IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE II (1996) *

I don’t know why they waited forty-three years to make a sequel to It Came from Outer Space.  They should’ve waited longer.  It Came from Outer Space?  It should go back there. 

I guess it’s not really a sequel since it doesn’t feature any of the same characters.  (In an incredible cost-cutting move, it reuses the same opening titles from the 1953 original movie, just with a superimposed red Roman numeral II.)  That’s the first red flag.  The second red flag is that it was written by Jim and Ken Wheat, who also wrote another years later sequel, The Birds II:  Land’s End, which like this turd also went straight to cable.  This one is better than The Birds 2, but that’s like saying meteor shit is better than bird shit. 

Oh, and it was produced by Tony Dow.  Yes, as in Wally from Leave It to Beaver!  What the fuck?

Brian (King Kong Lives) Kerwin stars as a photographer who returns to his small desert hometown to take some pictures.  One day, he and his young dirt-bike-riding sidekick photograph a strange object that landed out in the desert.  While he tries to figure out what the heck it is, the blue rock lures people inside of it and swaps them out for evil alien doubles. 

It’s funny they reuse the opening meteor crash from the original since that’s probably the best effect in the movie.  I mean, wait until you see the shitty looking CGI storms and cheesy morphing effects.  I know it was the mid-‘90s and all, but… sheesh. 

It’s also hopelessly tame, even for cable TV.  Heck, it could probably run on network television with no edits.  Not only is it weak sauce up and down, it takes forever before anything even happens.  Even then, it’s painfully anticlimactic. 

The cast tried, but the deck was stacked against them from the start.  Kerwin makes for a bland but serviceable hero.   Elizabeth Pena (who deserves better) is good as the single mom to the dirt bike kid.  We also have Bill McKinney, Dean Norris, and The Love Boat’s Lauren Tewes, who is seen watching pornos in one scene.  (They sure couldn’t have shown John Agar doing THAT in the original!)