Attack the Block

Comedian Joe Cornish’s directorial debut presents a couple of challenges from the outset. The first is that its protagonists are an essentially unlikeable bunch of hoodies whose first onscreen act is the mugging of a nurse walking home from her shift, who are incapable of construction a sentence that doesn’t start with “yo” and end with “bruv” or “blood” – worse, delivered in a Sahf End Lahndan accent so that “blood” comes out as “blahd”. “Yo, blahd”, “wassup, blahd”, etc etc. Oh, and they also use weapons grade quantities of American gangsta-speak. Personal bugbear, but I just can’t understand why British kids want to act like they’re East Coast. East Coast may have a certain underworld cachet in the States, but all East Coast means in the UK is crap holiday resorts. Bridlington, Cleethorpes, Maplethorpe, Skegness. “Yo, blahd, we is da Ingoldmells Massiv.” What the fuck?

Oooops, sorry. Rant over.

The second challenge is that the material is so old-school, the homages so plentiful and the basic set-up so patently absurd that – along with the advertising campaign that bigs it up as the new ‘Shaun of the Dead’ (word to the wise: ‘Hot Fuzz’ is the new ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and we’ll leave it at that, shall we?) – that my expectations ran to a fast-paced, irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny slab of creature-feature mayhem. And while ‘Attack the Block’ ticks some of these boxes, Cornish’s script gets too wrapped up in lionizing his hoodie gang heroes (yup, he insists, come the denouement, on painting them as heroes) that he often forgets he’s supposed to be making a knowingly ironic horror-comedy with a deliberate B-movie aesthetic.

The pre-credits sequence has Sam (Jodie Whittaker) robbed at knifepoint by Moses (John Boyega) – his name, given his final act of courageous leadership, is staggeringly unsubtle – Pest (Alex Esmail), Dennis (Franz Drameh), Jerome (Leeon Jones) and Biggz (Simon Howard), during which attack another attack occurs (see what I did there?) and our lovable rascals find themselves battling aliens who plummet to earth during a Bonfire Night fireworks display.

Sorry to labour a point here (I actually enjoyed much about the film, honest!) but the suggestion if you rob a lone woman by pulling a knife on her and knocking her to the pavement, she should somehow be grateful that she wasn’t raped or killed into the bargain is a concept I’m having a fuckton of trouble trying to get my head round. I’m also throwing up a big fat “does not compute” at the knowledge that Cornish was one mugged in like manner and started to wonder whether his aggressors weren’t in fact as scared as he was. Now, I’ve been on the receiving end of hoodie thuggery myself (one punch to the face, one attempted boot to the kidneys which I fortunately managed to deflect), and I can tell you that with a film crew and a budget at my disposal, my artistic response would have been closer to ‘Harry Brown’ than ‘Attack the Block’!

Anyway, Moses and his crew are attacked by something that looks like it didn’t quite make the casting call for ‘Alien’. They respond by tracking it down to a kids’ playground and kicking the shit out of it under a climbing frame. Kudos to Cornish and his DoP Thomas Townend: they turn in some pseudo-iconic Spielbergian imagery while at the same time effectively pointing up the absurdity of the moment. (Similarly, a scene where one of the gang straps a samurai sword to his back, straddles a motorcycle and roars off to get some payback is wonderfully puncture by a cut that shows him puttering away on a 10cc moped with a pizza-delivery box on the back decorated with a learner driver sticker.)

Sorry, another digression there. Anyway, they haul the extraterrestrial corpse back to their council estate apartment block, Wyndham Tower*, where they stow it in Ron’s weed room (“What’s Ron’s weed room?” “It’s a big room full of weed. And it’s Ron’s”) while they figure out the best way to fiscally exploit their find. The lugubrious Ron (Nick Frost) works for edgy crime boss Hi-Hatz (Jumayn Hunter) who, after a misunderstanding, decides he wants Moses’s head on a plate. As do the police, since Sam has by now reported the mugging.

