A review of Femalien: Cosmic Crush (2020) (2024)

Apologies in advance, but I have a lot of thoughts on this and want to get them down. If you're wondering: Yes, I feel pretty weird about it, heh.

Full Moon hasn't done an original softcore sci-fi movie in the better part of 20 years, so it was a huge surprise when they announced back in 2019 that they were making a new Femalien movie. Even more odd was that it was part of Charles Band's high-profile "Deadly Ten" project, so fans could watch the movie being shot back in November of 2019 on the Deadly Ten site. The final day of shooting was 26 November 2019, and the movie was originally slated to be released in early 2020. We all know how any plans made for this year have gone, though, right? So it's finally hitting Full Moon's streaming service in two "episodes," with the first dropping today and the second next Friday. So how does Cosmic Crush stack up to the productions from the heyday of Surrender Cinema?

Overall, so far shockingly well. Like its fellow Deadly Ten movies, Cosmic Crush was shot in five days. Unlike at least a couple of them, it feels much less like it. There are certainly tells--the occasional shot that's slightly out of focus, or some awkward framing/blocking--but from a technical perspective this is a big step up from Blade: The Iron Cross. It's wild how long this one spent in post-production, and the "episode" format seems 100% conjured up to allow more time to finish the movie. Which is fine given how solid the first "episode" is, and there's a TON of vfx work. Most of it looks decent, but some of the stuff that interacts directly with actors is unsurprisingly not great. The CG tentacles get a lot more freedom of movement, but the disconnect between them and the charmingly practical on-set tentacles is kind of distracting.

Speaking of which, "charming" is one of the main adjectives that comes to mind after watching the first half of this movie. Writer/director Lindsey Schmitz fully embraces the camp possibilities of the franchise, and the impressive sets and adorable miniature work really help set the tone. The writing is very "Full Moon," which is to be expected. Lots of innuendo and the stray inexplicable dad joke (there's a "love the one you're with" gag that must have been pitched squarely at--or maybe even suggested by--Band himself), but there are also some clever bits and the whole thing is just self-aware enough without becoming smarmy. The cast does well with what they've got to work with, but Lilly Fairfield is especially fun and seems like she's having a blast. (Also great to see Rachel Grubb in a small part that allows indie genre nerds to connect the Femalien franchise to the Mihmiverse in one degree!)

Narratively, this is a huge improvement on the original Femalien movies, which were literally just a series of 8-10 minute sex scenes strung together with the barest implication of a storyline. Mostly just "Let's go to this place," then a very long sex scene, repeated until the whole thing hit 90 minutes. Schmitz has fun fleshing out the world only vaguely hinted at in those movies, giving us a lot more information on the Alterians and playing with their shape-shifting abilities in ways both fun and nonsensical--no clue why one of the aliens suddenly turns into another cast member for a "trying to put on clothes" montage, for example. There is a fair amount of sex and nudity here, but the scenes are much shorter and there's nothing as graphic as the first Femalien. The sex and the story feel much more organically related here, even if it's obviously the former that "sells tickets" to these things.

All that said, though, "Episode One" is transparently just the first half of the movie, so I'm not going to leave a rating yet. Hopefully it doesn't take a nosedive in the second half, but so far this is a surprisingly solid and fun return to the sci-fi softcore style for Full Moon and arguably even better than the stuff they were making back when Surrender Cinema was at its most popular.