[Part of the Science Fiction special in the Vienna Filmmuseum.]

Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America is a 50-minutes-movie by Craig Baldwin, narrated by Sean Kilkoyne.

Plot:
In the year 1000, aliens from the planet Quetzalcoatl fled to earth, where they started to live underground, bothering no-one. But in the 1950s, the aliens are disturbed by the Atomic Bombs testings – and they start to attack with doppelgangers, killer bees and all kinds of other conspiracies.

Tribulation 99 sounds great on paper – a fake documentary made completely with footage from other movies, building a grand unified conspiracy theory about aliens? That has got to be awesome, right? Wrong. Unfortunately this movie is too frantic for its own good.

I loved the idea of this film – that you edit stock footage and movie scenes together to get one batshit insane story. And the story is great and all the ideas Baldwin had are pretty awesome. Unfortunately, his editing is so frantic and Sean Kilkoyne talks so quickly (probably to keep up with the pace of the film material) that it gets really hard to keep up.

My brain was pretty much on overload for the entire time of the film, especially since the film is very America-centric and my grasp of US and Latin American politics of the 50s is rather flimsy anyway. But since I was that overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information, my brain tried to switch off all the time and I had to fight to not fall asleep.

Maybe I was really tired and had I been less so, I would have found it easier to take the entirety of the movie in. Maybe going to the cinema so much these past few weeks (and it really has been too much, I’m afraid. I’ve reached the point – again – where I’m longing for an evening at home) has fried my brains. But I’m generally pretty sure of my intelligence, so I’ll maintain that it’s the movies fault.

Anyway. It’s short, I guess it won’t hurt if you give it a try and see if the concept translates better into practice for you. But I wasn’t convinced.

Summarising: Maybe at half the speed.