I had hopes for Alien Trespass, which lampoons paranoid 1950s science fiction thrillers. It gets many particulars right, including the stilted dialogue and the silly rubber monster. Alien Trespass clearly is made with great affection for those old flicks, like 1958's The Blob, (scenes from which are glimpsed), and story-wise Alien Trespass takes cues from 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still, with Eric McCormack in the part of the benign alien out to save humankind.
But despite their limitations, the old sci-fi films retain a potency, thanks in part to their very guilelessness. Of course, much of the old movies' charge comes from the Cold War anxieties that inform them - about nuclear annihilation, about alien invaders in the form of Marxist-Leninists. There's no anxious subtext in Alien Trespass, but not because we live in less troubled times. (Ha!) It's just that the filmmakers seem more interested in the old movies' silly surfaces than in what makes them truly interesting: their underlying dread. I wonder what Alien Trespass would be like if all its revivalist effort had been in the name of something other than glibness.