Coming to you straight from screenwriter’s school is this mundane tale of aliens and cornfields and teenage sex and death at every turn. Billy Zane and Stephen Baldwin should have known better than to appear in this gloop, but they are about the only saving grace. Oh, apart from the practically mandatory rake thin girls getting their gear off.
Stephen Baldwin plays Joe, a delightfully inbred cornfield attendant who has found out the crop circles in his fields each morning are warnings. He’s used his delusional brain to figure out that the crop circles are actually teleport scars from when aliens teleport and that. When he dies in a freak explosion accident, his property gets left to city cousin Layne who gathers his college buddies and they head into the sticks to fix up the old place and sell it at a profit or something. But then, wouldn’t you know it? Something weird descends on the farm fortress that Joe so lovingly built with his own two whiskey bottles, and these city kids (with the help of Billy Zane as town sheriff) must defend themselves using iron. Or something like that.
It’s a rather thin premise and one that boldly defies comparisons to M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. I mean, the titles are all different, man, come on. And the storylines, well, wildly different. Ahem.
Anyhow, using this thin premise as its launchpad, it would appear that this is the pilot for an attempted television show. There are myriad clichéd events and characters adding fuel to this theory. In any given group of friends, there has to be the slightly gothic one who dresses in black and does Tarot (but is still sufficiently composed to hang with the cool ones). Or the token black guy who fancies the only single white girl and she him. Or the jock. And there are others... like bizarre clues that lead to something just beyond understanding and so on - it’s entirely formulaic toward being a pilot. With the ending fading off without a lick of closure and sudden world changing news breaking coincidentally as the film is ending, we are being led into something here.
Hopefully the exit.
Delivered in 1.78:1 and 16:9 enhanced, this is a relatively grainy looking picture that adds fuel to the TV pilot theory. The opening titles (which arrive after Baldwin’s part has been effectively excised) look totally kick-arse in comparison to the rest of the show, erm, movie.
However, let’s move on to the animation. If it can be called that. Geez. It’s pretty weak and very cheap looking. Plus there’s the classic explosion with two-dimensional fire ring shockwave. And not content with one, another follows it! Woo. These kids obviously aren’t studying physics in college, because that just doesn’t happen people. Get with the program. George Lucas has so much to answer for. Yes, it looks cool, but no it isn’t right.
Sound-wise this is alright, actually. Dolby Surround 5.1 carries the dialogue and occasional big bangs clearly and neatly without any noise or static or whatever. Some of those lines are sure cheesy too (Stephen Baldwin, hunting something in his house, dives against a wall, gun upraised. He looks up at the mounted deer head on the wall and utters, “What’re you looking at?” before running off to another wall). Sound effects are okay, although some sound stockish, whilst music is quite fitting. Sufficiently creepy when it needs to be and comical at other times, it suits the show well.
We manage to get a few extras - then I looked at them and they're shockers. The first of three is an alien gallery which shows concept art, a model, animation tests and such. A couple of special effects scene breakdowns are included, but they are fairly short at six or seven seconds each, plus a morphing technique is also broken down. This runs longer at 17 seconds, but still looks cheesy. (An interesting note in the credits is the same names crop up under the headings; Animators, 3D Modeling and Compositing. Of course they do.)
Next up comes a cast and crew thing that is basically the show’s credits on four pages of text. Not much of an extra, dudes. Lastly comes the 1:42 long trailer at 1.78:1 without enhancement. It's probably not best to watch this first as it may give away any possible secrets left in the film. Also, a fun extra (for me) was found in the credits! Michael Ash is credited as playing 'Local Yokel'. Imagine that on your resumé!
Being what is obviously a TV pilot, this has been made on the cheap, which unfortunately included the script. Plenty of recognisable film techniques have been utilised to build tension, but they are drawn out too long so we’re over the shock before it occurs. Probably aimed at a teenage market, this one mis-hit a bit with me, particularly over things like the ‘It’s been done’ factor, the cheap-arse animation and the thin storyline. I mean, six teens alone in the wilderness with a kindly not-too-old-yet sheriff to help them? How much more formulaic could it get?
Entirely average, as a general viewing piece Warnings (Silent Warnings in the U.S.) falls very flat and a way, waaaaaay second best to Signs.
