Attack the Block

I end my survey of British miserabilism with a film that takes than genre and combines it with another, unlikely one, science fiction. Attack the Block, a film from last year, written and directed by Joe Cornish, is an homage to B-movies of yesteryear, with aliens in bad costumes terrorizing a certain part of the population. Many of those films dealt with rural desert locations, but this one is in a housing project in South London.

The film opens with a nurse, Jodie Whittaker, being mugged by a young gang of hoodlums. They are led by John Boyega, who looks a bit like a young Denzel Washington. He lets Whittaker go, and then looks on in amazement as some kind of meteorite hits a parked car. He looks inside and finds a fuzzy and sharp-toothed creature, which scratches him up. Boyega is determined to kill it, and does. This unwittingly brings down the wrath of the creature's compatriots, who are black with glow-in-the-dark teeth. They are frequently described as "gorilla-wolves."

The gang teams up with Whittaker to fight back at the invading creatures, and also recruit a pot dealer and his best customer (Luke Treadaway), who figures out that the "gorilla-wolves" are tracking Boyega because he has phermones all over him. The biology here is flawed--there would not be one female and several males, it would be the opposite, as a female can only bring to term one litter at a time. Secondly, how much sense does it make, evolutionarily speaking, for a creature to have glow-in-the-dark teeth, which announces its presence?

This film got some good reviews, and I suppose it's because it's an affectionate nod to better science-fiction alien invasion movies. Much of the acting is sub-par, and as keen an idea as it is to have London gang members fighting the critters in a Council Estates building, the whole enterprise stinks of low-budget cheesiness. The monsters look like Muppets, and aren't really that hard to kill.

Cornish does throw in some humorous subplots, such as two little kids, spurned by the gang, who go off on their own, hunting aliens, carrying fireworks and a Supersoaker filled with gasoline. There is also some droll dialogue, such as when a character explains what Ron's weed room is: "It's a room with weed, and it's Ron's."