Attack the Block

A great cast of mostly fresh faces in "Attack the Block"

**** out of ****

It is hard to express where my satisfaction comes from when viewing a film like "Attack the Block".  Here we have an alien attack movie in a creative unlikely setting containing the suspense and humor of one of those all-in-one-night John Carpenter films. This time, the setting is a rough neighborhood South London. The heroes: a gang of young delinquents and the nurse they just mugged. The aliens they are up against are simple in design, yet amazingly original.

This setup was so good, I was waiting for it to collapse. Didn't happen.

This flick stays awesome from beginning to end. The inner-city atmosphere is intense, the music is rad, and the violence is plenty-gory.  

I really liked the cast of this film. I can only think of two actors who I'd seen before. The young thugs are all fresh faces to me and I like it that way because the teenagers need to look genuinely young and free of an audience with preconceived notions of who they are except for a bunch of bad kids who will turn heroic. 

Another fresh aspect of this movie is it's writer director, Joe Cornish, who used to do work with Edgar Wright. Wright is a producer on this project and it is easy to associate it with his type of genre-bending comedies like "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz". Cornish still has a style that is somewhat different. There is obviously a strong desire on his part to portray the inner-city underworld and it's surroundings realistically. 

According to this movie's trivia section on IMDB, Cornish did in fact grow up in South London and was inspired to write this film after being mugged by a group of teens. 

Listen to David Edelstein review and compare "Cowboys and Aliens" and this film.