Iron Invader (2011)

Iron Invader (2011)

Directed by: Paul Ziller

Starring: Kavan Smith, Colby Johannson, Nicole de Boer

I kinda want to be one of the guys who pounds out SyFy original movie scripts. It would be such a fulfilling job, just get out all the stupid ideas about sharks fighting robots and one-dimensional alcoholic middle-aged single mothers who get back together with their high school sweethearts. Are… those not the same kind of bad ideas you have? Uh… this is awkward…

Two guys who are remodeling a bed and breakfast (this is never dealt with again, don’t ask me why this is the most defining trait I remember about the protagonists) find a crashed Russian satellite covered in weird green stuff. They sell it to a junkyard where the elderly owner has been pointlessly creating a gigantic horrible robot monster statue. The green stuff gets on the statue, which of course brings it to life and it starts killing people. Turns out it’s some sort of space bacteria that kills people it touches and also it controls metal to walk around as a giant robot monster thing for no reason. They finally defeat it by pouring alcohol on the stuff, the solution I was shouting drunkenly at the screen as soon as they found out it was bacteria. To be fair, I often shout “POUR BOOZE ON IT” in many situations, only some of which are in an effort to help movie characters.

Time for a personal anecdote. Back in high school, I used to listen to Coast to Coast, a radio show with Art Bell where he talks to insane people late at night about aliens and psychics and whatever other stupid shit they felt like talking about. The one story that has always stuck with me over the years was one caller who was deathly afraid of what he called “Mir Mold.” The story is this: on the Russian space station Mir, they did tests on various kinds of mold to see what happened to it in zero gravity, because that’s the kind of boring space science everybody does. When Mir crashed into the ocean, this guy was convinced that this Mir Mold would come to life and destroy the world, not just like by infecting people or anything, but by literally coming to life as a big green monster that ate people. So that’s what Iron Invader is for me. Mir Mold: DER FILM.