I’m a simple man who enjoys simple pleasures, and as such, a movie like Osiris should be right up my street. William Kaufman’s indie sci-fi actioner is stripped down to the most essential B-movie basics – vaguely familiar actors stalking cheap-looking sets being chased by men in rubbery alien suits. It’s The Marine – Kaufman directed the fourth movie in that franchise – meets Aliens with a surprising amount of craft but a crippling lack of intrigue.
This is all well and good, and if nothing else, Osiris understands the value of practical makeup and gore effects not as a way to minimise ropey-looking CGI but as a mission statement. There’s something comfortingly unreal about exploding blood bags and vicious extraterrestrials that are clearly just big blokes slathered in makeup and prosthetics; it’s a throwback to the halcyon days of shlock-horror moviemaking where a certain tangible squishiness was basically mandatory (for what it’s worth, the effects in Osiris are courtesy of Todd Masters, who provided the same for Final Destination: Bloodlines, another fun throwback determined to make a mess.)
The mistake this movie makes is believing the practical novelty is enough. There’s no meat at all on the bones of the plot, which finds a bunch of special forces soldiers – played by Max Martini (Lioness), LaMonica Garrett (1883), Michael Irby (The Lincoln Lawyer), and others – beamed up onto an alien spacecraft, where they run into a fellow abductee named Ravi (Brianna Hildebrand, Lucifer) and eventually a Russian-accented Linda Hamilton, whose involvement was oversold by the marketing but is nonetheless welcome as ever. The science-fiction is even less developed. Outside of some brief explanatory text about Voyager 1 – the now-lost space module containing the “Golden Record”, a key plot point in Netflix’s The Signal – this movie’s approach to extraterrestrials is basically saying, “They’re aliens,” and calling it a day.
These aliens have laser guns and big shields, and they skin human corpses like in Predator, which is really the only thing they need to be doing to justify our ragtag group of heroes shooting them to death. But I’d have preferred a bit more detail about what they were up to, since it would have helped to add a bit of nuance to protracted and largely flat dialogue scenes as the cast mumble through hasty plans, frat bro patter, and infrequent attempts at genuine emotional sincerity, none of which work.
The action is serviceable, though. Kaufman likes a gunfight, and while there’s perhaps a little too much of both groups shooting at each other from opposite ends of a corridor, there’s a viscerality and a kineticism to the set-pieces that mostly works. Perhaps the smartest thing Osiris does is put its best action sequence – a shootout in Uzbekistan that takes place before the aliens even get involved – right at the beginning. It does mean that the rest of the movie is never quite able to hit the same high, but it sets an appropriate tone, if nothing else.
You’ve seen this movie before, of that there’s no doubt, and Osiris is a very competent take on it that unfortunately lacks the broad, crowd-pleasing appeal of a dumb-fun blockbuster like Heads of State or the commitment to gonzo madness of a smaller genre movie like, I dunno, Malignant. Instead, it sits somewhere in the middle, where everyone quips but nobody laughs, the aliens are dudes in suits not interesting enough to be memorable, and it all passes by more or less unnoticed. A shame, really. But I’ll still probably watch whatever Kaufman makes next.