Review:  ‘Extraterrestrial’ lands with a thud

A home invasion on your moviegoing sensibilities, the slickly schlocky “Extraterrestrial” takes the well-worn concepts of space-creature marauders and doomed party-hearty cabin weekenders and opts to fling the litany of horror and sci-fi clichés at you in the manner of monkeys well armed with dung.

The writers-directors who go by the Vicious Brothers (Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz) aren’t siblings, and they’re not entertainers either: Their default approach to human interaction is witless insult, and their go-to mode for scenes of alien-freakout mayhem isn’t to scare or creep you out but, instead, to bludgeon you with empty style.

Flickering, single-source lighting (flashlights, flares, UFO illumination) in forest-y darkness is all the visual oomph you get, and you get a lot. But it means nothing when — unlike one of the movie’s influences, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” — you aren’t made to care about anything or anyone.

Then there’s the endless abuse of the bone-rumbling “Inception” noise, the anal probe joke made manifest and a final act covered in layers of slime that feels like the filmmakers thought, “We forgot ‘Alien’!”

Joyless and repetitive, “Extraterrestrial” is like getting cornered by a madman. You keep wondering, why is this movie shouting at me?

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“Extraterrestrial”

MPAA rating: None

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Playing: Laemmle NoHo 7, North Hollywood.