Tuesday, August 3, 2021

A Movie You Might Have Missed #45: Attack the Block

It's been 11 years since I began this series highlighting movies I wished more people knew about. I'm rerunning it from the beginning because I still think these are movies you might have missed.

Inner City vs. Outer Space

 
This was one of my favorite movies of 2013 and I just realized that I never gave more than a one line description of this unexpected delight.

It's a good, solid monster movie with a basic puzzle to solve in order to rid oneself of the monsters. In this case, the twist is that the alien monsters land in London. The only ones to realize what's happening are some young thugs in a council block (that translates to "the projects" in the U.S.). They must battle the aliens while trying to escape the police who believe the resulting destruction is from gang violence. Its thoroughly enjoyable if one doesn't expect too much from it and watching the young actors is a delight, many of whom were recruited from local acting schools.

I especially enjoyed the fact that you can tell the aliens are not computer generated. The young actors said that they were actually frightened during action sequences because they were acting with real, unpredictable "creatures" ... it both shows and enhances the film.

The director went to a lot of trouble to get the place right. He interviewed council block kids to find out what weapons they'd grab if aliens landed. They use real slang and at times I felt as if I were watching a foreign language film with the captions off. However, there was always enough understandable dialogue for context.

2 comments:

  1. Yes, I would most definitely have missed this movie - and I'm so glad I didn't! Mind you, It took both your recommendation and the leading lady being from Broadchurch to keep my husband and me watching through the first half - and we (ghastly admission) used subtitles.
    So now I have an entirely new appreciation for the genre of monster movies, where do I go from here?

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  2. So glad to hear you liked it! :-)

    I'll get a few recommendations together for you!

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