Meanwhile, the alien invasion is gearing up in fine style and the boys find themselves public enemies numbers one to five as far as the invaders are concerned. A word on the aliens: they’re a terrific creation, midnight-black furballs with claws like tungsten carbide blades and teeth that glow with electric-blue light. Cornish’s script picks up and he sends his cast hurtling round Wyndham Towers as they try to find sanctuary, rescue cut-off members of the party and find a way to defeat their furry nemeses. Imagine the grimy locale of Ken Loach’s ‘Ladybird Ladybird’ shot like something out of a Michael Bay film, crawling with the non-human cast of ‘Critters’ (only given a serious upgrade) and everyone locked into a siege situation a la John Carpenter in which a bunch of kids give the adults a Joe Dante-like run-around and ultimately save the day.

This latter aspect works the best, with a frenetically edited moped/pushbike chase vying with a fireworks-as-incendiaries kids vs aliens smackdown as the film’s high point. Credit where it’s due, also, to Cornish’s facility with actors – most of the cast are making their debut here. Of the professionals, Jodie Whittaker makes for an appealing and unsentimental heroine while Nick Frost provides his dependable line of laid-back schtick in an essentially there-for-a-few-belly-laughs role. The man of the match award, however, goes jointly to Sammy Williams and Michael Ajao as, respectively, Probs and Mayhem, a pair of little kids who gleefully embrace the chaos as an opportunity to cut loose and be badasses. God love you, fellas: here’s to the film career you deserve.

‘Attack the Block’ is entertaining. It’s slick, it’s energetic and it doesn’t outstay its welcome (running time: one hour seventeen minutes if you don’t count the ludicrously interminable end credits). It looks great and it bodes well for Cornish’s future as a director. But it’s difficult to get round the fact that, as a horror-comedy, it misses more often than it hits where the comedy is concerned. It’s clever in its construction and the way in which the kids take the fight back to the aliens, but none of this cleverness makes it as far as the dialogue which, with only a couple of exceptions, is devoid of the witty, hip, eminently quotable lines that this kind of material cries out for.

If the filmmakers had gone full-on, one way or the other, and made it funnier or nastier, ‘Attack the Block’ might have achieved cult classic status. As it is, there’s tonal dichotomy that never reconciles. Still, Cornish delivers a hoodie horror movie where the hoodies aren’t the monster, so I guess that’s something.

*Pay attention to place names – they add up to a beautifully sustained in-joke that proves to be the single cleverest thing in the movie.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #11: Shaun of the Dead

“You’ve got red on you.”

Let’s consider the comedy horror sub-genre. Perhaps the most easy kind of movie to fuck up. Make a straight horror film that doesn’t work and you’ve achieved the comedy unintentionally. Set out to make a horror film that’s funny and you already run into two potential – and oh-so-often blundered into – pitfalls. Either it’s not funny enough, or not dark/horrific/nasty enough.

If that’s not enough of a challenge, you then have to factor in how buggardly difficult it is to be funny, period. Bad comedians? Ten a penny. The likes of the Goons, the Monty Python team, Dave Allen, Bill Hicks or Billy Connolly – the defining comedic talents? Once a generation, pretty much. Lame, stupid, by-the-numbers movies advertising themselves as comedies? There’s probably four or five playing at a multiplex near you right now. Something that really hits the ball of the park and makes your sides hurt even while the intelligence behind the rib-tickling is actively challenging you as a viewer? ‘Four Lions’ was probably the last thing I saw that ticked all the boxes.

So: comedy horrors. Fuck loads of ’em. And some come very close to nailing it. ‘Slither’ only just misses out because of it’s mean-spirited and utterly unamusing first half hour. ‘Zombieland’ has a shedload of good ideas and intermittently hits the heights, but tries too hard. ‘Dead Snow’ mines some belly laughs out of promising material but never goes as crazy and satirical with it as you so desperately want it to. Those that get it right? The ‘Evil Dead’ films, ‘Tremors’, ‘Eight Legged Freaks’ and the absolute best of the bunch: the king of comedy horror, the monarch of mordant mockery, the sultan of scary spoofery, the god-emperor of graveyard humour: ‘Shaun of the Dead’.

‘Shaun of the Dead’ works, primarily, because everyone involved in it knows how to be funny. That’s “knows how to” in the same way that Bernard Haitink knows how to conduct, Iain Banks knows how to write novels, Slash knows how to play the guitar and the gentlemen at the Talisker distillery know how to make whisky. Co-written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, and directed by Wright, these fellows were two of the three talents behind ‘Spaced’ (the third, Jessica Stevenson, cameos in ‘Shaun of the Dead’ to terrific effect), which I’d dare anyone to argue otherwise as regards the proposition “best British sit-com” of the last twenty years.

