With how well Thanksgiving turned out, I figured it’d be
worthwhile to check out what another Grindhouse alumnus has been up to. And
oddly enough, this one also involves turning a short film into a full
feature (albeit still a short one at around 70 minutes). After winning his way
into the Grindhouse project with the fake trailer for Hobo With A Shotgun
(which got a pretty kick-arse feature adaptation in his own right), his next
feature is a fleshing-out of Slumber Party Alien Abduction, a segment he made for the V/H/S/2 anthology.
The short itself is pretty solid, with a decent approach to found footage horror using GoPro footage mostly taken from the back of a pet dog, but considering how obnoxious the characters and the scares were (it’s almost parodic how the jump scares literally involve blasting a floodlight and a foghorn right at the audience), it’s difficult to see how it could be turned into a full production and still be entertaining.
Well, for the most part, this isn’t a direct
one-to-one adaptation. While found footage camerawork informs Mat Barkley’s
cinematography, and quite a few setpieces are translated over, the filming here is more traditional. And pretty. Like,
this is legit one of the prettiest films to just look at that I’ve
reviewed all year, with consistently vibrant and nicely saturated colours throughout.
The characters are pretty fun too. The titular kids Gary, Jack, and Miles have been slightly toned-down in terms of language, but they’re still as foulmouthed as ever, and their rapport not only feels genuine to how little kids who discovered the joy of swearing would act, but it’s just fun to watch them have fun. Then there’s the teenaged bullies Trish, Dallas, and Billy, who are evil, evil-lite, and evil-plus respectively. Seriously, Calem MacDonald as Billy is one of the best hate-watch antagonists I’ve seen in a hot minute, never letting up on the sheer extent of his shitlordery no matter how many aliens start killing people.
And then there’s Phoebe Rex as Sam, Gary’s older sister and arguably the main character. The story, irrespective of alien invasion, is about her struggle between having fun with her brother and his friends while they shoot fantasy-action wrestling films for their own fun, and wanting to be seen as more popular and ‘mature’ amongst teens her own age. At once, she represents the necessity of embracing one’s own joy regardless of how anyone else perceives it (which is pitch-perfect for a film this grounded in exploitation film textures, both visually and with Andrew Gordon Macpherson’s amazing soundtrack), an interesting dichotomy between destructive fun (house party where said house gets trashed, along with the people in it) and constructive fun (making art with friends for your own entertainment), and a message about how growing up shouldn’t involve becoming a shittier person.
It also offers something similar to the Valkyrie warrior progression that Terrifier 2 was aiming for, but concentrated down to its purest elements, and frankly, for the better because Sam is an action hero to be reckoned with here. When things go more directly into genre territory, with the aliens kidnapping everyone to either liquefy them for ship fuel or mutating them with Nickelodeon slime (even the film the characters are living in feels like it was made by kids, it’s fucking great), Sam literally takes up arms and absolutely wrecks shit. The practical effects both for the aliens (which stick to the simplistic design of the original short) and the varying levels of gross fluids they bring to the screen are quite effective just as a foundation, but the set pieces are highly memorable as well.
For how straight-forward and brief this ultimately is, this is a great horror flick. Every second of screentime is used well, the film craft wields the story’s lo-fi origins to great effect and even show some well-placed found footage inspiration, and while the story itself is fairly standard as a coming-of-age arc, it’s framed beautifully and makes the woman at the centre of it into an avatar for the kind of liberating, “only I get to define my fun” attitude that results in films like this getting made in the first place. Eisener has shown interest in making a follow-up to this, depending on how well this film does, and… well, suffice to say, I 100% welcome more of this existing in the world.
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