Movie review: 1313 UFO INVASION

So here we go: one of the infamous “1313” movies. If you haven’t seen one of these, it’s going to be hard to believe anyone else’s description of the pacing and “plot.” Basically, I think these movies emerged from some alternate reality in which there is no such thing as gay porn (or else it’s illegal or impossible to obtain), so there is a huge market for extended shots of buff young men walking around semi-clad.

It’s like soft core porn, except…softer. No sex actually happens, but there are shower scenes filmed in real time that dwell so long on the actors’ abs and asses that it starts to feel like some new kind of meditation.

And why are they called the 1313 movies? Because that’s the number of the house where they’re all filmed. No, I’m not kidding. After about the third 1313 movie you start dreaming about the place; it’s that familiar.

IMBD estimates the cost of producing this thing at $1,000,000. Yeah…okay.

• Script quality: Ahahaha.
• Acting quality: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
• Overall feeling afterwards: I need a drink.

SPOILERS beneath the cut, although I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to spoil you for this just by describing it. The best I can hope for is to warn you, really.The movie begins by letting you know its a Rapid Heart Production. Look, if you experience a rapid heartbeat from watching any of the 1313 movies, you need to cut way back on the digitalis. Or else increase it. I can’t remember which; ask your doctor. My point is, NOTHING in these movies should be making your heart pound, so if it’s pounding, something’s really medically wrong. Stop watching immediately and call 911.

Anyway, then we have a standard issue night sky, and then a standard issue shot of a sunrise, and then, joy! THE HOUSE. One of the Buff Twinks (which would make a good name for a band) enters; this is my third 1313 movie and I still can’t tell any of the actors apart or remember any of their names, but this one has brown hair. He wanders around in board shorts and flip flops calling “Guys?” repeatedly while I boggle at how even the damned FURNITURE is the same in all these movies. Goddamn. That is some serious dedication to mediocrity, right there.

The camera zooms in close. Really close. We’re seeing, like, cellular structures. Nerve endings. Then we see the Nameless Brown-haired Guy (because it’s not like you have any way of KNOWING who the character is yet) lying spreadeagled, tied to a bed (an eerily familiar bed, if you happen to have seen 1313: Frankenqueen.) An evil-looking redheaded woman is smiling at him. I should mention that every one of these movies has exactly one female character, and she’s always evil.

Then he walks dazedly down the hall, now wearing white underwear. Look, clothing changes are practically plot points in these things, okay? He walks, really slowly, down the same corridor and stairs he entered by, and THEN the title flashes onscreen, and I start to sob quietly as I remember exactly what the pacing is like in a 1313 movie.

Exterior shots, house. Interior shot. Another Buff Twink, this one slightly blonder, enters, talking on a cellphone. Okay, wait, the interior decorator has added a giant piece of driftwood wearing red boots. That’s new. Tense music plays while he walks into the kitchen and opens a beer, then meets the Evil Redhead, who he assumes is the real estate agent.

She shows him around–SLOWLY. He explains he’s a grad student studying theoretical biocultural anthropology–first-cultural contact stuff, only he’s interested in alien cultures contacting us, as opposed to our culture meeting less technologically advanced ones. She tells him the house is near a UFO crash site. Convenient. He appears not to have known this, so why is he renting this house?

She’s going to be using one of the spare bedrooms as an office, even though he and his friends are renting the place. Sounds legit.

His friends arrive. I’ll call them Boyband Twink and Dark-haired Twink. Neither one of them is wearing a shirt, because this is a 1313 movie. They go out to the pool, strip down to their identical unattractive white briefs (I guess it was a pack of three) and swim. Evil Redhead watches. They splash around touching each other on the shoulders a lot, but THERE IS NO SEX IN A 1313 MOVIE, so you know this isn’t going anywhere beyond campy horseplay. This scene lasts  ten minutes or so. It feels like hours.

