Aliens in the Attic

On Friday evening, my host Greg had to take his kids to a birthday party, so I was on my own. I used the opportunity to visit a few more movie venues in the Memphis area. My first choice, for the last afternoon show, was Aliens in the Attic, which had been out since August when I was in Maine, but which had left the theaters in Maryland before I got a chance to see it there. I was resigned to having to see it on DVD, but it was still playing in Memphis when I arrived here.

The nearest place where it was showing was at the Ajay Palace cineplex, a non-Malco theater that turned out to be located on a utility road flush up against the freeway. It looked like a huge brick warehouse. Out in front was a goofy gorilla statue. The parking lot was shabby. Not surprisingly for Memphis, the clientelle was entirely African-American, except for yours truly.

At first I was thrilled, because the prices were so cheap. It turns out that the regular matinee is five bucks, but between five and six p.m, they charge only four bucks (Malco matinees were hardly cheap in Memphis). Moreover, during this happy hour, you could get a popcorn and soda combo for only a dollar! Too bad I had just eaten a big bar-b-que sandwich for lunch.

I was psyched about being there until I actually went into the auditorium. It was stadium seating, but with a twist, namely between each row there was a small wooden wall that served as a long table upon which one could put concessions. Not only was this a little cramping in terms of being able to fold my legs, but I discovered that one had to sit with one's head smack against the barrier in the previous row. It was like sitting in a chair right up against the wall---hardly the wall most people feel comfortable sitting for two hours. If had been any more than four bucks, it would have been a ripoff, but I wasn't complaining. Thankfully I was one of the only people in the theater, so there was no claustrophobia.

When the movie started, things got worse. The print was all worn, and moreover the sound seemed to come from a single tinny speaker overhead that had all the quality of a portable radio from the 1960s. Well, you get what you pay for...

Appropriately the movie itself was dreadful, among the worst of the year that I have seen so far. I had not been psyched about seeing it, after seeing the trailers with Doris Roberts (the mother-in-law in "Everybody Loves Raymond") doing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-style kung fu twirls in mid air. Everything about the movie lived up to this expectation.

The story is fairly self-explanatory---a group of goofy CGI aliens invade a house in rural Michigan and terrorize a family on vacation. The kids of the family must fight off the aliens to save the earth from invasion.

The character interactions spring from a highly dysfunctional portrait of the American family. All the characters seem to dislike each other and treat each other like crap. Oh, boy. How funny! Not surprisingly, the aliens (mirroring the human interactions) treat each other like crap too, which thankfully allows the children to overpower them and save humanity.

The alien plot was handled so clumsily at its opening that I felt like I was watching a skit rather than a movie. It seemed to have the attitude, "and as you have seen before a thousand times, a bunch of aliens show up to invade the Earth." Yikes. This was awful. It reinforced all my notions of how goofy looking aliens in movie are a narrative cheat.

For so many reasons, I was very glad when this movie ended and I could escape out into the parking lot.