the set-up is good enough and the overall cynical 70's sci-fi vibe works for me. There's only one occasion when we see the effects of the virus on a human and it's actually surprisingly decent – they could really have done with using this a little more. The effect is basically the brain expanding and breaking out of the cranium of the unfortunate victim. This is the horrible death that the infected people are trying to avoid. For some reason this nasty scenario only kicks in when the victims fall asleep, so for most of the film the story seems to be about people trying to stay awake – a symptom that I'm sure some viewers of this movie will experience too funnily enough.But, for me, this isn't a bad effort overall. It's definitely one of director Bill Rebane's best. He operated in the Z-Grade side of the cinematic spectrum for sure but his films have an honest earnestness that is easy to get behind. And this is a relatively thoughtful narrative for Bill's standards. However, its cheap limitations are never truly averted, and it doesn't develop the space virus thread of the story as well as you hope and the film ends up being essentially about people in a room popping amphetamines. But, you know what, I kind of like this one anyway.

For many years my connection to THE ALPHA INCIDENT was a long 35mm trailer that became a cult sensation amongst my pals, mostly for its perceived ineptness and terrible one-liners from the preview. The trailer itself is pretty inept, stopping almost dead half way thru for a long ticker-tape crawl that spells "until" as "untill"! Then a friend sent me a VHS of the film, only to discover that it was missing the first entire reel, highlighting and multiplying the absurdity (not that it made much difference). To me, more than the marginal acting and unreal situations and behavior, the thing it has going for it is really badly written and the dialog is delivered exceedingly poorly. The trailer has ten great/really BAD lines that deserve to be in its IMDb listing. Maybe this film was directed by passers by, but it is one of those films whose badness doesn't destroy its entertainment value..

This very slight "thriller" has flashes of inspiration visually, but is weighed down by less than stellar acting and a wretched script. The story concerns an organism recovered from a space probe that-get this- is being transported by train guarded by one man. The crate containing the organism is tampered with and before you know it, complications ensue. There's very little action and long stretches of corny dialog delivered in a leaden manner. I 'm not sure if the director intended this film to be a character study or a thriller, but either way, The Alpha Incident fails miserably. Saved from a no star rating by interesting photography and occasionally effective editing.

Understandably, many viewers do not see the true value of The Alpha Incident. Sure, the acting is not necessarily great and the set up is slow, but this is all part and parcel to the overall project. Only the most inexperienced layman would write off this masterwork as a "bad" movie, a "B" movie to be ridiculed. In the case of The Alpha Incident, B stands for beguiling.As the main characters are sitting in the train station, struggling to stay awake, you find that you, watching the movie, are doing the same thing. Immediately you are transported into the characters' psyches. You become part of the movie, and before you know it, the movie becomes part of you.So watch, nay, live The Alpha Incident.