Aliens in the Attic (2009)
Directed by John Schultz
Written by Mark Bunon, Adam F. Goldberg
Starring Ashley Tisdale, Carter Jenkins, Austin Butler, Kevin Nealon
Release Date July 31st, 2009
Published August 2nd, 2009
Idiot movies like Aliens in the Attic are why I discourage parents from seeing live action kids flicks. The fact is that 99% of live action kid flicks rot out loud. Aliens in the Attic simply proves the point, only take your kids to animated movies. Even then, wait for it to be a Pixar animated movie.
Aliens in the Attic is the dopey story of ugly green midgets come to earth to take over. Why they begin with a summer house in the middle of nowhere is likely a joke I missed while attempting to retrieve my ever rolling eyes. Standing in the way of the invasion are a group of mean little brats and one not so horrible one.
The not so bad kid is merely boring. He is Tom (Carter Pearson) and from moment one he is picked on by all around him. He is joined by his brainless sister Bethany (Ashley Tisdale), her disturbingly older and creepily leering boyfriend Ricky (Robbie Hoffman) and a group of smaller cousins who, like us, also think Tom is boring.
They are on vacation with a group of the most annoyingly clueless parents ever put to screen. Kevin Nealon and Andy Richter lend unneeded and entirely untapped comic credentials to Aliens in the Attic as the befuddled dads.
Worst of the adults however is poor Doris Roberts. The Emmy nominated mother from Everybody Loves Raymond is called upon to perform karate in some of the most painfully unfunny comic fight scenes put to film. One can only assume that the awful effects used to place Ms. Roberts in these fight scenes are intentionally bad but it's hard to tell when everything in the film is so poorly crafted.
There is not a single laugh or note of originality in one minute of this slapdash mess. Aliens in the Attic was cynically crafted to remove money from people's wallets and nothing more. Call me elitist if you like but I believe movies, especially those made for kids, should enrich the culture.
I believe that when a movie is made for an audience of children that the filmmakers have a duty to make a film of high quality that does more than merely asphyxiate a child for 90 minutes while mom and dad play sudoku on their iPhones. A movie made for kids should have a point and purpose and short of that should at the very least intrigue and involve the imagination.
Kids will get nothing of the sort from Aliens in the Attic a mindless piece of dreck that shutters the imagination in favor of cheap and easy gags and bad special effects. Ugh.
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