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"Almaz Black Box" is certainly cheap — with no stars, no special effects and only a cramped Soviet space station as its set — but the only thought it provokes is: What were they thinking?

This film can be neatly summarized as "Blair Witch Project" meets "Event Horizon," a hoax documentary crossed with some kind of mysterious presence invading a spaceship.

"Almaz" does have a great concept: An orbiting Russian space station inhabited by three Russian astronauts is visited by two representatives from a Western corporation seeking to buy the module, and strange phenomena begin to occur. The entire film is posited as having been reconstructed from onboard monitor camera footage retrieved from the ship's black box after some sort of mysterious disaster.

The claustrophobic interiors and Cold War paranoia — is the Almaz actually harboring pulse-beam weaponry that the Russians are trying to disable? — make for a good premise, but the film runs out of steam surprisingly quickly. As deaths and unexplained phenomena increase, "Almaz" devolves into nothing more than a flurry of flickering monitor-cam jump cuts, vaguely ominous static and shards of electronic noise. What exactly is going on is utterly incomprehensible. As an industrial-style art-video project, where jittery, distressed video images are the point, "Almaz" could have been somewhat engrossing. Yet as cinema, aiming to be a suspenseful horror movie, it fails miserably — It's like "Alien" without the alien.