‘Shaun of the Dead’ takes the outbreak of revivified corpses/mass panic/small group of survivors holed up against superior (undead) numbers narrative checklist of every zombie film since a certain George A Romero made a low-budget indie called ‘Night of the Living Dead’, transports them to a blandly realistic London and demonstrates how two adult males who have never truly left adolescence behind deal with the crisis. Let’s meet our heroes. Shaun (Pegg) is pushing thirty, stuck in a dead-end job and just about, as the film opens, to be given the Spanish archer (El Bow) by his long-suffering girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield). Ed (Nick Frost) is Shaun’s unemployed and terminally irresponsible best mate who’s been crashing at Ed’s shared accommodation for so long that he’s long since incited the wrath of Shaun’s prissy flatmate Pete (Peter Serafinowicz).

Battling rank insubordination at work and Pete’s anti-Ed rhetoric at home, as well as nurturing resentment against his stepfather Phillip (Bill Nighy) while trying to keep things on an even keel with his mother Barbara (Penelope Wilton), Shaun prioritizes his biggest challenge as getting Liz back. And no pissy little zombie epidemic is going to get in his way!

The cleverest thing – in a movie chock-full of inspired moments – that ‘Shaun of the Dead’ does is treat the zombie threat, in its early stages anyway, as a minor irritant in Shaun’s rapidly unravelling life. The reason for the dead rising is not so much explained as turned into a brilliantly edited satirical comment on the attention-deficiency of the TV/infotainment-addled channel-hopping generation. In fact, Pegg and Wright go one step further and suggest that since cultural zombification is pretty much a state of mind for an entire cross-section of the populace (as evidenced in the low-key but conceptually brilliant opening sequence) an actual zombie attack might not be as easy to recognize as you’d imagine.

Hence the first scene in which Shaun and Ed realize that there’s something untoward about their fellow Londoners and start fighting back. I refer, of course, to the scene in the garden where they raid the shed for items to fling at the zombies’ heads in order to incapacitate them. They come upon Shaun’s collection of vinyl LPs and this ensues:

Ed: Purple Rain?
Shaun: No.
Ed: Sign o' the Times?
Shaun: Definitely not.
Ed: The ‘Batman’ soundtrack?
Shaun: Throw it.
Ed: Dire Straits?
Shaun: Throw it.
Ed: Stone Roses?
Shaun: Uh, no.
Ed: Second Coming?
Shaun (sheepishly): I like it.
Ed: Sade?
Shaun: But that’s Liz’s.
Ed: Yeah, but she did dump you.

It’s the first scene in which ‘Shaun of the Dead’ lays down the gauntlet as to what the comedy horror movie can truly achieve. And then spends another hour and change more than living up to it. Take the scene where Shaun and his mates fend off their newly zombified barman with pool cues, leaping around him in some weird parody of a maypole dance with the jukebox blasts out Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. I’ll put that up with anything Scorsese, Tarantino or Richard Kelly have pulled off in the marriage-of-music-to-imagery stakes. Or the appropriation of their favourite pub (The Winchester)’s mascot – the eponymous rifle – to fight off a zombie attack. Shaun proves spectacularly useless as a marksman until Ed talks him through it as if they were playing a video game. Or the two bands of survivors who meet whilst heading in opposite directions – a sublime visual joke that not only provides one of the many ‘Spaced’ in-jokes, but niftily references co-star Dylan Moran’s wonderfully subversive sitcom ‘Black Books’.

Or the proliferation of horror movie homages, from Fulci’s Italian restaurant (Shaun’s first choice when he tries to make an eleventh hour booking for an anniversary meal) to a supermarket chain called Landis (both a nod to John Landis and a spoof of British supermarket chain Londis) to Shaun’s disapproval of Ed using “the z-word” (a sneaky allusion to Danny Boyle’s insistence, at the time ’28 Days Later’ was released, that it wasn’t a zombie film). More subtle still, Shaun works for “Foree Electrics”, a tip of the hat to Ken Foree, the iconic actor in Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’ who memorably delivered the “when there is no more room in hell…” line. (And delivered it to equal effect in Zack Snyder’s remake.)

