User Reviews

This film is like someone from another planet came down to earth, watched one alien movie and tried to write and direct a 10-minute script. Acting was bad, not really the actors faults, shots lasted SO long, I think I counted about 4 collective minutes, 40% of the total runtime, of just shots of the girl looking around or walking. There was a dumb montage scene that also lasted far too long, I think it should've just been completely left out and transitioned instantly into her finding the soil samples overturned. Once that happened it took the film so long to get to the part where she finds the dog, that probably should've just been what they cut to instead of spraying her in the face with steam for... some reason? Twice? I get that the director wanted to try and recreate the atmosphere of the alien movies and get long, dark shots with ominous, atmospheric music over top but it just feels so forced and transparent. Like Kelsey Taylor was on the couch watching with me, explaining to me how to feel in the stupidest way possible. The shot where she finds the barrel overturned lasts 28 SECONDS. A single shot. Of her walking. For half a minute of a 10-minute film. It didn't add anything, it didn't make me feel scared for the character or make me nervous with the anticipation of what she was going to see, it made me hit my right arrow key a few times to skip to the next shot. The power going out and comms not working didn't make any sense to me, nothing had happened to the station aside from a containment breach, so why would the little talk button not work? There was no big reveal, nothing about it was new or interesting, it seemed like a boilerplate production of "something to do with the Alien movies". Shot composition was terrible, line delivery was meh at best and ridiculously cheesy at worst, direction was practically nonexistent, it makes sense this came out on Youtube because it felt like a 4-minute clip stretched out to be longer than 10 minutes lol. I think the only part I enjoyed was the idea of an android dog, making the earlier line of "you shouldn't name them" actually have any significance, as soon as I heard that I figured they were just emptily referencing the fact the dog was totally gonna die from the moment it entered frame, can't have an alien movie without a redshirt. This is what happens when you let the lighting girl direct something, it looks pretty, professional and is lit well, but literally everything else about it was dumb and pointless. It could've been fun if they'd had the dog get implanted, make it an actual dog, gotten to the point a little quicker and not used cgi for the close-ups of the facehugger. It doesn't deserve a 1/10 but there was just zero effort put into this.

This film is great! The idea of an Android Dog is something new. But I'm always disappointed about the facehugger's design, it's basically bad CGI, but other than that, it's all fine to me.

This is the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the very successful Alien franchise and as a tribute, several short films are released. Here we have one of them "Specimen", released by Kelsey Taylor. It runs for minimally over 10 minutes and takes place in the Alien universe of course. Usually I like films more that focus on an unseen threat, but this one here did not do too much for me. It is the second I watched from these tributes and I preferred the other. With a female actor at the center from beginning to end and a female director, this could have been a nice female kick-ass movie, but it only succeeds to some extent. Not a big enough extent for me. The thing i ended up being most curious about eventually is if the dog would make it alive. i won't spoil it for you in case you wanna watch. But really you shouldn't. Actually, even if you love the Alien series more than I do, then this will not be enough and the best choice may be to skip it because it did not feel as close to the series as it could/should have been. A bit of a disappointment. The ending is okay, but it does not make up for all the mediocrity before. Don't get me wrong, by no means this is a failure we have here, but it is also not good enough a watch for a positive recommendation. My suggestion is you go for something else instead. I must say I cannot deny I am glad it was this short because it never had me even close to the edge of my seat.