Alien Party Crashers is a sci-fi comedy about the first wave of an alien invasion that coincides with a New Years Eve party in a Welsh valley.
Following the same setup as Steven Spielberg‘s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, writer/director Peter Stray‘s alien invasion film Alien Party Crashers (aka Canaries) spends its first minutes trotting us about the globe tracking what appears to be a series of strange events involving UFOs and … time travel? It’s played for serious in how it’s filmed and acted, as if what it might portend is something rather ominous. Then it introduces the name of the small Welsh town those in charge know to be the next landing site and well, things jump to a new track where comedy sets the pace. It’s a lowkey affair with a decidedly local flair that certainly has its moments, even if it sort of deflates the potential it creates before finding its proper footing.
Primarily set on New Year’s Eve 2014 around a group of somewhat close friends and casual acquaintances, including an arrogant playboy DJ named Steve (Craig Russell), who, along with the others, find themselves facing a very strange night. Seems that aliens have landed and taken the form of yellow-slickered fishermen with rather prongy-like fingers. As the crew become fodder for the attacking menace, a small team of officials back in Washington D.C. track the mayhem with a contact actually attending the party.
Here’s the part where we give indie filmmakers a break and call their films ‘ambitious’ despite their lack of money, which is a term readily applied to Stray’s movie, the whole thing a ragtag affair with nearly no money for effects, putting all its efforts in the characters and simple story. More a home invasion than a Earth invasion, it centers mostly on the steadily decreasing numbers inside the house against the assimilated attackers.
However, despite the fact that there’s little all that original about it, aside from maybe how the aliens literally fall into play, the monsters lumbering about like zombies poking their fingers in places they shouldn’t as the survivors try to figure out an escape plan makes for some good times. The cast is quite game for some fun and remain the best part of the show, convincing and energetic, balancing the action and humor pretty well throughout. There’s an obvious purposeful cheesiness to it all, which I’m sure was a choice made partly by the fact none of the aliens could possibly be made to look real with the money allocated to do so and Stray at least manages to keep both the tension B-movie grade from the start and the smirks genuinely earned.
Mixing in some playful politics and a somewhat clever ‘twist’ at the start of the third act, Alien Party Crashers is what it is and does it just fine, taking a few jabs at the horror and invasion tropes. Fans of indie films should flock and Stray shows some real competence in setting up some decent moments of action and suspense. Worth a look.