Hybrid

Hybrid is another sublime slice of Fred Olen Ray madness. I love just about every film that Fred has ever made but Hybrid is especially memorable. Few directors can claim to have as unique a vision as Fred Olen Ray and this film is a perfect example of that twisted outlook. Hybrid plays like a cross between "Alien" and "Emmanuelle", only without the special effects of the former or the arty pretensions of the latter. This film is wonderfully trashy and a must see for fans of this brilliant director.

The action begins with a preposterous looking creature chewing up a couple of scientists. Right from the opening scene it is apparent that Fred has not lost his sense of humour. The creature looks like a bad Halloween costume and the gore effects are as unconvincing as ever. The film switches focus to the crew of a very unrealistic looking spacecraft, who crash land on a desolate planet. The crew seek shelter from bad weather and stumble across a soldier, who directs them to an abandoned laboratory. This is when Hybrid begins to rip off "Alien" in earnest and Fred Olen Ray really hits his stride.

The crew find the laboratory abandoned and quickly discover through a series of hilarious revelations that the scientists were experimenting on humans and succeeded in creating a homicidal cockroach/human hybrid. Instead of leaving as quickly as possible, this crew of dunces decides to spend the night at the facility - only to learn that the hybrid is not only alive but also hungry and horny. The remainder of the film basically involves crew members being killed and having raunchy sex. In other words, Fred Olen Ray serves up a large serving of quality entertainment.

The sex scenes in Hybrid are particularly amusing. A perfect example of Fred's unique approach to plot and character occurs when Dr Leslie, played by horror icon Brinke Stevens, and Nurse Carla, JJ North of "Hellblock 13" fame, decide to freshen up - by showering together. Before too long the women begin to massage each other to "relieve tension" and before you know it they are partaking in some soft-core lesbian action. Nurse Carla really gets around. She also finds time to seduce soldier McQueen, played by Tim Abell, in the midst of all the carnage. This scene would look cheesy in a 1980s porno but somehow nurse Carla's very thorough check-up routine works here. The cutting between Carla and McQueen's sexual acrobatics and the creature's killing spree makes for particularly classy viewing. Just when I thought Fred had reached a dizzying new height, Dr Leslie takes a sleeping pill and is molested by the creature in a scene that puts Sigourney's cross-species flirt in "Alien Resurrection" well and truly into perspective.

The technical aspects of Hybrid are pretty terrible. The action sequences are cheap and poorly staged, while the make-up and gore effects leave a lot to be desired. And that is fine with me. I don't watch Fred Olen Ray movies for technical virtuosity but for his outrageous imagination and unswerving dedication to bad taste. Fred's directing is as haphazard as ever and the actors vary wildly in skill. Tim Abell has gone on to bigger and better things and somehow makes it through Hybrid with his dignity intact. Poor Brinke Stevens is not as lucky. However, she can take solace in the fact that people are still paying her to take her clothes off well past the age of 40. JJ North is hilariously inept as Carla. I'm disappointed that she has dropped off the acting radar after a promising string of wonderful Z-grade movies.

Fred Olen Ray's hypnotic brand of crap is an acquired taste but once you get it, there is no going back. Hybrid has everything a B-movie should have in spades - poor effects, gore, gratuitous nudity and a rapist alien. This is highly recommended.

Always turning a blind eye to the prospect of a new idea, director Fred Olen Ray gives us a remake of CREEPOZOIDS, itself a garden-variety ALIEN knock-off. Here six post nuke survivors seek shelter from an upcoming "ion storm" in a (uh oh) seemingly abandoned scientific lab. Despite finding a half-melted corpse, mysterious slime puddles and body parts lying around the group decide to spend the night and a mutant monster, supposedly a hybrid cockroach/snake (though it looks no different than the monsters usually found in these things) picks them off one by one.

Now that we've established the fact there's no plot, the question remains...Is there anything good here? Well...like many Ray productions, naked chicks are a given. Buxom blonde J.J. North and Brinke Stevens split up from the guys, go exploring, find a shower with warm water and hop in for a lets-toy-with-lesbianism shower romp, nevermind the fact they've already discovered a dead body. Stevens, a veteran Scream Queen for 15 years now, still looks great in her 40's and does a decent job in her role. Tim Abell, in the token Rambo role, also comes off pretty well and exudes leading man potential. Everyone else is awful, the violence is mostly offscreen and the monster design is terrible.

