Upon the capture of the vicious beastie, which is hidden from view wrapped in a tarp with a welding shield duct-taped to its face (because if it looks you in the eye with its face vagina it can control your mind, don’t’cha know?), the boys head to Wyatt’s house. Apparently Wyatt is the only one who will know what to do with it (bust out the grill, boys!).

Wyatt is understandably unhappy about his three drunken buddies arriving at his door in the wee hours with a pissed-off alien in a bag. The first thing he does is slice it open and saw a small, three-pronged piece of bone from a coil of its intestine. The bone is a sort of organic GPS, guiding the other creatures to its location. Hope is suspicious of the group’s shenanigans until the alien, through a crack in its mask sustained when it bit Cody and he whacked it in the head, gains control of her mind and forces her to put a knife to her throat. Wyatt dictates she be tied to the bed to avoid further mental abductions.

Cody becomes violent, insisting that they kill the creature to avenge his brother, who was killed when the aliens experimented on them years ago. Wyatt seems to think that would be a deeply, seriously, eschatonically (that’s probably not a word in that form, but bite me, I like it and I’m using it anyway) bad idea. The issue almost escalates to a fight when Cody goes septic from the alien’s bite and is quarantined to the bathroom. And then, things get really bad.

The alien breaks free and runs off into the house, just as the sheriff shows up. He doesn’t believe Wyatt’s story about an alien, until they find Hope screaming on the bed, looking at Otis, who is sitting on the floor, barely managing to hold on to a coil of his intestine, which is being pulled out by the alien crouching in the opposite corner of the room, giving Wyatt a “Don’t come any closer or I’ll turn your buddy into sausage” look. The Mexican (or would it be Martian?) standoff concludes with the sheriff being shot, the alien being captured again, and Otis bleeding out on the floor.

Wyatt leaves Duke to deal with the alien and Cody, while he takes Otis to the hospital. Bleeding like a stuck redneck, he doesn’t make it, but the drive takes just long enough for Wyatt to explain to Hope why he’s against killing the alien. Being a super-advanced culture, they view humanity as nothing but interesting animals. And when an animal, say a bear or a mountain lion, kills a human, what happens to that animal? If your answer was every yahoo within a hundred miles hits the bush with a shotgun lookin’ to bag him some varmints, you whacked the xenomorph on the head with a lead pipe. We kill one of them, they kill ALL of us. What’s worse, they know where Wyatt is now. Seems they fear him because they discovered during his abduction that he was immune to their toxins, and so they performed some genetic enhancement experiments on him, but when he was released he cut out his own GPS clicker growth and went into hiding. Duke and the boys didn’t find the alien by chance. It was a scout, sent to them so they would in turn take it to Wyatt, so the rest of the crew could come looking for him.

When they return to the house, the alien has crucified Otis to the wall with a nail gun. Cody, now rotted almost beyond recognition (and looking like a more convincing walking corpse than about 90% of any movie zombies I’ve seen, kudos to the makeup crew), breaks out of the bathroom and spears it to a wall with a homemade harpoon gun before it takes control of him, sending him after Wyatt before Wyatt, loving friend that he is, puts a round in his buddy’s head to end the pain.

Wyatt almost brings the alien to its knees (or as much to one’s knees as one can get when one is pinned to a wall three feet off the ground with a harpoon through one’s ribcage) in a mental showdown, when Hope shoots it in the face. Unfortunately, it’s too late. The mother ship has arrived, and aliens are swarming into the house. Will Wyatt and Hope make it into the bomb shelter in the basement in time? Will Wyatt be able to set off the several tons of explosives hidden under the floor? Will that be enough to dissuade a super-advanced race of aliens bent on genocide from wiping humanity from the face of the earth? Watch the exciting conclusion of Flash Gordon to find out! Be here next week, same Ming time, same Ming channel!

This movie kicks some major ass. The intestine tug-o-war was the point when I realized that the movie I was watching wasn’t just an interesting little indie genre piece, but a goddamn work of genius. The only thing I really can’t figure out about the plot (once they explained that the alien wasn’t caught by chance, but that it was a scout, that part really bugged me for the first 30 minutes or so, because why would an alien just be running around in the woods unless it liked moonshine and sheep fucking as much as the next Missourian), is why the aliens waited so many years to devise what seems like a simple enough plan that they should have thought of it about five minutes after they lost contact with Wyatt’s clicker (seriously, do aliens not perform controlled experiments, or is alien science just “let’s do some shit and see what happens!”?). And furthermore, if they were so worried about him, and are indeed as insanely advanced as he says, why didn’t they just nuke the whole country and be done with it. Perhaps because they didn’t have the budget to show it?

As I mentioned before, Cody’s melting-man makeup rules. Everyone making zombie movies from here on out should hire this crew to make their zombies. All apologies to Tom Savini, his super-gory corpses look awesome, but if you want realistic rotting, this is the place to find it. The alien itself is one mean sumbitch, too. It looks like the painting of the kickass space monster on the cover of Star Crystal that tricked me into buying that fuck-awful piece of crap movie (which, if you’ve read the review, you know is actually about a slimy down-syndrome sock-puppet booger which kills a couple people, then reads the Bible and decides that Jesus would rather he made friends and played checkers and listened to really bad 80’s pop music).

In the end, I’m left with just one burning question (and a burning sensation when I pee, but I’m not entirely convinced that’s because of the movie). The question is this: why do super-advanced civilizations who have conquered space travel and organic technology and telekinesis-for-fuck’s-sake never wear pants? I mean, we never get a clear shot at the thing’s crotch, so maybe it has a retractable (or perhaps detachable?) penis or something, but is mankind really the only race in the universe who hides his shame? I guess Predators (or Yautja, for those who are extremely geeky about it) wear codpieces, so I probably don’t have anything to complain about here.

Bottom line, Altered is a cross between Fire In the Sky and I Spit On Your Grave, and that’s okay with me.

The Moral of the Story: Do not stare directly into the vagina.

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