I watched "The X-Files" when I was in high school, so I have a fondness for alien abduction stories. When they're done right, that is. "The Visitors" had so much potential, but when I saw the overly elaborate and hard to navigate DVD menu options, I should have known that this wasn't going to be a smooth ride.

Here's the basic premise: there has been a rash of UFO sightings in the town of Desert City, CA. "The Visitors" starts out with a news crew out at the location of one of those sightings; then they get a little more than they bargained for. The scene changes to a small home out in the middle of nowhere (because aliens LOVE to go to the middle of the boonies to do whatever it is that they do), and a woman played by Kimberly Kane.

I've seen Kimberly Kane in a few movies now, including an X-Files spoof where she played a very convincing Dana Scully. But in this she was wasted. She had second billing, was only in a handful of scenes, had very little dialogue and spent more of her time doing non-sexual screaming than anything else.

Yet another cliché in this film involved young people being picked off in the woods. A group of presumably college age people were in the aforementioned woods, when one named Jessica (played by Kerri Sable who had top billing and only slightly more lines and screaming), telling stories around the campfire of when she was visited and terrorized as a child by beings she called The Visitors. I assumed that this was setting up some kind of plot point about her being some sort of alien magnet, but if that was the case, they never got around to the payoff.

Now the movie started off really well. Whoever was in charge of lighting was a genius, because the way light was diffused through mist and fog helped to amp up dramatic tension. Even in some of the sex scenes this light was still prevalent; people were getting laid, but they were still in danger.

My favorite of these scenes was in an abandoned train car near the campsite. Two of the young sacrificial lambs, played by Avena Lee and Eric Masterson, pair off, wander off alone, and frolic. It was in this train car that the light was used to its fullest effect; it was in that train car that, I thought, the best sex of the movie was shot.

It was the usual kissing followed by groping followed by oral followed by intercourse that we've become used to, but there was one bit before the main event started that stood out in my mind. Both partners fought with a condom wrapper and had a hell of a time getting the damn thing out. I've lost track of how many times that's happened to me! It was that little bit a realism that I thought really added a layer to this film.

And then it all fell apart. It was as if the director remembered that he was making a porno, so he had sex scene after sex scene practically piled together like some badly planned out orgy. The first two sex acts were separated by a few scenes and some plot development.

Not only was the sex rapid fire, so were the abductions, as if the director then remembered that he was making an alien abduction movie and he had to get in his quota of screaming people being taken away. And there was a lot of screaming to the point that it got painful to hear.

Then there was the only post-abduction scene they showed with one of the victims; Kimberly Kane being subjected to wannabe hentai tentacle alien sex by what looked like a vine attached to a fucking machine with a glowing orb at the end. So you have three genres now, all duking it out for some kind of supremacy in this mishmash of a movie: porn, sci-fi, and hentai. None of them got the upper hand.

But, you may be asking, what happened to the victims? Who were the aliens, and what did they want? I can't tell you. Not because I don't want to spoil the end of the film, but because it's never revealed. All you know is that the entire town's population vanished overnight. Hell, outside of the DVD menu animation, you never even get a sense of what the aliens looked like! The cliched and contrived "dream ending" would have been preferable to this.

This had so much potential, but unfortunately, it just lost track of itself.

There was one good sex scene and some awesome lighting, but other than that, this was pretty dull.