Day # 23
Attack the Block
(2011)
A pack of deadly animalistic aliens crash land in London. Luckily for us they chose a poor place to land and quickly end up in a blood feud with a criminal gang of teenagers.
Fright Factor:
1.5 / 5 Turquoise Glowsticks
Gore Factor:
2.5 / 5 Bloody Lifts
Should You Watch It?
I really want to like Attack the Block. Nick Frost and John Boyega are in it, it’s a horror movie with a cast that’s predominately people of color, and it’s got a fun premise!
But the thing is...it somehow manages to be a pretty dull movie.
It makes a couple hamfisted attempts at being about something bigger, but they’re all too heavy-handed and inconsistent to mean anything. With some slight tweaking it certainly could have been a movie that used the horror genre as a way of looking at the issues people face in poor communities, but instead it's just a slightly lazy horror-comedy that likes to throw out an occasional deep thought to seem profound.
But whatever, right? Most people aren’t going to horror movies for their societal messages. They’re going to see some spooky mayhem and cool monsters, right?
Enter the aliens:
What. The. Fuck...
I don’t know about you, but that is quite possibly the laziest creature design I have ever seen. There’s just something about creatures that looks like cheap gorilla costumes with CGI-rave teeth that makes them hard to take seriously.
And those aliens are symbolic of the movie. The whole thing is amorphous: just a blob of movement with some glowy bits of danger. It’s as if it was afraid to really try to be anything and thus left us with nothing.
“We should call the police.”
“You’d be better off calling the Ghostbusters, love.”
