BLOCK PARTY
Attack The Block
Review by M.V. Moorhead/Less Hat, Moorhead
“Pardon my French,” says the nice middle-aged lady, “but they’re fucking monsters.” She’s speaking of her neighbors, the teenage street punks who haunt the title block in Attack the Block. “Fucking monsters,” echoes the young nurse (Jodie Whittaker) who’s just been mugged by the misunderstood lads in question.
The judgment may seem fair enough, but when literal monsters—shaggy, ferocious quadrupeds from outer space, with blue luminescent fangs—unwisely choose this same block of council flats in South London to drop onto out of the sky, the street kids turn out to be the planet’s first and possibly most effective line of defense. That’s the joke of this headlong, highly exciting sci-fi/horror comedy, written and directed by Joe Cornish.
The alien landing takes place in the middle of Bonfire Night, and goes unnoticed among the fireworks, except by the kids, who arm themselves with ninja swords and bottle rockets and the like, and take to their bikes. The nurse is eventually drawn into a truce with her muggers to fight the common enemy.
Whittaker gives a fine performance, as do Nick Frost as a weed dealer and Nick Treadaway as an upper-crust stoner, but the movie really belongs to the young ne’er-do-wells. Once their faces are out of their hoodies, they’re an engaging, even endearing rabble, and the most glowery of them, Moses (John Boyega) is a born leader. The actors are terrific, but Cornish doesn’t sentimentalize the little sods too much; he even lets them indulge in maudlin sociological self-pity when the nurse challenges them on their criminality. Their fast chatter—unsubtitled and sometimes unintelligible but comprehensible by context—and their swiftly-formed alliances give Attack the Block some of the quality of The Thing From Another World.
The creature effects, though extensive, have a minimalist quality that’s spookily effective—you haven’t seen these aliens before—and the musical score, by Steven Price, Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, is wonderfully old-school. With Attack the Block, Brit cinema does for the alien movie what Shaun of the Dead did for the zombie movie: Take an American form back to basics and, in a lighthearted but by no means unemotional way, reinvent it.
M.V. Moorhead is a frequent Jabcat On Movies contributor whose work has also appeared in publications ranging from the New Times weeklies to USA Today to Weird Tales. His e-novel, “Super Eight Days” (no relation to the film “Super 8″) is available from Amazon Kindle.
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