Prolific filmmaker Fred Olen Ray is a Shitty Movie Sundays All-Star. He’s on the list for his lifetime achievement in the art of b-movies. Sometimes pumping out half a dozen shitty movies in a year, Ray’s career is one worthy of study for the mutant connoisseur. But, had his career consisted of just this one movie, he would still have a place in this amateur reviewer’s heart.
Alienator, from 1990 (screenplay by Paul Garson), sounds just like what it is: an alien who is a terminator. The titular character is about all the relation this flick has to James Cameron’s classic, though. There is no time travel, there is no apocalyptic artificial intelligence, and there is no unborn savior of the future. What there is, is a large, unstoppable space bounty hunter, played by bodybuilder Teagan Clive, in a hair metal-perfect costume.
The Alienator is a hunter, sent by the Commander (Jan-Michael Vincent) to track down and kill Kol (Ross Hagen), an escaped prisoner who was about to be executed. All this happens out in space, but this flick doesn’t take place in the future. In the lore of Alienator, there is a galactic civilization of human beings out there, that we here on Earth are unaware of. They look just like us, they talk just like us, and, if P.J. Soles, who plays an alien administrator, is any indication, they used the same amount of ozone layer-killing hairspray that we did back in the day.
Kol flees to earth, and his model kit spaceship crashes in rural California. He wanders onto a road and is hit by an RV containing this flick’s supporting cast: Rick, Orrie, Caroline, and Benny (Richard Wiley, Dyanna Ortelli, Dawn Wildsmith, and Jesse Dabson). Kol warns them of the Alienator’s approach, but they are skeptical until she shows up and starts firing laser beams everywhere. The cast is rounded out by John Phillip Law as Ward Armstrong, a local game warden; Leo Gordon as retired Colonel Coburn, who is living out his days in an isolated cabin/armory; and Hoke Howell and Fox Harris as a pair of hillbilly poachers who are most useful as laser fodder.
Being a low budget flick, there isn’t a whole lot going on in the plot, or in the set pieces. Most of the movie is spent in the woods of Topanga Canyon, but Ray did manage to use what he had to effect. 
This is, at its most basic, a chase movie, but one with the kind of pace of a slasher flick. The characters flee danger, which pursues them at a leisurely walking pace, confrontation, rinse, repeat. What separates this from myriad other dogs that aren’t worth watching is the Alienator itself, and Ross Hagen.
Hagen was well past his prime when Alienator was released, but he was still a reliable professional no matter how cheesy the movie. Professionalism is all a filmmaker can expect from old names looking for a late career payday, but something about this flick must have appealed to Hagen. He gave it all he had. There isn’t a line delivery in the movie that he didn’t spew forth with measured intent and intimidation. The combination of makeup, costume, and hair just drips with menace. Hagen makes it clear that he is not the kind of fugitive one should be rooting for.
There are no deeper meanings to look for in Alienator. It’s the kind of movie that sounds like it was a title before it was ever a screenplay. Nor is Ray a genius filmmaker. Yet, it’s a howler. Between Hagen’s overacting, Clive’s lack of acting, and the outrageous model and costume work, Alienator turns out to be one hell of a shitty movie watch. Yes, the space stuff with Jan-Michael Vincent and P.J. Soles could be excised, but no shitty movie is perfect. The total package of substandard cinema, from beginning to end, was joyful. When Hagen pronounced ‘escape’ as ‘exscape’ I got chills. When Ray used some very obvious forced perspective for the spaceship crash, I was ecstatic. When Clive would sometimes shoot her laser gun and no beams came out, I was giddy. Alienator is shitty gold, landing at #89, displacing The Killers Edge. Check it out.