Decoys 2: Alien Seduction
½*/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Corey Sevier, Tobin Bell, Dina Meyer, Kim Poirier
screenplay by Miguel Tejada-Flores
directed by Jeffry Lando
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Sometimes a symptomatic reading is the only thing keeping a critic from hurling himself out a window in the contemplation of drivel. Frustrating when it's not simply banal (and often both at once), Decoys 2: Alien Seduction (promotional title: Decoys: The Second Seduction) is one of those times. As with the first Decoys, it's loaded with revelations about the Canadian fear of sex and the national stereotype of the snivelling, eternally-discouraged male. Good thing, too, because it's almost completely intolerable in every other particular. I defy even the most devoted B-fancier to sit through its tiresome sophomore humour and lame attempts to get the girls' kits off. That it embodies Canuck cynicism towards male-female relationships is pretty much its only point of interest.
To distract myself from the film's general awfulness, I found myself taking stock of its Canuck male archetypes as delineated by Robert Fothergill in his article "Coward, Bully or Clown." The nice-guy male, represented by Sam Compton (Tyler Johnston), is an ineffectual college student surrounded by manipulative jerks who run a contest to see how many girls they can screw–a coward amongst bullies, in other words. As it turns out, the outward bullies are largely cowards themselves: Nobody is seen actually having sex, unless it's with one of the hottie alien decoys infiltrating the ranks of these virginal palookas and impregnating them with larvae. The Decoys, meanwhile, embody the flipside of the coin, as they are ultra-competent, completely aware of their mission, and utterly ruthless in their exploitation of the weakness of the menfolk they've targeted for fertilization.
Although the film follows through on the coward/bully equation, it complicates the counterpoint of Fothergill's thesis: the notion of women as "in touch with their feelings," possessing "a greater authenticity" and "attributed a greater and more integrated consciousness that doesn't calculate before it speaks." Though this is certainly true of Stephanie Baxter (Kailin See), the one non-Decoy college-age girl with a narrative function, the Decoys themselves represent something else altogether, i.e., the taunting unattainability of sexual release. Not only do they lure their quarry into the cold to nab them, but they also bring their prey to the brink of sexual release in order to disappoint them in the worst possible way. So there's a divergent sense of blame here. On the one hand, the boys' contest is seen as the worst sort of male brutishness, yet on the other, the Decoys are funbusters and castrating bitches worthy of destruction.
Decoys 2 isn't interested in exploring this paradox. Mostly, we're thrown against two utterly unattractive alternatives–loser-jerk boys or killer-alien girls–and told to sink or swim. And while a middle path is half-heartedly forged with couple-bound Sam and Stephanie, it's not enough to relieve the almost total confusion of the rest of the movie. We're condemned to frustration, since it's impossible to get a bead on what the filmmakers want to leave us with: Like its predecessor, the sequel is coitus interruptus going on until infinity. Though I don't demand genius from a bounce-and-jiggle B-horror movie, I do expect a modicum of pleasure. With a non-thesis and a constant series of narrative disappointments, Decoys 2 doesn't know how to live up to its already-low level of aspiration.
Thus Corey Sevier, returning from the previous film as now-traumatized senior Luke Callahan, is allowed to stew in his own paranoid juices for too long without much resolution; the boys have way too many scenes of striking out and being humiliated; Dina Meyer's psychiatrist is held in suspicion while Tobin Bell's professor is held in reverence; and the film belabours its untenable point that monogamy is better than casual sex with as much clumsiness as possible. It's a total write-off, unpleasurable as ever despite accidentally twisting the Canadian erotic consciousness in new patterns. One of these days, Bob Clark is going to have to give seminars on how to make a raunchy movie that people might actually enjoy–almost nobody else in the country gets it. In the meantime, I put Decoys 2 through the national psyche in order to salvage my own, until I blissfully pass onto other things.
THE DVD
As is typical, Sony's DVD is better than the movie deserves. The 1.86:1, 16×9-enhanced image looks very good indeed: lustrous in its rendering of the film's haphazard colour scheme, sharp in its presentation of every maladroit compositional detail. It's fine work in the service something not good at all. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is also better than anticipated, perhaps a little less complicated in the surround department but frighteningly sharp and well-articulated for the incidental-effect cues. The sole extra is a batch of trailers for The Grudge 2, Night Skies, Walking Tall: The Payback, Decoys, Hostel, Bottom's Up, and Population 436, with the first three cuing up on startup.
94 minutes; R; 1.86:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French Dolby Surround, Portuguese DD 5.1, Japanese DD 5.1; CC; English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, Thai subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Sony
