Vivica A. Fox is no stranger to battling aliens (after having appeared in both Independence Day movies), but the trailer for her upcoming VOD release Crossbreed pits her against an altogether different extraterrestrial threat. While the film has shades of John Carpenter's cult classic Escape from New York, it also resembles the Luc Besson-produced 2012 thriller Lockout, which takes the premise for Carpenter's movie and sets it aboard a futuristic space station. The two films are so similar, in fact, that Carpenter successfully won a lawsuit against Lockout for plagiarizing his Kurt Russell vehicle back in 2016.

Crossbreed, fortunately, mixes things up far more that Besson's sci-fi thriller did. This time around, the objective isn't to rescue an important person from a prison in space, but a dangerous and partly alien biological weapon from a secret facility. And far from being a convict in a dystopian future, Fox plays a futuristic U.S. president named Ellen Henricksen, in what may or may not be an intentional nod to actor Lance Henricksen from Aliens (another '80s sci-fi thriller that Crossbreed takes inspiration from).

The movie is being distributed by Uncork'd Entertainment and costars Daniel Baldwin (John Carpenter's Vampires), Stink Fisher (Gotham), Devanny Pinn (Casey Anthony), and Vernon Wells (The Road Warrior), with Brandon Slagle (Escape from Ensenada) directing from a script he wrote with Robert Thompson (Aftermath). Check out the trailer below, followed by the official synopsis.


In the near future, the President of the United States of America hires a team of military veterans to retrieve an alien bio-weapon from a top-secret research facility orbiting the Earth. These highly trained mercenaries must infiltrate the space station and recover the deadly experimental alien cargo located onboard. All is going according to the plan until the cargo escapes.

It may not have anywhere near the budget of Independence Day: Resurgence, but by the look of it Crossbreed will give Fox a whole lot more to do than her throwaway role in the Independence Day sequel did. With its unapologetically B-movie premise and design, the film also has the feel of a low-budget throwback to pulpy sci-fi action movies from the 1980s and '90s, like Universal Soldier. Crossbreed specifically brings to mind 1995's Species, a horror-thriller that similarly revolved around scientists who create and lose control of an alien creature through genetic splicing.

Uncork'd Entertainment has begun to increasingly specialize in such low-budget genre fare of late, with releases like the apocalyptic thriller Prodigy. Those who've enjoyed their recent output may want to give Crossbreed a look when it arrives.

Crossbreed premieres February 5, 2019 on Video On Demand.