Over-rated creature feature

Rating: Null/10 (4 September 2006)

Definitely over-rated by my reckoning, then again, I'm not a big fan of creature features. They tend to age badly as time goes by because of technological improvements, what may look state-of-the-art at that time becomes prosaic in time to come.
As with all the other films in its ilk, the creature is the main focal point with no character development for the human co-stars at all. As a result, one cannot identify with any of the characters. In fact, I found some of the scenes extremely hilarious and burst out laughing, for example, I cracked up during the blood-testing scene when the creature was outed and the body it possessed started to transmogrify into the alien itself, the other humans tied with it were frantically trying to free themselves and the flame throwers were malfunctioning, a scene that could have taken place in a Charlie Chaplin/Marx Brothers feature were it not for the alien.
Somehow, I felt that the film could have developed and exploited the paranoia/distrust theme much more to build up the suspense and unpredictability.