It’s the overall picture that makes a movie shitty or not. There is never just one thing that earns a flick a spot in the Shitty Movie Sundays Watchability Index. Sometimes, though, there are individual things worth pointing out. Take today’s movie, for instance. Alien Outlaw. It’s right there in the title. Alien Outlaw, singular. One alien who is an outlaw. But, this movie has three outlaw aliens. Why not title the movie Alien Outlaws? Surely the opening credits were made after filming had wrapped. The title wasn’t carved into stone. At some point writer/director Phil Smoot had to have noticed the title on the front page of the script versus the amount of aliens in the movie. Yet, there it is. Singular title, three aliens.
A little bit of regional cinema from 1985, Alien Outlaw was filmed in and around the area of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and features enough smiling and friendly folks to make someone from a big northern coastal city puke. Nary a bad word drips from any character’s mouth that can be taken as truly menacing or hostile, even when referring to the aliens. It’s a southern thing. Anyway…
Alien Outlaw follows Kari Anderson as Jesse Jamison, a scantily-clad roadshow sharpshooter, à la Annie Oakley, if Annie had favored frilly pseudo-Native American buckskin. Jesse is ready to hit the big time, but her team, manager Frank (Eric Berg), and roadie Wes (Stephen Winegard), are no good, lazy morons who only use the show to pick up women. 
It’s a good thing, then, that she’s ready to fire the both of them. Before that can happen, one of the most precious alien spaceships one will see in a b-movie lands in a rural river. Or it crashes, maybe. This flick didn’t have enough of a budget to make that clear.
Three aliens emerge, played by Berg, Stuart Wilson, and Dan Preston. The first person they come across is Wes, towing a trailer full of the guns Jesse uses in her show. They do away with Wes, loot the trailer, and go on a rampage through the countryside.
No lasers or any other sci-fi weapons in this flick. It was probably easier for all involved, and less of a strain on the budget, to have the aliens armed with prop pistols and rifles. Think on it hard enough, and it fits the backstory. These aliens are supposed to be outlaws. Perhaps they escaped from some space prison and these are the first weapons they’ve been able to find. Sure, whatever works.
Besides Jesse, other prominent characters include Hollywood cowboy Lash La Rue, who worked his tail off in the late 1940s and early ’50s, playing Wes’s uncle Alex; Paul Holman as Luger, a local farmer whose Falstaffian figure is the film’s comedic relief; and Gil Newsom as Peter, the flick’s resident straight man. It’s these three who support Jesse as she gears up and battles the aliens.
There aren’t any surprises in how the plot progresses. Nor is there an appreciable amount of blood and gore. It’s there, but is as light as the overall mood of the film. For such a serious subject as murderous aliens, it’s the effusive geniality of everything that sticks out. This is mostly due to the acting, which is all-around bad. La Rue plays his role as the grinning grandpa we wish we all had, while Anderson’s performance was straight out of a high school play. She’s bubbly, perky, and she enunciates. Boy, does she enunciate.
Alien Outlaw, despite all the violence and death, is about as wholesome as a movie like this can get. And that’s what makes it excruciating. It’s not a bad watch, as Smoot kept the pace nice and tight, but it sure is frustrating. Sometimes it felt as if the aliens were the only characters who knew they were in a sci-fi action thriller. At least there are a couple of explosions here and there, and lots of gunplay.
It moves well and it’s kitschy in a good way, but the curmudgeon inside of me would have preferred that Alien Outlaw err on the extreme side rather than the silly. It enters the Index at #247, taking the spot from Cards of Death.