Martin (Brian Morvant) is a PTSD veteran whose dog was just killed. He lives in a cabin by the lake and informs his brother not to come up, which means his psychologist/counselor brother Ed (Dean Cates) and alcoholic sister Lyla (Lauren Ashley Carter) drive up to help the "Maine-iac." They find Martin talking wildly wielding a gun babbling about a killing soldier called a "pod." He claims he was part of an army experiment being fed pills etc. and that he had seen the pod. He has one trapped in the basement. Martin has shaved portions of his head and has even removed the "tracking device" in his tooth using a pliers. Ed believes Martin has had a relapse and needs help. Lyla buys into the far fetched tale.

The acting on this film was solid. Brian Morvant did a crazy person that drove me crazy. Likewise Dean Cates and Lauren Ashley Carter seemed to have nailed their roles in this low budget film. The movie camera angle was mostly a first person angle giving the production a hand held camera feel, but without the jerking camera. The film was a bit short (76 minutes) and the explanation didn't come until the end...except it didn't give closure.

Good suspense horror too.

Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity.

Pod is proof that anyone can make a movie. It's also proof that Netflix has no set standard for what content they will stream.

With a total of five credited characters this low budget indie film failed catastrophically. About a psychotic ex-army man who has captured a "pod", the movie looks like something dug up out of the discarded ideas of X-Files. I half way expected to see David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

Martin (Brian Morvant) did his best Brad Pitt 12 Monkeys impression to convince the audience he was really crazy. Me, personally, I can only listen to so much rambling and incoherent speech for so long before I start to go crazy myself.

We have to endure a good chunk of the movie with Martin rambling and his brother and sister trying to convince him to leave his home in the woods. The bulk of it is pure cacophony as it's difficult to make out anything any of them is saying. Then to add to the headache inducing noise was a terrible musical score. The music was horribly loud and misplaced. I don't need "scary" music when someone is simply driving from one place to the next. I don't need more overbearingly loud stringed instruments when people are talking. They tried to use the music to set the mood which would've been OK if the mood was annoying.

To further the chaos the cameraman would zoom in and out and shake the camera to simulate fear, angst and panic. It looked more like someone following a police officer on foot in an episode of COPS. As if they didn't know if they wanted to be a traditional film or a POV film.

Besides the picturesque views of the lake and other shots there was nothing satisfactory from this movie. It wasn't scary, it wasn't unique, it wasn't thrilling, it wasn't even comedic in its failure.

I'll end my review with this one quote to give you an idea of the "quality" of this movie. Ed (Dean Cates) says, "If dad saw this place he'd be spinning in his grave." Really!?

Reading a old issue of UK film magazine Empire,I saw Kim Newman's give a good review for this Sci-Fi Horror. Curious about seeing it,the only thing I could find was a overpriced DVD.

Years later:

Checking every so often for it,I finally found the flick online, only for the hard drive it was stored on to crash later that night! Signing up for 30 free days of Shudder,I was surprised to see the flick pop up for streaming, leading to me entering the pod.

View on the film:

At odds with each other from the moment they set off, Lauren Ashley Carter and Dean Cates give very good performances as brother and sister Lyla and Ed, whose constant family bickering is casually delivered by the duo, which keeps the family drama in the middle of a close encounter grounded. Contrasting Carter and Cates, Larry Fessenden and Brian Morvant bring welcomed sides of paranoid weirdness as Martin and Smith.

Keeping the majority of the flick confined to one location, writer/director Mickey Keating & cinematographer Mac Fisken make the low budget all too visible via dimly lighting everything, which instead of building tension,just makes it difficult to see what is going on.

Unlike in his directing style, the screenplay by Keating neatly springs tension from the arguments between family members Ed,Martin and Lyla's over if Martin's claims of a alien in the house are real, or if he's just imagining them, leading to a wonderfully gloomy twist ending, as the pod opens up.