KIDS vs. ALIENS (2022)

Studio:     RLJE Films/Shudder
Director:    Jason Eisener
Writer:     John Davies, Jason Eisener
Producer:  Brad Miska, Josh Goldbloom, Jason Levangie, Marc Tetreault, Rob Cotterill
Stars:     Dominic Mariche, Phoebe Rex, Calem MacDonald, Asher Grayson Percival, Ben Tector, Emma Vickers, Isaiah Fortune, Jonathan Torrens

Review Score:

---

Summary:

A rivalry between teenage bullies and imaginative kids erupts in chaos when alien creatures suddenly crash a Halloween party.

---

Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Searching for a place to host a Halloween party, teenagers Billy, Dallas, and Trish bully young friends Gary, Jack, and Miles while the kids film a homemade fantasy movie with Gary’s older sister Samantha in a barn. Billy only stops harassing the boys when he seemingly takes an interest in Sam, who becomes enamored with Billy.

Gary breaks his arm while recording a wrestling scene for the movie. Due to Gary getting injured on her watch, the duo’s rich parents ground Sam before leaving the siblings home alone to go on a trip. Gary compounds Sam’s frustration by criticizing his sister for giving up on her role in the movie so she can start pursuing a more adult persona that might impress Billy.

Billy harasses the three friends once more when he comes to see Sam. Secretly wooing her so he can use the house for his party, Billy pretends to appreciate Sam’s interests in action figures and wrestling. Sam and Billy start making out on her bed, but are interrupted by the boys when they burst in to harass Billy. The boys are then interrupted by a loud noise and lights outside, which Sam dismisses as another one of Gary’s pranks. Sam calls her brother a loser and tells him to “grow up.”

Billy convinces Sam to host a Halloween party while her parents are away by claiming he wants to show her off as his new girlfriend. While Gary, Jack, and Miles secretly spy on the festivities using a drone camera, Billy and his friends intentionally trash the house. Sam tries to kick out the disrespectful partygoers, which causes Billy to become physically threatening with her.

Gary, Jack, and Miles interrupt the party by hijacking the TV to broadcast a message calling out Sam for changing her personality to appeal to Billy. Gary also shows footage of Billy making fun of Sam to Trish before urinating all over Sam’s bedroom, which brings Sam to tears. Billy grabs the boys from their hiding spot and brings them out to be beaten in front of everyone.

Alien creatures previously seen attacking three fishermen aboard a boat suddenly burst into the house. Partygoers flee while Gary, Jack, Miles, Billy, Dallas, and Trish are captured. Sam avoids capture by barricading herself in her bedroom.

Once the coast is clear, Sam dons a scuba suit that she uses to swim underwater to the alien spaceship submerged in the lake behind her house. After sneaking into the craft, Sam witnesses the aliens using a slime pit to melt Trish, which Gary later theorizes is how the aliens create fuel for their ship. Another type of slime mutates Dallas into a creature with bladed claws.

Armed with an unusual sword she found, Sam slays several aliens to rescue her brother before he can be slimed. With Dallas pursuing him, Billy steals the scuba suit to save himself and return to the surface. Sam still escapes with the three boys by having everyone hold their breath before resurfacing.

Sam, Gary, Jack, and Miles return to the house to discover Billy locked himself safely inside. Dallas still breaks through a window to resume his pursuit of Billy while Sam and the boys escape on their bicycles. In between more alien encounters, Gary and Sam reconcile.

Sam, Gary, Jack, and Miles seek shelter in the barn where they had been filming their movie. Billy, who also went to the barn to hide, suddenly takes Sam hostage with her sword. The three boys attack Billy so Sam can get free, but Billy gravely wounds Jack by thrusting the sword through his stomach.

While Miles tends to Jack, Dallas’s sudden arrival scatters Billy, Sam, and Gary. Dallas ultimately kills Billy before the siblings finally defeat Dallas.

A tractor beam from the alien ship starts pulling Gary into the sky. Acting on a suggestion from Jack, Miles lights a fireworks rig that the friends built for their film’s grand finale. The rig gets sucked into the sky too, and its subsequent explosion destroys the ship and saves Gary.

With Jack barely clinging to life, Sam, Gary, and Miles start rushing him to safety until more aliens surround them. Armed soldiers from an unknown organization suddenly kill all of the creatures with automatic weapons. Unexpectedly, the soldiers then retrieve the sword, take the kids captive, and transport them to a secret location where they are put in stasis.

Sam and Gary’s parents return home to their destroyed house with no knowledge of what really happened. An alien attacks the mom.

---

Review:

Remember “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” from “V/H/S/2” (review here)?  It might have slipped your mind seeing as it had the unenviable assignment of falling into the film’s final position, right after “Safe Haven” knocked everyone’s shocked socks off as the standout segment of that anthology.

