British Cinema: Evil Aliens (2005)

Evil Aliens, 2005.

Directed by Jake West.
Starring Emily Booth, Chris Adamson and Sam Butler.


SYNOPSIS:

A television crew must try to survive a bloody alien encounter on a remote Welsh island.


Jake West’s Evil Aliens begins with a man having a large pointy thing rammed up his arse by an alien. It would have been nice to use this as a metaphor for how it feels to watch the film, but unfortunately, I can’t. What a corker of a low-budget, British film.

The aliens in question have come to an island in North Wales – conveniently (or not) reachable by people only at low tide – in order to impregnate a farmer’s daughter. To research and re-enact the event comes a TV crew from “Weird Worlde”, headed by appropriately named cynical presenter Michelle Fox (Emily Booth) and guided by major geek and alien enthusiast Gavin Gorman (Jamie Honeybourne).

The guts of the film is a jolly blood-soaked romp through the Welsh countryside with nods to Star Trek, Day of the Dead, Watchmen, Mortal Kombat, and much more along the way as the crew are joined by the resident farmers to both evade and destroy the dangerous alien invaders. And when The Wurzels begin singing during a particularly funny spell of alien-mowing, well, you know you’re in for a treat, as comedy, horror and sci-fi hold hands and dance merrily down a blood-soaked path.

The film does follow the standard rules of the horror genre up to an extent. Sex symbolises death, sacrifices are made by those whose soul requires redemption, and there is always a survivor (just maybe not who you think). The characters are the standard fair – the sexy one, the clever one, the brave one, the coward, the idiot. But they are stock characters for a reason; they allow the story to start quickly and allow the film to entertain, which at the end of the day is what it was made to do.

The humour, gore and quirky moments more than make up for some over-cheesy acting and at times predictable script. The film only gets going from the mid-point, and as such suffers somewhat from a slow moving first act. The tension is not racked up to the max, which leaves us waiting for the action to kick in, rather than fear for the protagonist. It is not helped by a lack of any substantial subplot, meaning the main premise of a group of people chasing after aliens is very much stretched to its limit. And thematically, a subplot would have helped the film really speak to us about the issues of truth and identity which crop up from time to time throughout.

With a budget of around £1,000,000, Evil Aliens shows that impressive special effects are attainable at this low budget and are no longer the preserve of the Hollywood elite. Some of the prosthetics are also worth a mention, especially the quite astounding transformation of human into alien.

This fun, action packed, killer of a film was made in 2005, yet still the UK Film Funding bodies continue to give out copious amounts of money to flog the old Rom Com horse. Time to wake up and smell to guts? After all, this genre is where all the imagination of upcoming superstar film-makers has been seen to gestate before. Peter Jackson, anyone?

Harry Loney

World Cinema: The Green Butchers (2003)

The Green Butchers, 2003.

Directed by Anders Thomas Jensen.
Starring Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas.


SYNOPSIS:

A depressed stoner and his highly strung friend set up a failing butchers shop, only for success to come when they stop selling chicken and start using human.


As anti-heroes go, a disturbed stoner and an anxious psychotic who butcher customers to sell the meat are probably more on the “anti” rather than “hero” side. However, Anders Thomas Jensesn’s ever so sharp script creates a world so bleak and characters so compelling and touching that quite simply, liking them on some level is utterly irresistible.

Set in contemporary Denmark, and starring Mads Mikkelsen (before he started to annoy James Bond) and Nikolaj Lie Kaas, horror combines with subtle comedy in The Green Butchers which perhaps takes an inkling of an idea from Jean Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen but runs with it in an entirely new way.

Feeling unfulfilled as butchers assistants, Bjarne (Kaas) and Svend (Mikkelsen) set up their own butchers shop in town. After the opening day brought zero customers and Bjarne’s fiancee left him, their hopes of success fall, until Svend discovers a body frozen in their meat locker and sells fillets of it to his old boss and arch-rival. Although initially horrified by what Svend has done, the queues outside the shop encourage Bjarne to get on board, and the death toll soon mounts up. From here on in their meteoric rise seems unstoppable, and money and love soon comes their way.

Structurally the film does not break with tradition, with it’s actpoints and mid-point all exactly where they need to be to keep the story engine running. But this is not a film which wants to be clever with the filmmaking process. There is no gore, no “unique styles”, no nothing which isn’t directly required by the script. The dark comedy comes from disturbed psyches and a sense of claustrophobia from both the small town they live in, and the meat locker where people have been taken to die.

There are no stock characters here; everyone has a complete backstory. Svend is not “just” a psycho – he lost his parents and has never truly found love until he stands opposite a counter selling human meat to unsuspecting, but devoted, customers. And Bjarne turned to pot after a traumatic event in his past which is slowly revealed throughout the film, intertwining itself with his life now. You begin to find yourself scared as, slowly, the idea of killing people for meat becomes excusable as it makes so many others happy. The Stockholm syndrome in the comfort of your front room, folks.

Svend kills off the problems in his life – literally – and Bjarne, so numbed by past events which come back to haunt him, butchers the meat as if it were chicken. The deaths in their past offer an excuse for the deaths in the present, and it is hard to demand justice for a couple of misfits even though, by any rights, they should be locked away and ignored for the rest of their lives. Perhaps not since Freddy Kreuger has there been examples where the protagonist is such a cold-hearted killer, but you just can’t wait until he is back on screen again.

The Green Butchers, like so many other fantastic films, is sadly not a film which will get wide recognition in the UK due to the language barrier, but for those who take the time to watch it, and enjoy some masterly writing, directing and acting, you may never look at your fillet of chicken in quite the same way again. KFC anyone? Didn’t think so.

Harry Loney