The Alpha Incident (1978)

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

As Good As It Gets

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

The Alpha Incident is basically a poor man's version of The Andromeda Strain with elements of Scanners and A Nightmare on Elm Street mixed in for good measure. It suffers from low production values and a claustrophobic setting.When a space probe returns to earth with a deadly disease, the federal government in its wisdom decides to transport it cross country by train with only one agent to guard it. Naturally, someone exposes themselves to the disease and several people end up quarantined in a rural train station.The major factor working against this film, other than its obvious plagiarizing of The Andromeda Strain, is its limited budget. Much of the screen time is spent watching people doing nothing in a train station. When we go elsewhere to see efforts to cure the disease, the NASA laboratory looks to be a high school chemistry lab. Even much of the camera work is shoddy, with a foggy look like a dream sequence.

For many years my connection to THE ALPHA INCIDENT was a long 35mm trailer that became a cult sensation amongst my pals, mostly for its perceived ineptness and terrible one-liners from the preview. The trailer itself is pretty inept, stopping almost dead half way thru for a long ticker-tape crawl that spells "until" as "untill"! Then a friend sent me a VHS of the film, only to discover that it was missing the first entire reel, highlighting and multiplying the absurdity (not that it made much difference). To me, more than the marginal acting and unreal situations and behavior, the thing it has going for it is really badly written and the dialog is delivered exceedingly poorly. The trailer has ten great/really BAD lines that deserve to be in its IMDb listing. Maybe this film was directed by passers by, but it is one of those films whose badness doesn't destroy its entertainment value..

"A Mars space probe returns to Earth and brings with it a microorganism from the red planet. While transporting the microscopic alien life form by train, there is an accident and the microorganism is unleashed. Exposure to the alien virus forces four strangers (sic) into quarantine while government scientists rush to find a cure," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis. Not exactly "four strangers", but: biochemist Stafford Morgan (as Sorenson), weighty John Goff (as Jack), busty Carol Irene Newell (as Jenny), weighty George 'Buck' Flower (as Hank), and rail-weary Ralph Meeker (as Charlie). If you fall asleep during this movie, your head will not explode. Trust me. ** The Alpha Incident (1978) Bill Rebane ~ Stafford Morgan, John F. Goff, Ralph Meeker

My wife often criticizes me when I see errors in logic on TV shows and point them out. I know that it's obvious that a CSI crew would never get a major case to solve every week. But once past that, I believe that you have to have some credibility in how things are portrayed. This movie is really slow moving and claustrophobic as a group of character types find themselves holed up in a train depot because of an accidental release of a space virus, being transported by train. Once this happens, you would think that the officials would have some interest in the well being of these poor unfortunate people. I'm not saying that an effort couldn't be made to cover things up. In the real world it happens all the time. But couldn't someone come in wearing those protective suits. It's just that they are dismissed so quickly. We don't even know if most of them have been infected. They could have been taken and brought to a sterile environment of some kind and watched. Instead, we are treated the banter of some misfit characters whose lives become meaningless to them almost immediately. Isn't there some sense of caring among these people. It had potential. It just didn't work.