Newlyweds Abby and Calvin are joined in a family cabin by Abby’s younger sister Rebecca. They met here to spread the ashes of their late mother into the lake near the cabin. The cabin brings Rebecca bad memories and she walks into the woods to find some solitude. Abby follows, as she is concerned for Rebecca’s safety, and together they discover a strange meadow with what seems to be some sort of crash site. They rummage through the debris and find a mysterious black ball, which Abby, in spite of Rebecca’s feeble protests, takes home, but not before noticing a small cut in her palm after lifting the ball from the ground.

Calvin, Abby’s husband, explores ‘the device’ and finds it to have strange, gravity-defying properties. He declares that (as it was recovered from a crash site) it is most likely a black box of a crashed plane (it’s a ball, stupid !) and proposes to explore it further in a hope to get a reward from whoever the plane belongs to. While handling the ball, Calvin gets a little cut in his palm, as got Abby previously. He takes the ball to the cellar for further examination.

It does not take long and things start to go wrong. While Abby experiences strange nightmares featuring a sinister, if rather man-in-a-rubber-suit-like looking, alien being, Calvin starts to spend unhealthy amount of time in the cellar becoming increasingly obsessed with ‘the device’. Abby’s nightmares become progressively worse, until she, suspecting that the ball has to do something with it, asks Calvin to dispose of it, which he reluctantly agrees to do, but secretly keeps it anyway.

Abby goes to see a doctor about her nightmares and finds out that she is pregnant. However, her and Calvin’s joy proves to be short-lived, when Calvin learns (apparently the ball ‘tells’ him) that the baby Abby expects isn’t his. Appalled Abby discovers that Calvin lied to her and ‘the device’ is still in the house. She decides to take things into her own hands, drives the ball ashore and throws it into the sea.

In the intervening time, Abby learns from a doctor who aborted Rebecca’s baby some years earlier, that Rebecca claimed to be abducted and impregnated by aliens, the claim he was very sceptical about, right until he saw her grotesquely malformed baby. When Calvin accuses Abby of infidelity after the doctor informs him that he is sterile, Abby, to her utmost horror, realises that she too could have been inseminated by the sinister alien visitors.

Calvin, arriving home and realising that ‘the device’, by which he is now completely controlled, is missing, takes Rebecca as a hostage and blackmails Abby to return him the ball in exchange for Rebecca’s life. Abby is desperate, as she no longer has ‘the device’, but (wait for it) conveniently, the alien ball finds its way back home (as they do).

Abby confronts Calvin who is holding Rebecca, and, in the ensuing argument, stabs him with a penknife. Then she throws the ball into the woods with the words “fetch Calvin !” (OK, she actually doesn’t say that) and Calvin obeys, stumbling in the undergrowth looking for his beloved ‘device’ until he finds not only it, but also its not-so-friendly alien owner.

The Device, directed by Jeremy Berg (with Angela DiMarco playing Abby, Kate Alden her sister Rebecca and David S. Hogan her husband Calvin), does not work as a sci-fi film, horror or thriller. What I am saying – it doesn’t work as a film – full stop. With the unconvincing plot matched only by equally unconvincing performances of the actors and truly awful ‘special’ effects, there is really nothing positive to be said about this disaster of a movie. If I say that the best thing about the film is its rather clever-looking theatrical poster, (that, incidentally, is completely deceiving, as it has no relevance to the storyline whatsoever) you probably get the picture.

TRIVIA: As well as playing on-screen newlyweds Abby and Calvin in ‘The Device’, Angela DiMarco and David S. Hogan are married in real life too.