Is I Come in Peace considered a Christmas movie? It’s set at Christmas. That seems to be the only requisite for some films. I mean John McClane got invited to a Christmas party so that covers off Die Hard, but what about Dolph Lundgren as Detective Jack Caine caught up in a drug war in Houston over the holidays only to have the whole thing complicated by the arrival of a towering alien, Talec (Matthias Hues) who is drug dealer of a different kind.

This one is crap, but it is fun to watch Lundgren go through the paces of being a Hollywood version of a cop. To add to the buddy-comedy aspect of it, Caine is assigned an FBI agent to partner up with, Arwood Smith (Brian Benben).

Together the pair find themselves in some X-files territory when a stolen cache of heroin starts turning up in dead bodies. It seems Talec has come to Earth to harvest the brain fluid of a person who is doped on heroin, apparently it’s a rare drug where he comes from.

Talec is pursued by an intergalactic cop Azeck (Jay Bilas) who passes on a little information to the pair of unlikely partners. All of it races by pretty quickly, tearing through its ninety-minute runtime, and while there are some fun moments and some goofy dialogue, it just doesn’t work as well as it could have.

BUT! Jan Hammer did the soundtrack for this one. How did I not know that before this? Course it shouldn’t really be a surprise, I only saw the film once when it was broadcast as an afternoon movie, and didn’t really pay attention to it.

Lundgren does alright in the film, he seems to be a slightly better actor here than he was in Master of the Universe, but the film never seems to know if it wants to be a sci-fi, horror, buddy-cop, or action film. I realize that’s a fine balance to walk, but it just never seems able to decide, and never finds a real balance.

That being said, it does have some fun moments, and there are some big explosions to serve as distractions, but the female characters are treated horribly, and written worse. It’s too bad, because if this had been written a little stronger, had slightly better effects, and a cast that could walk the balance necessitated by the story, this could have been something, but honestly, I don’t think this one even achieved the level of cult status.

Perhaps it’s better best forgotten.