Horror Movie Sneak Peek: The Substitute

After watching the horror flick The Substitute, I was pretty shocked to come online this morning and find rave reviews of the movie, because to be honest, I thought The Substitute sucked. In fact it sucked so bad, that after watching it I felt like I had been robbed of my time.

The Substitute has the same ring to it that 'The Faculty' does, only not as severe and serious as that alien invasion flick, nonetheless though, it has the same ring. Alien teacher is in the hizz-ouse!

Mini Plot-
 
In The Substitute an alien comes from her planet to learn about love in order to save her own species.

You see on her planet, when males and females mate, the female eats the male; sort of like a spider.

Oddly enough, instead of just realizing that perhaps her species needs to stop eating one another, she comes to earth to round up a group of humans in order to study them like guinea pigs back on her home planet.

The beginning of the movie looked pretty promising. You have some really cool visual effects in the sky, and from the hole in the sky out pops this odd shiny ball that comes slamming into a farm chicken.

Next the flick moves on to display an odd alien golden fluttering moth that slips into the mouth of an unknowing victim. The unknowing victim of course turns into the alien, and not too long after that this same chick is introduced as a substitute to a group of 6th graders with the name of Ulla.

Ulla is awful to the children, and makes their lives miserable, with a mean substitute, and an odd behavior about her the children of course begin to think something is wrong with her. After the first day of meeting Ulla, the children discover that there is no such person that exists.

Shortly afterward the class discovers that she is some sort of monster, or an alien. It's now up to them to try and find a way to stop her.

Are the children able to stop her? Or does she abduct them back to her home planet for testing?

My Feelings:
 
The movie is not in English, so on DVD you have the choice to watch it with subtitles, or with a voice over. The voice over was simply horrible, and played in as a huge suck factor. The children's voices were clearly adults trying to mimic a child's voice. The result ended up bad, with the kids sounding like cartoon characters. If you feel like you MUST watch this one, than watch it with the subtitles, I'm sure it will play out better.

Other scenes in the movie played out in a humorous way, and to be honest I don't know if that was the direction the movie was looking to go. It seemed that parts that were supposed to be scary, actually came off as funny. There is one scene in particular where Ulla eats a live chicken while the children watch. I found this to be hilarious the way she ate the chicken, and I think it was supposed to be scary.

The ending was probably the last and final deal killer in The Substitute. It plays out back at the farm where Ulla originally landed in the beginning of the movie. Here Ulla plans on abducting the children.

It plays out though in a confusing way, at one point the children hatched a plan to steal the schools bus to drive away from Ulla, yet in a matter of moments Ulla manages to stop them by freezing the bus, then suddenly we jump ahead and the kids are all on the same bus heading to the farm, completely forgetting about what happened just a few seconds (or hours) ago.

So we are handed a confusing bus scene, and then a very short crap-fest of an ending.

All in all, The Substitute is bad. Its got bad dialog, bad voice overs, and a bad plot.

The Substitute gets 1 star out of 5 in my opinion. It's one that I recommend you just skip all together.