It Came from Over Yonder (2008) - By Josh Samford

Film Reviews: It Came from Over Yonder (2008) - By Josh Samford
Posted on Tuesday, December 02, 2008 @ 16:48:57 Mountain Standard Time by Duane

Where does one begin with It Came From Over Yonder. Well, there are many ways you can view the film really. You can take it at face value and consider it as much a piece of cow flop as the fake pieces of excrement that fly around the film the entire duration - or you can simply sit back, separate your brain and any bit of analytical intelligence from what your retinas absorb and be part of one of the most deranged and looney indie films you'll probably ever see. Director/Writer Hardric Demsley and his loyal cast and crew, by all appearances, set out to make a film that would make Ed Wood and Phil Tucker quake in their boots with excitement and/or horror. However, this isn't some run of the mill "evoking the 50's era sci-fi feel by hamming it up and decolorizing the video", no It Came From Over Yonder is a true blood, bonafide new era of amateur b-movie craftsmanship. With so many fart and poop jokes, so much hammy and over the top acting, that you really can't help but go a little mad after watching.

There aren't a whole lot of clues that the filmmakers actually know better than what they're trying to pull on the audience, but the blatantly terribly special FX and the sometimes decent use of green screen gives the impression that those involved probably could make something a little more elaborate and better looking - but that isn't the intention. The intention is to have as many crass, rude and obnoxious jokes crammed into as goofy and awful a scifi film as could possibly be made. This sounds like I'm being critical of the film, but really, it's simply the direction it seems to take. Imagine Robot Monster except in modern times with a dose of Austin Powers fecal oriented comedic wit, only the comedy comes from the fact that the lines are so bad that they simply can't be funny and so that makes them funny. Confused? Well that's just the start of things, and before It Came From Over Yonder is done with you, you'll simply be a puddle of gelatinous goo in comparison to what you once were.

The premise for It Came From Over Yonder is not quite unlike many scifi films. You've got the farmer who awakens to find crap circles in the middle of his field and sets out to... what? Yes, that's right, not one of my many frequent grammar oriented mistakes. We're talking about crap circles. Circles of cow flop lying in the center of Joe the farmer's field. So Joe does what any farmer would do when forced into such a situation, he grabs up a dick. A private dick that is (this joke will be repeated in the film roughly three or four times!). With the detective on the case for a good hundred dollars, he searches out a Poopologist, one who studies fecal matter - then a UFO specialist who believes the cow paddies are from another dimension and finally a psychic who also feels she can help. With the entire team assembled, they will stop at nothing to find out just what has brought about this cow flop encounter of the third kind!

The jokes that do work in the film are usually pretty immature, and if you haven't got it by this point that you shouldn't expect Dennis Miller or Kelsey Grammar-esque humor on board this locamotive you're never going to get it, but occasionally a joke or two do slip through that aren't so beaten into the ground that one could actually find themselves guffawing. However, the jokes that ARE beaten within an inch of their lives and repeated over and over again, did for me eventually work simply because they became anti-jokes after a little bit. How many times can the leading man make the same "Well, I'm [insert possibly sexually expressive word such as 'hard']... did I say [previous word], I meant... happy" error and correction joke. Most of these jokes usually involve the words poop, poo or dookie though. Such as "This is really starting to get DOOKIE... wait, did I say dookie? I meant spooky!". This sort of stuff gets thrown around a lot, but in the end it finally starts to work because you just have to sit back and go "wow, they went ahead with that one" and you have to respect the brass it takes to go as far out there as the film does.

I won't lie and say that It Came From Over Yonder is a good film, the back of the DVD tells you it most assuredly is not - but it is an entertaining and bizarre beast of nature. I can definitely say that in my years of reviewing independent horrors and often times purposefully bad ones - never have I run into a film quite like It Came From Over Yonder. What that means is entirely debatable, but I'm glad I did get to see it and have to give the filmmakers credit for going all out even though some people probably won't be able to wrap their heads around a flick like this - they all committed to it and created a pretty original and often times disturbing (all the way to the last paragraph and I didn't even mention the mass quantities of fecal looking substances eaten by various cast members, including the very hot Nicole Cates) little b-movie venture. Check out more information as well as ordering details from their site over at It Came From Over Yonder.com.