Movie Review: Attack the Block

Attack the Block is the worst movie I've seen this year. It stars no one and was written and directed by nobody of any particular distinction. The movie tells the story of a group of south London gangbangers who fight off an alien invasion in their apartment block. Oh, and did I mention it's a comedy "in the vein of" Shaun of the Dead? Sadly, it is. People, the only thing worse than a bad sci-fi/horror movie or a bad comedy is a bad sci-fi/horror/comedy. The bad comedy cancels out any enjoyment of the bad alien movie.

The movie also takes the bold step of making the audience hate almost the entire cast of the movie. Everyone in this movie is either violent, stupid, annoying, or all three put together. Our main character is a guy called Moses, who leads a small gang of morons around the streets of London on Bonfire Night. The first thing we see them do is mug a young woman who happens to live in their block; this ensures that the audience has no reason to feel sorry for any of them when they are inevitably ripped apart. The gang finds an alien crash-landing onto a parked car, and after the creature slashes at Moses' face, they proceed to chase it onto a playground and beat it to death. Surely this is a great moment in history; "Alien Lifeform Killed by Chavs", it'll say in the papers. But I digress.

They take the alien corpse up to the top floor of the block, where they meet with the fat idiot from Shaun of the Dead; coincidentally, one of the many credited executive producers for this movie was Edgar Wright. My guess is he had as much responsibility on this movie as Tim Burton did with Batman Forever. But again, I digress. Fatso tells Moses to store the body in his ultraviolet marijuana garden, where Moses meets with a dealer and his henchman, Thuggin' Fat Albert. The dealer decides to put Moses to work selling drugs for him. Meanwhile, Moses' gang and "Ed"'s other customer are watching a documentary about pheromones one the Foreshadowing Channel. Suddenly, more aliens land, and the gang, reasoning "more aliens = more money", decide to go on an alien roundup, yee-ha! So they arm themselves with typical troublemaker weapons, like bats, chains, fireworks, and A SAMURAI SWORD! Why does someone living in an apartment block have a set of samurai swords? Not answered!

So a couple of our "heroes" get to one of the landing sites, only this time, the aliens are a bit bigger. And meaner. Now, instead of looking like the Cloverfield monster after being shrunk in the wash, they look like someone tried crossing a werewolf with the Alien. The monster starts chasing them all around the parking lot of the building, when one of the gang gets trapped in a dumpster, along with all the unsold copies of Attack the Block. The rest run into the streets, where a police van shows up and arrests Moses. Turns out the lady they mugged called the cops, who promptly lock Moses up in the back of the van. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of movie left, so the cops promptly get eaten, Moses' boys show up, and they drive the van into the basement parking for the block, where they run into the dealer. Victim Lady makes a break for her apartment, while the rest of them deal with the pusher, who's royally pissed. Suddenly, the aliens come back and tear out Thuggin' Fat Albert's throat, while the gang gets away in the confusion.

Which brings me to another problem with this movie, the kill scenes. Oh, they're fine, when you can see them, but most of the time they're filmed either too close, at awkward angles that barely show anything, or just not showing anything. Guys, you've got these characters swearing up a storm, I think it's too late to go for that PG-13 rating. What also looks really bad are the aliens. For some reason, the filmmakers decided to go with a color scheme for the aliens that's pretty much solid black, with glowing blue teeth. I guess the theory was to make them look indistinct and scarier in the dark, but in practice it just looks like the film got dropped in a pot of coffee.

Soon Moses leads his idiot friends to Victim Lady's apartment, because the smallest and most obnoxious of them got bitten on the leg and she just happens to be a nurse. As she's patching their friend up, the movie tries to build sympathy for these guys, but we've already crossed to the point where we're rooting for the monsters. The aliens catch wind of them, and from this point on the movie's just a ripoff of Aliens or any of its ilk. You can tell who's gonna live, who's gonna die, where they have the false alarm scare, and when they find out what makes the aliens tick.

So they make it back to Fat Zombie Chow Guy's apartment, and hide in his marijuana patch. Turns out the first alien sprayed Moses' clothes with a pheromone that attracted the bigger aliens, just like the documentary said at the start. Okay movie, how did that attract the aliens and tell them exactly where to land? I'm pretty sure smells don't travel through space. That'd be like the Borg came to Earth because someone in San Francisco was wearing too much perfume. I mean, not only did these aliens come from deep space to respond to this, they all landed in pretty much the EXACT HEMISPHERE, COUNTRY, CITY, AND NEIGHBORHOOD where Moses killed the original alien. How can a smell give these things precise coordinates, even compensating for planetary motion? I could swallow it if these things were an advanced species, but they don't seem to be; they're basically werewolves with Indi-Glo teeth. Their method of interstellar travel seems to be climbing into decorated rocks and launching themselves into space, and since we don't see the inside of these pods, we can't assume what kind of tech they have, but from the way they act, I'm willing to bet it's not very high. *Sigh*, bear down, it's almost over.

So it turns out Victim Lady doesn't have any pheromones on her, so Moses sends her down to his apartment a floor below, to turn on all the gas outlets and seal up the place to burn all the aliens. And yes, the aliens completely ignore her even though they've spent the last hour nipping at her heels. After that, Moses makes a mad dash to the apartment, blows up the aliens, saves London... and promptly gets arrested. For some reason, this gets everyone from the block to chant his name as a hero; sure he's harassed most of us along with his dumbass friends, but he blowed up aliens real gud! And it's over, just like that.

Ugh. What a bad, bad movie. Attack the Block is dumb schlock. The characters are unlikable, the monsters are barely visible, the scares rely on loud noises and things popping into frame rather than building tension properly, and worst of all, the jokes aren't funny, merely annoying. Avoid at all costs. Frankly, I don't see how Edgar Wright could have been involved in this.