Decoys (2004)

Plot Outline: Luke and Roger are just another couple of college guys trying to lose their virginity when they come across Lilly and Constance, two extremely beautiful co-eds who have just transferred from another college. The two guys immediately fall in love but then Luke stumbles across the two girls and sees something he shouldn't see - they're actually aliens! No one believes him and when bodies begin to pile up around campus, the finger of suspicion points to him. Can he prove to everyone that they are aliens before more people are killed, including Roger who desperately wants to hook up with Constance!

The Review: Take some of Species and mix it with The Faculty and you'll pretty much guess how this film plays out. It's not clever. It's not exactly thrilling entertainment. There are plenty of problems with the film. And there's also plenty of negative reviews across the net about it too. But, somehow, I did enjoy it quite a lot. Maybe it was the mixture of insanely beautiful women with a pretty simple horror/sci-fi story that did it for me. Don't expect anything great though. As I've said, the film is not without it's problems. There's a lot of plot holes throughout the film, a lot of obvious plot twists which won't surprise anyone except teenagers watching their first horror flick and lots of mundane dialogue. It's packed to the brim with stereotypical characters, your usual mix of sex and violence, some fake scares and some laughs occasionally. In fact there is probably a book on how to make films of this type somewhere. But with a steady pace throughout the film, director Matthew Hastings doesn't really deviate from the tried-and-tested formula and it works. You know what you're going to get and you get exactly what you thought you would. There isn't any gore in the film which is quite surprising but there are plenty of special effects, including a really cool freezing-from-the-inside moment. The aliens are also CGI and they don't look too bad (a little like Sil from Species though) - the script makes them out to be ruthless killing machines at first but there is one scene where one of the chicks describes their predicament and they do come off as quite sympathetic. In fact towards the end of the film, it's actually the hero who turns into somewhat of the bad guy when he wastes the alien chicks, including the one who killed his friend (with his friend's consent to have sex I might add). It may have also been Corey Sevier's performance that got me to start booing him because he's pretty loud and aggressive throughout the film. And with regards to the chick element, Kim Poirier and Stephanie von Pfetten both sizzle on the screen and certainly have a magnetism which will draw in the male fans (perhaps the fact that they show quite a lot of their hot bodies will have something to do with it) but they're not exactly great actresses. However they don't need to be when they play the roles of hot space chicks who turn into horrible tentacled monsters!

Final Verdict: Entertaining but instantly forgettable, Decoys doesn't push the boundaries of the genre, nor does it piss on them. It's just a classic example of one of those steady horror releases you tend to find until the next big new horror film gets released (and thus everyone begins to copy the ideas from that).

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