At the Austin Film Festival, I saw this first-time feature film by Scott Dikkers, editor-in-chief of the newspaper and webzine The Onion. Afterwards was a Q&A with Dikkers, and that will have to substitute for my usual Entertainment Weekly background information.

The story is about a 4 yr old boy who is abducted by aliens and raised to be an unstoppable killing machine. 25 years later, he has crashed to earth again and is having trouble adapting to our society - namely, the one with no overlords issuing commands to kill. He (Dikkers, not the Spaceman) is in talks with Miramax and Fox Searchlight, and Steven Seagal wants to buy the remake rights.

It was shot for $50,000, and while that does show up (in the film to video to film transfer and in the prop and wardrobe budget), it is still a very entertaining movie. The acting is not of the highest caliber either, but it is all completely believable and certainly better than some I have seen this summer from Oscar winners such as oh, JON VOIGHT

The camera was skillfully hiding all their budgetary constraits and still managing to show us what could have been very expensive sequences. The excavation of the crashed space craft is a prime example: you hardly see a thing yet you know what you are seeing.Chris Chan Lee is the director of photography and the music is by Edward Pearsall. The cues for the music were great, and the occasional modern-sounding homage to 50's sci fi music was nicely balanced.

It turns out that all the dialogue was relooped (recorded and matched) after shooting, which impresses me because the lipsynch was perfect! I only wondered about one character if he himself was looped. Some elements were a little off, such as the FBI agents that were too evil and not clever enough, but overall it was a good story idea with all the right moments and twists, and some really funny dialogue.

At first I was concerned about Spaceman's fight scenes - for a lifelong trained assassin I found him to be a little weak, but each fight sequence he got better and better until the end which was great! Having worked a little with this I appreciated the difficulties of the shoot.

One character, a mob don, was quite good even if he had an unnecessarily long and irrelevant monologue at one point - and it turns out he was played by a homeless guy and then his dialogue was redubbed by Dikkers himself. But he was still enjoyable. David Ghilardi was the monotoned Spaceman, and Deborah King was the love interest/neighbor/friend/tutor in all things earthly. They had good chemistry and while it was no Starman, it was an interesting relationship.

A few things shone out as a tad amateurish (this from me!) but only so much in that they were not as good as other parts that were truly inspired. The handheld camera work was interesting, and despite the crappy transfer process the shots looked balanced and lit and very slick. Especially if you consider the crew was Scott and the cameraman, the whole thing looks extremely polished. The fact that the looping was so not obvious is a testament to his post-production skills as well. If you get a chance to catch it, do so. It's not yet as funny as The Onion(www.theonion.com) but it shows a great deal of promise, and it was totally entertaining.

karina