Incident at Raven's Gate

This was a movie that could have been good but it didn't quite make enough sense. But as bad as Incident at Raven's Gate was, it was never dull, and it was always weird...

The plot unfolds something like this: Ex-con Eddie is helping on his brother's hydroponic farm when things start to get weird. Birds drop from the sky, people are acting strangely, and water is disappearing. In the midst of all this, Eddie and his sister-in-law are pursuing a romance. Will they discover what's at the root of all this chaos, or will they succumb to it like their unfortunate neighbors...

The sub-plots though: The movie skips around between strange subplots and most of them are never resolved. For instance, the brother's hydroponic farm's water keeps disappearing, but the reason for the disappearance is never revealed. (Though it's almost implied that aliens are responsible.)

Was it aliens?: Aside from the implications in the movie title, we couldn't tell for sure if the movie was in fact about alien encounters. If there were aliens, they weren't very consistent (some water was worth taking, some was not) and they weren't terribly interested in showing themselves. And although the main evidence that alien encounters were taking place was the towns people acting oddly, it was impossible to tell if they were being made to behave strangely by alien presence, or if they were always strange people. However, the government seemed to know what was going on! They show up during the aftermath (if those were actually supposed to be government officials that is) and it seems like their presence was supposed to indicate there were actually aliens involved.

Reasons to watch: It doesn't fail to deliver on the strange-twist front, there's some nicely gruesome moments, and it's pretty fun to yell at this one!

You might recognize: Vincent Gil (Body Melt, Mad Max).

What we learned: If you want to make a movie about aliens visiting earth, you should probably explicitly mention (or show) aliens a few times...