Potential points of interest include a topless pin-up of Michelle Bauer, a publicity poster of Rush Limbaugh (?), extreme misuse of the busy Corman factory stock space FX and probably a record amount of time padding of characters walking down darkly lit corridors.

John Blyth Barrymore is to the Barrymore's what Eric was to the Douglas clan! A talentless hack who just appears in movies because of his family name. This movie is a shocker! A cheap, inept alien rip-off which has the obligatory nude scenes to appeal to the men! Poor special effects mean that you barely even see the monster and the most shocking acting known to man makes the people on Dawsons creek seem like great actors! One can only hope that all copies of this movie will be destroyed one day like what happened with the atari 1600 game "ET" and then this movie can disappear, and the actors can pretend it never happened!

For those who enjoy cheesy b-grade horror Sci-Fi, Hybrid is a gold mine of goodies.

The movie opens with a couple of minutes of what looks like footage from other sci-fi or disaster movies awkwardly spliced together with little to no attempt toward coherence. Initially I was wondering if this was why the movie was called Hybrid. Random shots of alien spaceships shooting at stuff in space, buildings and cars exploding, a few brief shots of some creature in armour shooting at the screen culminates in a stock shot of a nuclear explosion. None of the footage matches at all, the grain and film is different in each shot, some of it is in broad daylight, some of it is at night, some of its is clearly meant to be in deep space. It is presumably meant to be showing some sort of cataclysmic, apocalyptic event but the details are sketchy. None of the dialogue in the rest of the movie is that helpful- it would seem to indicate some kind of nuclear war but the aliens seen in this prologue are never mentioned and there is even mention of natural disaster at one point. Possibly the makers didn't know what footage they could get their hands on for the opening whilst writing the script and decided to hedge their bets. After this we are treated to a cheapo credit sequence complete with wonderfully cheesy music. I love the fact the title of the movie is in that green blocky computerised type of font that may have looked so cool and futuristic in the seventies (This movie being made in the late nineties).

After a comically bad and short second opening in which some marine types are killed by some unseen creature the movie proper begins. A ragtag group of scientists and military types travelling across a blasted post apocalyptic war zone (a nice cost effective desert) take shelter from a killer ion storm inside an abandoned scientific research facility. From there on it's your standard alien clone as our colourful cast are picked off one by one by a generic monster. In this case it is apparently a cross between human, reptile and cockroach, although it looks like none of the above and I see good reasons for this particular combination beyond those of the "WTF, why not, we're bored and have access to gene splicing technology" variety. It in fact looks like a dude in a really, really fake and rubbery looking 'Alien' rip-off monster costume with a stupidly long neck. It is quite hilarious when you do see it chasing after someone lamely shaking it rubbery claws at someone and shaking its badly balanced and over large cranium from side to side. The makers wisely only show bits of the creature from time to time- every few minutes there is a standard POV shot of the creature roaming the corridors followed by a shot its snarling teeth which may remind you of the snarling drooling teeth of another well known alien creature.

In its relatively short running time Hybrid has almost everything you could want from this kind of trashy pic- a rubbery fake looking alien, cheesy dialogue, gratuitous sex scenes, bad acting, clichés, impromptu and lengthy lesbian shower sequences, fake gore, lots of cheap props and sets, more bad dialogue and acting, creatures beating incessantly on doors, technobabble, alien rape, slime, gratuitous stock footage, loose endings and bad soap operatic back stories. Many will cite the lesbian scene as a highlight but it's all an amiable plateau of cheesy fun from start to finish. Stay watching till the end of the credits which make it clear that the makers of Hybrid were had no illusions as to the kind of film they were making.

this movie opens up with multiple segments of other movies strung together, i mean what the???

the acting in this movie is just terrible, the dialogue is that bad its laughable, like using the word besides three times to start a sentence in one segment.

this movie seems to try to redeem itself with random skin scenes that don't do too well at it.

there is cheap gore and a funny soundtrack. one scene that used the 80's synth beat for the music made it funny, instead of a dark atmosphere. i understand its a b grade movie, but thats no excuse for how bad it is.

a bunch of space renegades go into an abandoned military facility to escape a dangerous ionstorm but have something more "deadly" inside. guess what it is. an alien made of a really bad fake rubbersuit which makes you laugh every time you see it. the alien's noise is so terrible to listen to.

i give it a five only because that its laughable, and watching this movie with a bunch of mates makes watching this movie a funny experience.