To make time pass more slowly, the director randomly inserts external shots of the house, or a sunset or sunrise.

Boyband Twink talks about hitting on the realtor. That’s another standard 1313 thing: there’s always one male character who unconvincingly plays the role of heterosexual stud, and he always hits on the one female character, and whatever bad things are going to happen to the Buff Twinks happens to him first.

Only NOT THIS TIME. In a stunning twist, Evil Redhead watches Dark-haired Twink sleeping, and then injects him with something. Boyband Twink is unharmed! For now.

Grad Student Twink drives out to the UFO crash site IN REAL TIME while Spreadeagled Twink reappears. I guess he’s one of the grad students.  Dark-haired Twink finds the exercise room from Frankenqueen and works out for a while.  Then he goes upstairs, and suddenly wakes up spreadeagled and tied to a bed.  There are some more shots of nerve cells, and then he walks numbly down the hall. Every now and again we cut away from all this to see Grad Student Twink walking down a sidewalk in a desert town.

Another Twink ( I have lost the ability to tell them apart; this one has black underwear) enters the house, finds the weight room, and the exact same sequence of events recurs. For variety, we get shots of Grad Student Twink walking in the desert.

GSTwink finds caves. Another random Twink shows up. Boyband Twink welcomes him. I think BBTwink is the only non-spreadeagled-and-numbed one now, barring the new guy (who goes for a swim soon, presumably so we can see that he, too, is wearing black underwear).

BBTwink tries the realtor’s door for the second or third time and get no answer, so he takes a LENGTHY shower, during which we see the realtor watching him. He doesn’t notice, because he is admiring his own body. A lot.

Some other Twink works out, and the realtor walks in on him creepily. He doesn’t notice that she is an Evil Redhead, so she encounters no resistance when she injects him in the neck.

GSTwink is still wandering around and around the desert caves. God, I wish that were a euphemism for something more interesting.

BBTwink, suddenly noticing his friends have all vanished, goes running around the house in his white underwear. He breaks into the realtor’s office, which is actually some kind of lab. A dazed Twink is tied to a chair, loosely, with IV tubing draped pointlessly around his neck.  BBTwink asks “Who did this to you?” and the Evil Redheaded Realtor shows up to say “I did!” while jabbing him in the neck. What the hell is IN those syringes, anyway?

In a series of flashbacks we see her leading various indistinguishable young men to the bed and tying them down. She cheerily explains to BBTwink–who is now tied to the bed–that “your friends are all dead or dying now, of course,” and then moves in to begin…doing whatever it is she does. We don’t find out yet, because the director cuts away to an exterior view of the house. Then we cut back to the front foyer to see that GSTwink has returned from his caves. There are only ten minutes left to roll.

Evil Redhead confronts him in the hall and…I don’t know, zaps him in the shoulder? while explaining that she’s trying “to reverse your treatment!” which would have been easier if he hadn’t left before she’d finished his injections. So at SOME point something interesting happened, but we didn’t get to see it. Super. The hallmark of good film making, right there: have anything of interest, or which makes sense of the plot, happen offstage.

She chases GSTwink around explaining that he’s really an alien, and he doesn’t belong here.  We watch her tie him to the bed–he’s still got his white underwear on; this is a 1313 movie, EVERYONE KEEPS THEIR UNDERWEAR ON–and exposit at him that he’s had various identities (pilot, mailman, student), all of which have been very useful in helping her obtain samples and harvest brain matter “for study at a later time.”

GSTwink begins to remember, muttering about having work to do, infiltrating and gathering. After reassuring her that “the real me” is back, and “I know who I am,” GSTwink grabs a scalpel and stabs her in the side when she bends over to give him a “this should help!” injection.  “Why?” she asks, or possibly “What?” because there’s a lot of dramatic music. “I know who I am,” he repeats.

GSTwink staggers outside and slits his own throat by the pool, and we cut to the same shot of the night sky that we opened with.

No, really. That’s how it ends.