Decoys delivers its true moment of greatness somewhere in the final 15 minutes, long after its frat-dude hero Luke (Corey Sevier) has discovered that Lilly (Stefanie von Pfetten), the bodacious blonde he's been crushing on, is actually a nymphomaniac alien murderess. Cornering her with a flamethrower, he reflects wistfully on the night they spent together under the stars. She'd pointed out the constellation Orion, none-too-subtly hinting that it was her neck of the woods. He hadn't gotten it. Now, his expression hardens, and then, just before he pulls the trigger, he says "belt of Orion, huh? How's about the belt of … O-Fryin!"

It's hard not to root for Decoys, the first teen-horror film ever set in New Brunswick. Early on, one of the characters even talks about ducking out of a house party to catch a David Cronenberg film festival, and while it would be happy to report that first-time writer-director Matthew Hastings is a Cronenberg-in-waiting, it would also be sadly, hopelessly inaccurate. His is a film devoid of anything even approximating depth, shamelessly recycling the killer-hottie conceit of Species, with, if such a thing is possible, less finesse. But what Decoys has in spades is good humour; not in the sly, Kevin Williamson manner, but rather a sort of bashful amusement at its own totally, irredeemably superfluous existence. (The actors, realizing they can't overcome their own dialogue, amusingly pitch their performances somewhere past the balcony, even in close-ups.)

So you take what you can get, which in this case is a smattering of great and gratuitous boob shots, a few jump-out scares that will rattle impressionable 12-year-olds, and at least one truly original scene, in which the sweetest of the extra-terrestrial interlopers sweetly explains her posse's world-domination plans to a virginal victim. Her rationale is that before they'd gotten down to it, he'd told her that he had always imagined his first time being with someone he trusted. When pressed, she even shows him the orifice where she hides her blood-freezing, prehensile tentacles. It's really quite sweet.

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