This week’s other extraterrestrial- invasion movie is more funny than scary, but that’s not a bad thing. There’s quite a bit of wit in British comedian Joe Cornish’s low-budget filmmaking debut, which imagines what might happen if murderous ETs made the mistake of landing in a council estate, London’s euphemism for its brutalist housing projects.
Moses (John Boyega), a 15-year-old thug, is being busted for mugging a trainee nurse (Jodie Whittaker) when the first one lands and dispatches his would-be captors. Moses kills the creature and plans to sell the corpse, but then more of the bloodthirsty creatures start landing.
Reckoning that the authorities couldn’t care less about what happens to the residents of the estate, Moses and his underage cronies form an unlikely alliance with some older and tougher gangstas and the trainee nurse, as well as a drug dealer and his stoned customer.
What follows is a hilarious, slam-bang series of chases and battles that cross “Gremlins” with “Assault on Precinct 13,” the two most prominent of many genre films quoted by “Attack the Block.”