None of the members of the Morris family really stand out by way of characterization, they’re of the cookie cutter variety and feature no outstanding traits that might’ve made them stand out in a crowd but the performances are indeed earnest and realistic enough for an audience to find something to grab onto.
Mind you, I still think it’s a silly notion because Riley seems to understand that these aliens have nothing but bad intentions for him & his family and he runs when threatened so he obviously understands that he’s gotta get away but the film wants us to believe that if he loses his camera while running for his life he’ll fall prey to his autism & shut down? His behavior in the film felt pretty normal to me so I just didn’t buy that explanation but it is different – I’ll give them that. In a very interesting conceit, the reason given for someone always having a camera running during the usual shenanigans found in films like this is that 11 year old Riley Morris ( Riley Polanski) is autistic and recording everything is his way of staying connected with the world, essentially it’s the only way he can functionally interact with everyone. In Alien Abduction, the Morris family is on a camping trip in the area where the lights have been sighted and soon after they arrive the trouble begins. In an attempt to echo similar scenes from The Blair Witch Project (1995), these scenes are filmed in black & white but all that did was remind me that they were done more effectively back then. The film begins and ends with some interviews with eyewitnesses who’ve witnessed the phenomenon first hand and “ Experts” who offer their opinions on what the mysterious lights might actually be. That legend being the appearance of strange lights that supposedly plague the Brown Mountain region of North Carolina. In an attempt to give it some dramatic heft, the producers claim that this flick is based on a true story but upon doing some research on the subject matter, it’s based more on an urban legend than anything else. And in all honesty, it had me on the hook for a short while but, as I expected, it ended up as just another failed attempt to milk something from a genre of film that should’ve been sent out to pasture years ago. And why was I in a good mood you ask? Because I had watched a film called Afflicted a few days earlier and it gave me hope that I might’ve been a bit hasty in dismissing all found footage films as 90 minute hackfests. I was in a particularly good mood before I sat down to watch Alien Abduction, another entry in the found footage canon of films that I abhor so mightily. A vacationing family encounters an alien threat in this thriller based on the real-life Brown Mountain Lights phenomenon in North Carolina.
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