I am warning you now, the OVA I'm about to review is completely NSFW. I have not included any screencaps or described anything explicit in detail because of this fact. However, I wouldn't recommend viewing this in public.
You have been warned.
This is a 1997 hentai ripoff of Alien with a couple of interesting tweaks. I don't normally watch hentai, but this is an animated Alien ripoff, so I felt compelled to give it a shot. I was cautious when thinking about viewing this; I thought it would be gory and really ultra- super- hardcore.
I was, thankfully, wrong.
Don't get me wrong, Alien from the Darkness isn't spectacular. It's average at best. But the deaths weren't very gory at all and the "action" scenes weren't guro like I expected.
The story follows a space crew made up entirely of women, many of them being lesbians (no surprise there) who board a disaster-stricken space vessel with only one survivor.
Please don't stop reading, it's not like Roots Search at all, I promise.
Anyhow, one by one the crew is killed by the survivor who turns out to be a parasitic alien disguised as a woman. The alien has to lay eggs inside a host to reproduce, but usually the host dies after a few hours.
You can probably tell where this is going, so I won't go into much detail.
There's also a fairly intriguing subplot involving an illegal chemical weapon that ends up being the only thing that can kill the alien. One of the crew members kills it and is the last suvivor. Or is she? At the very end her sister somehow comes back to life, and it is heavily insinuated that she has become a parasite herself.
The story is rudimentary sci-fi horror and an Alien rip-off to boot, but surprisingly it wasn't terrible or even bad. The animation is quite good and the interior lighting in the second half is fairly creepy. The alien monster's design is okay if a bit too typical, as well as the characters. Same goes for the space vessels, though I like that one of them is red instead of the usual grey.
Most of the characters are underdeveloped and unchanging but still have basic personalities that differ from one another; sometimes drastically.
I also like that the cat from Alien has been replaced with a ferret in this ripoff. It's a rather tongue-in-cheek move, like the producers knew this was derivative.
The "action" itself is actually pretty bland (for what it is and compared to other titles). A lot of it is actually offscreen, maybe even half of it. If all of it were offscreen, this would merely be an ecchi title.
I like that unlike other hentai titles, they don't try to make rape okay by having the victim admit it "feels good." Even then, all of the human-on-human action is consensual, as I mentioned earlier that some of the crew is comprised of lesbians.
Overall I'd say Alien from the Darkness is okay for what it is but not an absolute must-watch unless you're an Alien ripoff fan like I am. It doesn't really work as a hentai because of all the off-screen action, but I personally prefer it that way. If you like Alien tributes and don't mind adult content, you might give it a watch.