All of which is an extended way of saying that in addition to being a funny, clever and often genuinely suspenseful film in its own right, ‘Shaun of the Dead’ is a treasure trove for the genre aficionado. It trades in a brand of deadpan observational humour that is archetypically British, but seasons it with a thorough knowledge of (chiefly American) genre movies. And it handles the tension and the gore as rigorously as it does the comedy of embarrassments.

Paul

Use the phrase “the new Simon Pegg and Nick Frost comedy” and immediately you find yourself with an elephant in the room. Two of them, in fact. ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Hot Fuzz’. Both razor sharp and wickedly funny riffs on all-too-familiar genres (the zombie movie; the crime thriller) and not only send up their pop culture touchstones but vigorously revitalize them.

‘Paul’ could easily come off as the lesser sibling to these terrific, out-of-nowhere contemporary classics. Which is why it’s important, right from the off, to point out the crucial difference, as obvious as it may be: Edgar Wright has nothing to do with ‘Paul’. Unlike ‘Shaun’ and ‘Fuzz’, he’s not in the director’s chair. Unlike ‘Shaun’ and ‘Fuzz’, he didn’t co-write.

Instead, Pegg and Frost share the writer’s credit, while Greg Mottola calls the shots. I’m going to make the only ‘Shaun’-‘Fuzz’-‘Paul’ comparison of this article and make the observation that, on the evidence provided, it seems to be Edgar Wright who gives the earlier films their bite (and let’s face it, between the laughs, both ‘Shaun’ and ‘Fuzz’ have something of a mean streak). Take him out of the equation and the comedy is a tad gentler, more warm-hearted.

But with lots of swearing.

Seriously, ‘Paul’ is a wonderfully sweary movie. In particular, the line “Yo, fucknuts, it’s probing time” has automatically become one of my favourite movie quotes.

‘Paul’ starts out as a sort of anti-‘Spaced’, a love-letter to its protagonists’ nerdiness, rather than a send-up of their social ineptitude. Scenes of Clive Gollings (Frost) and Graeme Willy (Pegg) – respectively the writer and artist of a graphic novel involving an alien with three tits – noodling nerdily around Comic-Con and being mistaken for a gay couple at their hotel are wincingly unfunny and get things off to a decidedly shaky start.

Things pick up big time when they hit the road in a hired RV and head along Route 375, the so-called “Extraterrestrial Highway”. Another slice of nerd heaven for our boys, with stop-offs at the Little Ale’Inn (where they piss off a couple of rednecks) and the Black Mailbox (which they discover is white). They also discover a little grey individual, an otherworldly type with the ability to heal by touch and turn invisible while holding his breath. Named Paul – you’ll find out why in the opening sequence – and voiced by Seth Rogen, he’s a foul-mouthed, cynical, sarcastic alien with a penchant for dope, booze and hard partying. He’s the single best thing about the movie.

If, like me, you were starting to wonder if the Seth Rogen bubble was on the verge of bursting, then be jubilant. Acting with his vocal chords only, Rogen does his best work since ‘Superbad’. Funnily enough, like ‘Superbad’ (another ostensibly low-class but actually quite sweet comedy), ‘Paul’ is directed by Greg Mottola. He’s the film’s other great asset. Directing in an almost classical style (but allowing for chases, shoot-outs and a moment of utter wrongness where Paul’s admonition to “take your hands off my motherfucking junk” elicited the biggest laugh at the screening I attended), Mottola instinctly taps into the Spielbergian homages writ large in the script.

Mottola also brings back Rogen’s ‘Superbad’ alumnus Bill Hader as one half of a spectacularly incompetent pair of Feds out to catch Paul and haul him back to Area 51. Rounding out the cast are Jason Bateman as their considerably more proactive colleague Agent Zoil (the matter of his first name is one of the film’s more groan-worthy puns) and the excellent Kristen Wiig as Ruth, an optically-challenged Bible-basher. Her anti-creationism worldview blown apart by Paul’s existence, she makes a swift u-turn and decides to reinvent herself as a potty-mouthed bad girl. The results are priceless. Jeffery Tambor and Blythe Danner are memorable in small roles.

Narratively, there’s nothing particularly original going on, and Pegg and Frost’s characters aren’t quite as on-the-money as their ‘Shaun’ and ‘Fuzz’ personas (or even their ‘Spaced’ personas), but there’s no denying that ‘Paul’ provides 90-minutes of laugh-out-loud feel-good entertainment.