If Seinfeld is the show about nothing, Altered is the movie about nothing. These four friends were abducted by aliens fifteen years earlier, so these geniuses decide to get revenge by kidnapping one of the aliens. They accomplish their goal, but once they do, they don't know what to do with it and lock it in the garage. After that it becomes a slasher film where nothing significant really happens. Honestly, they kidnapped this thing and then don't know what to do with it, so then what's the point? To make things worse, we never see the abduction or find out what exactly happened to them up there. It's just an extremely dark and confusing hunting scene, which believe it or not features a harpoon, and then there is nothing else. As for the acting it is just as inconsistent as the story! One minute their going crazy, trying to kill each other and the next they're crying about old times, it's ridiculous! James Gammon is the only name in this thing, playing the sheriff in one of his last roles. The guys are so intimidated by the sheriff and when we finally see him, we find out he's this little eighty year old guy, are you kidding me? This movie is a complete disaster and an utter waste of time. Being that it's from the writer/director of The Blair Witch Project, I was expecting something as groundbreaking as that was, unfortunately, Altered isn't it and there is a good reason why you've probably never heard of it.

Some spoilers here ************************************************************* Four friends in the deep south (or so I guess by their accents), face their fears and the past that haunts them. The result is a movie that has much more depth and suspense than the average straight to DVD movie. Brothers Duke (Brad William Henke), Cody (Paul McCarthy Boyington), and Otis (Michael C. Williams) accomplish what they thought they would never be able to do. They trap one of the aliens that abducted them 15 years earlier and killed their brother. The problem that comes next is what to do next. A quick decision by Duke sends them towards their one time childhood friend Wyatt (Adam Kaufman) who was also with them during the abduction years earlier. More so, he is the only one that "they" seemed most interested in. However, Wyatt upon learning of their capture wants nothing to do with the brothers or their capture. A paranoid who lives in a remote home surrounded by flood lights and with doors that can be locked various times, he himself has dealt with the abduction in his own way. Bringing them back to him is the last thing that he or his girlfriend Hope (Catherine Mangan) want. Even if they were the reason for the death of his best friend, Wyatt has done his best to move on. Wyatt though becomes the center of the story as we discover that the aliens do have a certain desire for him even though we never fully know why that it is. He received an implant and somehow the ability to sense them. During the final confrontation with the alien that Duke and his brothers captured, it appears that Wyatt himself has mental powers which he uses to cripple the alien. Again we find no explanation though we can guess that the past abduction gave him powers which he used. The conflict that fills Altered is not so much the alien vs man story that we are used to after years of sci movies. What makes Altered interesting is the relationship between four friends and how they dealt with an experience that only brought shame and ridicule. Much of Altered consists of conversations about the past and what was done and what should have been done. This is especially so between Wyatt and Cody where the latter especially feels remorse because of the belief that his father blamed him for the death of his brother. Hope herself also constantly bemoans any attempt to bring the past back into the present and struggles to understand why such aliens would show such interest in Wyatt in the first place. The most important lines come at the very end of the movie. As Hope and Wyatt flee, she asks how safe they are now that they killed perhaps a dozen of their kind. Wyatt can only say that they will have to wait and see. A soild straight to dvd film well worth checking out