Gotta love the helmets these guys wear. I’d say it’s for holding their brains in, but there’s no brains to hold in.
Some stories are very culturally dependent, stories that, viewed by an audience embedded in the milieu of the story, have great significance. The rest of us? Not so much[1].
So it may be with Cute Little Buggers (2017). It’s Brit, not American, and is the story of the alien invasion of Earth, starting with a strangely dysfunctional British village. They want our women for the usual thing, and the invaders, ably represented by Ernest and Brian, are nearing extinction – thus their motivation for making it with the loathesomely ugly humans. In some ways, they get the best lines in the show, even if they do look like fish with arms, stuck up in their ship in orbit.
Their proxies for their war for survival are robots who disguise themselves as bunnies!
I’ll not spoil the plot – as much as there might be one – as to advise you that, at least to American sensibilities, this was unappealing. Bad acting, unsympathetic characters, shockingly bad bunnies, and a lot of unnecessary nudity. Oh, and the word FUCK seems to be a big part of the dialog. Maybe the Brits liked it.
While I have to say it reminded me of Shaun of the Dead (2004) in that neither I nor my Arts Editor appreciated it, at least Shaun of the Dead had good acting and pointed commentary; we just didn’t really think a self-absorbed Londoner weathering a zombie attack was funny or profound. Cute Little Buggers doesn’t have the commentary nor the acting. The pacing is by turns sluggishly boring, then ridiculously filled with dangerous bunnies. Their sudden attacks are fairly repetitive, and if the defenses the beset villagers devise are silly, at least they’re creative.
And, just to interject a note of sunshine, I was pleased to see that one of the more despicable characters, who I had pegged for an early out in this cosmic version of Bombardament, actually does quite well for himself. I admired his skill with the cricket bat.
But this really struck me as more an indulgent fantasy than a rigorous exercise in story-telling, an amateur effort that will require large amounts of alcohol and pizza to bribe most viewers to actually finish. We made it to the end, but only by digging our fingernails into the palms of our hands.
And they really blew the first Easter egg. We’re guessing the second was just an outtake. Maybe the only outtake. Brrrrr, I’ve seen worse, but not much worse.
1 In fact, that reminds me of the time an Iranian I knew for a short period watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) with a group of colleagues. She left at the Black Knight scene with her hand over her mouth. I suspect American tolerance for violence is greater than most of the world’s.
