Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on December 15, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Is there really a good reason why Altered, long promised as a Rogue Pictures theatrical release, has wound up as a direct-to-DVD title (under the Universal banner)? I guess without someone like, say, Sarah Michelle Gellar as the toplining star, a small-scale creature feature like this was considered too hard a commercial sell. That’s a shame—but on the other hand, the modest trappings of Eduardo Sanchez’s long-in-coming directorial follow-up to his and Daniel Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project make it perfectly suited for a night of creepy home viewing. It’s just too bad that, if it had to go straight to disc, the film couldn’t have been graced with a respectful assortment of supplements.
Jamie Nash’s script was apparently first conceived as a comedy, and certainly the basic premise suggests a satirical spin on a well-worn story: Four guys who were abducted and experimented on by aliens in their childhood succeed in kidnapping one of the creatures 15 years later. And even as reconfigured in straight horrific terms by Sanchez, there’s a fairly constant undercurrent of humor bubbling under the tension, a lot of it having to do with the fact that the principal characters are, when you get right down to it, a bunch of not very bright rednecks. There’s plenty of good ol’ boy wisecracking and profanity (“Suck it up, pisspants”) in the setup; one of the guys actually says “Dad gum it!” fairly early on. The surprise is that despite all this, Sanchez and his cast gradually develop a sense of sympathy and dramatic rooting interest in these guys and their increasingly dire situation.
Part of it is due to Sanchez and Nash’s careful parceling out of backstory as we gradually learn more about these guys’ lives, what happened to them a decade and a half ago and how the latter impacted on the former. Evidently they’ve been going on “hunting” trips into the woods where that long-ago ordeal occurred for some time, and the film opens with Duke (Brad William Henke), Otis (Michael C. Williams, almost unrecognizable from his Blair Witch role) and Cody (Paul McCarthy Boyington) successfully nabbing an extraterrestrial critter in the middle of the night. It’s only after they’re successful in their mission that they realize any other aliens hovering about might not approve of their actions, and they flee to the isolated home of fellow abductee Wyatt (Adam Kaufman). He has declined to join the group on their excursions and has been trying to simply forget the whole experience, as he apparently got it the worst from their monstrous captors—with the exception of another boy, Timmy, who didn’t make it out alive.
Once the trio arrive at Wyatt’s door with their captive, an escalating series of confrontations, revelations and horrible consequences ensue, some exacerbated by the presence of Wyatt’s pointedly named girlfriend Hope (Catherine Mangan) and the thirst for revenge by hotheaded Cody, who it turns out is Timmy’s brother and has a couple of other reasons to be cheesed off. As the guys bicker and threaten and try to figure a way out of their situation, certain that the outer-space antagonists are waiting outside the door, the critter they’ve chained to a table inevitably starts posing a threat inside. Sanchez cleverly conceals the alien by having the characters keep it wrapped in a sack, a welder’s helmet over its head, for a good portion of the film, and teasing us with a glimpse of an eye here, a claw there and an icky look at the thing’s guts during a bit of impromptu surgery.
That’s a good thing, as the creature is somewhat less persuasive the more we see of it; the FX wizards at Spectral Motion clearly had a much lower budget to work with here than they did on the likes of Hellboy and Blade: Trinity. Sanchez works with it well, though, setting a good portion of its attacks and mayhem in creepy semi-darkness, and he and the Spectral team stage a couple of effectively grisly prosthetic setpieces that are a far cry from the psychological terrors of Blair Witch. Yet the scenarios are not dissimilar—both focus on small groups of people trapped in rural isolation, dealing with situations partially of their own making—and Sanchez’s work on Altered shares with that previous film a keen sense of downward-spiral pacing. The shared thematic concerns no doubt helped Sanchez in making the jump from the mock-documentary/semi-improvised Blair Witch to this traditional narrative feature.
Not that you’ll find out about that or any other creative concerns on the disc—there’s no commentary, no interviews, nothin’ to allow anyone involved with the project to have a say about it. (Just to rub salt in the wound, the disc nonetheless begins with one of those “Any views or opinions expressed in interviews or commentary…” disclaimers.) The “Bonus Features” supporting the expectedly slick 1.85:1 transfer and Dolby Digital 5.1 audio amount to exactly one: a five-and-a-half-minute collection of deleted scenes. These include some violent slapstick during the alien’s capture that seems left over from the project’s comically intended origins, and dialogue moments among the characters that reveal a little more about their histories. Though these bits are superfluous to the overall movie, it is nice to get the extra insight into the protagonists—but it’s not nearly enough to make up for the fact that we’re told nothing about the making of the film they appear in.
