Technically, it is true that Kids vs. Aliens is about a group of rowdy kids and a couple of older teenagers battling against the extraterrestrial threat of aliens. After all, it’s right there in the title of the film, yet the most baffling thing about co-writer/director Jason Eisener’s long-awaited sophomore feature is that it is barely interested in the eponymous showdown. We spend so long in the company of the kids here, all of them a bunch of rude, needlessly crude, unfathomably annoying little jerks, that we sort of end up rooting for the aliens at the end of all this. Surely that was not the intention of Eisener and co-screenwriter John Davies. Then again, they do devote an entire half-hour of the film’s precious 75 minutes to the demands of a sociopathic incel who wants to get into the pants of the protagonist – a teenage girl.
The degree to which the movie really, really wants us to become invested in this story line is sort of absurd. By all accounts, neither Samantha (Phoebe Rex), the girl in question, nor Billy (Calem MacDonald), the young man who will stop at nothing to seduce her (except to insult and cheat on her behind her back), is the main character of this story. By default, that would be Gary (Dominic Mariche), Samantha’s younger brother, who has invited his best friends Jack (Asher Grayson Percival) and Miles (Ben Tector) over to shoot a low-budget sci-fi film – sort of a mash-up of aliens and professional wrestling that seems a lot more fun that the movie the characters are actually in – with the help of Samantha herself.
Halloween is approaching, and when Billy arrives with his pair of dimwitted goons – Trish (Emma Vickers) and Dallas (Isaiah Fortune) – it’s infatuation at first sight for both him and Samantha, the latter of whom can’t really explain her attraction. The former simply wants her for the conquest or whatever, and when the crap really hits the fan during a literal invasion of the planet and a bloodbath as aliens attack, his true colors of being a total coward are predictably revealed. It’s nothing against the serviceable performance by MacDonald, but as written, the character of Billy adds nothing but sourness to an enterprise that should, theoretically, be based in a sense of bloody genre fun.
Things do get very bloody and gory and generally gruesome by the time the big action climax arrives, and only then does it seem like Eisener’s genre intentions really come to fruition. The director, along with cinematographer Mat Barkley, employs an appealingly stark, old-school color palette that makes the images grainier and sharper and more attuned to the explosion of neon colors present. It can at least be said that this is a gnarly-looking film in all the right ways. Very little about what happens within it can be called fun in a similarly gnarly way, though.
Kids vs. Aliens inexplicably keeps getting in its own way with odd divergences from the central concept and some strange attention paid to the sexual proclivities of a particularly deviant supporting character who doesn’t fit into anything around him. One can only guess it was too much to ask Eisener and Davies just to shut up and let the central joke of the premise lead the day.
Photo courtesy of RLJE Films
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