Saturday, July 6, 2013

Attack the Block!


Attack the Block! (Brian Cornish, 2011) is a low-budget British creature-feature refreshingly similar to American UFO movies produced in the fifties. A pygmy monster (it looks like a miniature of the predator in Alien) falls out of the sky near a Brixton housing project. Some ghetto kids kill the little monster and take it back to the project where they store the cadaver in a “weed room” – a place where local drug-dealers are producing industrial-grade marijuana. Immediately, another two dozen orangutan-shaped monsters equipped with luminous glow-in-the-dark fangs crash into the neighborhood and beginning eating the inhabitants. The kids, aided by a plucky nurse that they have just mugged and robbed, fight back and, after a lot of gory adventures, the monsters are defeated. In an ironic twist, derived directly from the ending of George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead, the cops arrive and immediately arrest all the kids, heroes who have, possibly, saved the earth from alien invasion. The film’s upbeat message is that Britons of all races and classes should work together to defend the nation against common enemies – a moral that would not have been out-of-place in one of Jennings WWII propaganda movies. As the cops haul away the kids, the nurse points to their leader, Moses, and says: “He’s my neighbor and he saved me.” Pictures of this sort are supposed to be bad, poorly made, and entertaining and this film is no exception: the monsters are not convincing and, even, somewhat laughable, the action scenes are competently produced but don’t have the sizzle and inventive fury of a good American genre film like John Carpenter’s somewhat similar Assault on Precinct 13, and there are gaping holes in credibility. As one might expect, the acting is uniformly excellent although the Jamaican-inflected slum patois is very hard for an American to decipher. There are some poignant moments and the tense alliance between the plucky nurse and gang leader (the kid playing Moses looks extraordinarily like a young Denzel Washington) lends some emotional resonance to the film. Ultimately, the picture is only “pretty good,” impaired mostly by the fuzzy-looking unthreatening monsters; the movie also straddles the line between comedy and horror never quite opting for either approach to the campy material. But the film makes sense, unlike most Hollywood blockbusters costing thirty times it’s budget; it’s plot points are economically and effectively made and it has a breakneck pace. It’s not as good as reviewers said it is – they mostly used the film to bludgeon the idiotic Cowboys and Aliens – but its okay.

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