“Kids vs. Aliens” should jog foggy memories since it’s director Jason Eisener’s feature-length expansion of his “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” short.  Eisener takes the previous premise of some prankster pals interrupting a sister’s sex session only for their stunt to get interrupted by a sudden alien invasion and, with co-writer John Davies, blows it up into a full-fledged story exploding with five times as many irreverent antics and gooey grotesqueries while also adding, believe it or not, unexpectedly endearing emotion that might even moisten some eyes.

What I remember best about “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” is the hectic hilarity of its beginning, where boisterous boys break into a bedroom for an electrical light parade of jack-o-lanterns, Santa hats, and comically loud music.  “Kids vs. Aliens” gets even goofier with its outrageous opening, where Gary and his older sister Sam don makeshift Mad Max costumes to battle a few friends, dressed as a rival faction of mutant dinosaurs, for a homemade fantasy film featuring fights, fireworks, and wrestling in a real ring.

Good times get broken up by Billy, a teenage bully whose harassment elicits expletives from the boys while Sam’s eyes bug out into big hearts.  Sam becomes so enamored with Billy that she decides it’s finally time to drop childish interests like action figures, comic book heroes, and hanging out with her kid brother so she can act more like an adult, become popular, and hopefully hold Billy’s attention.

Little does she know though, Billy only wants Sam so he can use her parents’ place to stage a Halloween hootenanny where he and his fellow punks can cause a destructive ruckus.  Little does everyone know though, deadlier devastation is on its way when extraterrestrial creatures crash the party so they can drag hostages back to a Master of the Universe-inspired slime pit where they melt people into mush.  Coming of age has never been this chaotic as sibling rivalries, bad romances, and face-offs with troublesome teen tyrants now have the complication of contending with alien eviscerations too.

There are two ways to look at “Kids vs. Aliens.”  One of those ways may result in a nonplussed reaction while the other should yield infectious fun for those with the right disposition.

The less favorable way to take “Kids vs. Aliens” is as a low-budget Amblin adventure, with “Amblin” and “low-budget” being violently opposed terms that go together like oil and water.  Some of the movie’s cheapness ends up being charming, like the aliens’ Legion of Doom lair lurking underwater, when you look at certain staging through the lens of 1990s syndicated sci-fi.  Even then though, the film still gets rough around its technical edges, in part due to an unsteady handheld camera prone to momentarily losing focus whenever a subject moves perpendicular to the plane.  So if you’re looking for refined visuals, fewer uncouth characters, and more maturity across both of those boards, you’re likely to be unimpressed.

The better way to take “Kids vs. Aliens” then is as a bigger budget version of the kind of backyard B-movie the kids are seen making at the beginning of the film.  “Kids vs. Aliens” carries the energy of a noisy Nerf commercial airing in between Saturday morning cartoons, if those cartoons were cut from a Spike and Mike cloth, and I mean that as affectionately as possible.  Warts and all, this is what indie horror is supposed to look like when it’s made with passion, sincerity, and a flair for getting freaky.

Every actor is incredibly well cast.  Performances read as real, not rehearsed, and that’s something seldom seen when working with relative newcomers not yet old enough to vote.  Some might see their foul-mouthed behavior as occasionally obnoxious, yet each kid comes with a unique personality that’s always synched to what’s going on in the setting.  Calem MacDonald gives Billy that signature “bad boy” appeal that can make a naïve high schooler swoon even though he’s clearly sitting atop a powder keg of alpha a-hole aggression.  But Phoebe Rex steals the show as Sam.  Sam is facing a tough transition into early adulthood, and it’s her heartbreaking, relatable arc of finding her interests evolving from make-believe to making out that makes “Kids vs. Aliens” more meaningful than the mere snark and splatter fest it might look like on the outside.

I’m not sure I can accurately articulate the overall vibe “Kids vs. Aliens” delivers, so let me try a pair of similes.  Considering its charm as a kooky creature feature, picture Joe Dante trying to make an R-rated vision of a vintage Steven Spielberg movie.  Or, considering its retro aesthetics like a pulsing musical score and neon-soaked sets where frightened kids furiously pedal bicycles and swing swords, imagine Full Moon, when they were good, doing a riff on “Stranger Things.”

“Kids vs. Aliens” is silly and harmless in the best sense of those terms while simultaneously sticking to its own F-U attitude.  A bizarre blend of Disney Channel drama, gross-out gags, horror, humor, action, and surprising sweetness shouldn’t work this well, yet it does thanks to its director.  Not to put Jason Eisener in a box, if he even can be given how many different varieties of pie his filmmaking fingers have been in, but “Kids vs. Aliens” maintains an entertaining stride because it was made by someone whose cinematic sensibilities were forged in the fires of dirty drive-ins and exploitation era epics, and Eisener applies those same styles here.  I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of kid-oriented movie I can root for, as opposed to something safer and traditional, like where a dog plays sports or whatever.

Review Score: 85

---