The great surprise about Blair Witch was that co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez subsequently failed to capitalize on that success in any way. As there always is after a massive hit, their agents’ answer-phones must have been white hot with offers. Surprisingly, neither Myrick nor Sanchez took up any of these for several years. They oversaw the obligatory sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000), but even then it appeared that they had both done a George Lucas and retired from the limelight at the peak of their success – only, unlike George Lucas, neither of them put out any other films in any capacity. One was happy to consign Myrick and Sanchez as one-hit wonders up until 2006 when we suddenly heard from both again – albeit separately and no longer as a creative team. Daniel Myrick turned up as producer of a number of dvd-released horror films, including Rest Stop (2006), Sublime (2007), Otis (2008), Alien Raiders (2008) and The Presence (2009) and then returned to the director’s chair with Believers (2007), Solstice (2008) and The Objective (2008). Eduardo Sanchez simultaneous made a return to the director’s chair with Altered, which was released directly to dvd, and subsequently made the horror film Seventh Moon (2008) and co-directed ParaAbnormal (2009).

Happily, Altered confirms that The Blair Witch Project was no one-hit wonder. Altered is immediately a film that sits well above the rest of the crowd. It is a small masterpiece of conceptual economy – it features only a handful of actors and Sanchez has managed to contain the action within a single garage for 98% of the film’s running time. (One was immediately reminded of Albert Pyun’s rather dreadful Deceit (1989), a film about a possibly alien visitor that spent the whole of its running time contained within a warehouse). Sanchez immediately draws us into the film’s grip – plunging us into the midst of a situation that we can see within moments is rapidly spinning out of control. And once he gets to the central location, Sanchez keeps winding up the tensions and conflicts and putting unexpected twists on them. His ability to ride up and down a rollercoaster of tensions and twists throughout comes with a real expertise.

Sanchez has somewhat more of a budget to hand than he and Myrick did in The Blair Witch Project. Among other things, Sanchez is not at all unstinting when it comes to piling on a considerable level of gore, which leads to some of the film’s most outré scenes. There’s the genuinely out there moment when the others burst into a room to find the alien holding several feet of Brad William Henke’s intestines torn out of his stomach and threatening to sever them. Not to mention Adam Kaufman’s having the task of trying to pile them all back in once the alien is subdued. There’s an especially wild scene where Paul McCarthy-Boyington, whose body has been eaten away by the alien infection to the point that bones are showing through, is mind-controlled by the alien and made to keep attacking Adam Kaufman at the same time as his own body is smashing apart.

In some ways, it is not hard to imagine Altered as a sequel to the supposedly true-life alien abduction film Fire in the Sky (1993), which was about a group of rural characters out of their minds and paranoid in the aftermath of an abduction experience. Eduardo Sanchez has an excellent cast on hand who all do an exceptional job in creating their characters. Paul McCarthy-Boyington gives an excellent performance as the white trash hick with a hair-trigger temperament. Adam Kaufman is also fine in the leading role, providing a handsome certainty and level-headed balance amid the panicky chaos around him.

My main problem with Altered was its inconclusive ending. [PLOT SPOILERS]. Sanchez just fades out with Adam Kaufman having blown the house up, causing the alien mothership to depart, and then he and Catherine Mangan departing, hoping to evade the aliens. It is an ending that fails to explain why the aliens are coming after him. And it is especially a let down on the title and various references throughout, which leads us to expect that Kaufman has in some way been altered by his experience. In the failure to explain anything about this at all at the fadeout, Altered cannot help but disappoint, especially in that a good deal of the plot hangs on these issues.