Stepping from the Inn you find yourself on a wide cobbled square surrounded by thatch roofed buildings. At the centre of the square is a tall pole. Different coloured ribbons hang from the top and flutter lazily in the breeze. Your hand brushes the scrap of paper in your pocket…the map, perhaps later, there’s a whole island to explore.
Hullo there friend!
A cheery voice rings out. You look over to a quaint little shop with a multipaned bay window where a jolly looking man with white mutton chops is beckoning you over.
My name is Albert, I heard we had a new visitor to the island. I’m the town chemist, can I interest you in anything?
You glance into the shop through the open door behind the man. Various jars line the shelves, full of things you’ve never seen in any other chemist shop, is that a tentacle?
No? How about some advice then? Not everyone is as they seem. Beware false friends. But most of all, enjoy yourself!
OK…so this is a review I was both amused by and dreading to some degree. Little did I know when I purchased this film in a ‘Wow Anime!’ period I was going through back in the early 2000s, when it was becoming available over here in the UK, that I would be reviewing it 20 years later.
Alien from the Darkness, or Alien of Darkness as the DVD I have calls it (淫獣エイリアン is its original Japanese title or Injū Eirian in the Hepburn romanization), is a Japanese Hentai, about the crew of a Spaceship who discover and explore a derelict craft which turns out to have an alien entity on board. The Alien turns out to be hostile, not to mention horny, and so of course the crew end up in a fight for survival in this pornographic horror from 1996.
I will be the first to admit that I went into this film as a bit of a sceptic. It had been around 2 decades since I last watched it and I honestly couldn’t remember much about it or if it was any good. Spoiler alert, you may be surprised by the result.
I’m going to go right out and say that this would be a better film without the porn side of it, but also if you take those scenes out it barely even qualifies as a film anymore with its already meagre runtime of 45 minutes. The graphic sexual scenes are what they are, they vary from standard lesbian porn scenes to the hentai staple of invasive tentacles. To be fair we’re not talking full hardcore, though it’s entirely possible my copy is cut, being from the 90s, but it’s certainly over and above incidental sexual scenes that are present in many exploitation films for example. The porn scenes are what people are generally watching this for. The thing is, as a by product of wanting to watch some horny space ladies get it on, the viewer inadvertently ends up watching a fairly decent sci-fi horror. It’s nothing special but I’ve very much seen worse.
The film makes no effort in disguising its influence from a film I’ve already reviewed. Alien. Crew finds an abandoned ship. Crew brings something alien aboard their own ship. Crew start to die. OK so that’s fairly vague but wait until you see the crew’s stasis pods and then tell me Alien wasn’t an influence.
I think what I wasn’t expecting in a 45 minute long hentai was a secondary plot, hell I wasn’t even expecting a plot full stop, I actually found myself fully engaged with the film. Yes it’s got some ridiculous scenes and it’s not a film I would ever recommend to people, unless they were after a sci-fi hentai, but it has plenty of good points.
The artwork is decent and at times quite creepy with the various decomposing corpses on the abandoned ship they find. The absolutely bizarre but entirely welcome inclusion of a cute pet ferret running around the ship and providing some awwww moments as well as taking part in the main plot and providing some comic relief. Speaking of comic relief there’s a fair few examples of it in the film. It’s entertaining and after all, isn’t that what films are supposed to be.
With this in mind and taking the film as what it is, porn, I’m going to give Alien from the Darkness 3 rotating vibrators out of 5. This film has no right being this watchable, it feels like the director Norio Takanami wanted to be making something more serious, and it shows.
**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**
Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.
The film is strongly influenced by Alien, but surprisingly doesn’t go the whole way and instead goes with quite a few of its own ideas, or at least ideas from different films. Having the creature spend most of the film in the form of a young woman was likely so they could show more boobs but it also means that the crew have no idea that she is in fact the cause of all the deaths and makes this into more of a slasher than Alien.
There is a secondary plot based around the banned substance Metrogria, and our second secret protagonist Lindo, who is trying to smuggle it onto the black market. This was a surprise to me, the fact that they included this in a 45 minute film shows that they cared about more than just a string of tentacle rape scenes.
Let’s talk about Einstein. This furry little ferret was a highlight of the film for me, he’s very cute, even if he sounds ridiculous, his noises clearly being made by a person pretending to be a ferret. He seems like a stand in for Jonesy, the cat from Alien, but really he’s a far more important character. Near the end of the film he leaps at and bites the Alien’s dick! This in turns makes it drop his owner Hikari, who was being gripped by the monster’s tentacles and allows her to shoot it with the Metrogria and blow it out the air-lock. Einstein is my hero.
For a hentai the women are drawn as relatively normal, if physically fit women, which I guess makes sense if they’re the crew of a spaceship. A little more variety in body shape would have been nice but to be honest it’s just nice that they don’t all have massive gravity defying breasts.
In some ways it’s a shame that the film is as short as it is. It does mean that there’s always something happening and the pacing is quick, but it’s a little too fast, even now writing, at this point a week or so later, many of the scenes blur into each other in my mind. It would have been good if we’d had more time to get to know the crew, so we could actually care when they get killed.
Flair, our main protagonist is frankly dull, because, she’s just a monster in a human form, so she doesn’t talk to the crew, or lure them to her in clever ways, they just kind of stumble into each other’s paths and fall under her spell. She’s frankly far more interesting in her monster form, if only because it’s something different to look at.
With regards to the rating system I used, shout out to the scene which I found hilarious the first time I saw it, where the captain and the doctor are getting it on and one of them produces what looks like a grenade, but hey, the captain certainly seems to enjoy it.
This is Emma, last survivor of the…wait, I already did that one…
Summerisle 