The Salena Incident

Plot Outline: During a routine transport, a group of prisoners manage to overpower their guards and take them captive. On the run, they enter the peaceful town of Salena and think they're free. However whilst they are there, they encounter a threat more powerful than anything they could imagine - flesh-eating aliens have crash-landed there and are hungry!

The Review: A traumatic experience in cheap movie making is the only threat anyone could encounter if they slap this into their DVD player. The Salena Incident has vision of grandeur but like many low budget films, it has expectations which would never be fulfilled by such a low budget and incompetent writing. Starting off with an Aliens-like slaughter of a commando team, the film never really gets into first gear. I guess the scene does it's job in establishing the threat of the aliens but once you know that they can sweep a commando unit into the ground pretty quickly, a bunch of cons, guards and big-chested blondes aren't going to do much later on. Things don't get any better with the introductions of the various cons and guards. Each one has their own trait to distinguish them from the others but that's about the only thing separating them. At least the film gets the rag-tag group of cons and guards into the town as feasibly quick as they can and they don't drag out the escape longer than is needed. Once they get to the town, events happen in a never-ending cycle of monotony. Characters are attacked by aliens. One is possessed or eaten. Aliens stop attacking to allow the infiltration into the group of the now-possessed body. Said possessed person then reveals themselves. Cue the whole process starting again. Throw in firefights and a few explosions here and there (and yes it looks like the same explosion effect used time and time again)

The film uses the body possession plot device that I hate - you know, when the characters become possessed by the aliens and they use the human bodies to move around. In reality it's just a cheap way to get around showing the aliens on screen. For some reason, the aliens eat certain characters but then possess others. You can tell a character is possessed by their eyes turning black. So I guess no one realises their former lover or friend is now an alien with two big bulbous black things peering back at them? The aliens get a little messy too, with a severed hand and severed body being the highlights. But the gore effects are unconvincing and don't look anywhere as good as they needed to be.
The cast is also non-descript. One of them used to be a Power Ranger. A couple of them have never worked again after this. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest because any smart casting director wouldn't even recognise this on a résumé. Enough said about them. Enough said about the film really, I'm just wasting my time. I didn't enjoy it. I endured it.

Final Verdict: I'm not sure whether this has been released in the US yet. It doesn't look like it. But let me tell you from across the Pond, you're not missing anything in the slightest. In fact do yourself a favour and petition for The Salena Incident to never be released there...ever. The less people that watch this, the better the world will be.