DVD review: Psychon Invaders (Video 2006)

First I´d like to thank Jeff Leroy for sending me a copy of Psychon Invaders as I´ve had problems locating a copy of the japanese DVD release.
Sarah McKinnis (Victoria De Mare), a software engineer at a weapons factory, is accidentally shot in the head by a new type of riot control pistol. From that moment, her life becomes a nightmare. People appear to her as hideous aliens. She is the only one that can see these creatures. She tries to warn her normal looking supervisor, Ed Devon (Vinnie Bilancio), but the evil space creatures massacre everyone at her laboratory. Sarah escapes with the riot control pistol. The aliens kill her sister in retaliation. She wages a lone war against the extra-terrestrial menace, shooting and killing the army of hideous, green skinned monsters from space. But, how can one woman stop this hidden invasion from the stars? Psychon Invaders is written and directed by Jeff Leroy and it´s a micro-budget feature flick which means for instance that the riot control pistol that Sarah escapes with looks like a toygun, that the guns used by various characters in the flick look like toys. The acting is over the top, the camerawork and editing is pretty decent. There´s some gore but it´s mostly when aliens get shot, get their heads crushed or spliced open with a machete. There is a lot of computer rendered fx in this, used for the alien spaceships and I´ll say that it looks pretty bad if not very bad. As usual with Jeff Leroy flicks we get to see things get blown up, he uses miniature buidlings and matchbox cars (in my opnion it really cool that he opts to use models instead of CGI). The aliens make-up fx design is simple but pretty cool.There is some topless nudity, Psychon Invaders begins with a naked girl wrapped in writhing tentacles and then there are another scene later on. We get two women (one of which is Victoria De Mare) around in their underwear in prolonged scenes but hey I ain´t complaining.
This review is based upon the Japanese region 2 DVD release from Amsell Entertainment.
Rating: 3½ out of 7. I enjoyed this. The plot, obviously inspired by John Carpenter´s They Live, is pretty cool. After the beginning I kinda hoped for more tentacle action but sadly the filmmakers didn´t go that way. The overuse of cartoonish CGI is kinda sad, I wish Jeff Leroy would have used models or something similar instead of it.

/JL