Midnight Screenings 2011 / Attack the Block / United Kingdom 2011
Joe Cornish’s feature debut starts out like a scene drawn from a realistic British drama about the life of troubled youth on the outskirts of London, but it soon transforms into a politically incorrect ride through the nighttime metropolis as the characters cleverly crack wise and London is threatened by alien invaders. And only a gang of kids is willing to oppose them.
Joe Cornish’s feature debut starts out like a scene drawn from a realistic British drama about the life of troubled youth on the outskirts of London. Returning home late one night, nurse Sam is mugged by five adolescents on bikes, their faces covered with scarves. The terrified woman manages to escape when the ruffians are distracted by an unidentified object smashing through the roof of a nearby car. Investigating, the kids discover that the object moves, and they lay into the unknown creature, killing it and taking it as a trophy to place among their pot plants. At this point, the flick transforms into a politically incorrect ride through nighttime London as the characters cleverly crack wise and the metropolis is threatened by alien invaders. But only the gang is willing to oppose them.... The movie, which the British magazine Sight and Sound ranks alongside the cult films of John Carpenter (Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from New York, The Thing), excels for the spontaneous acting performances from all of its young actors (Luke Treadaway and Jodie Whittaker as well), and for the tricked out, electronically pulsating soundtrack that will leave you breathless.
88 min / Color, 35 mm
Director Joe Cornish
/ Screenplay Joe Cornish
/ Dir. of Photography Thomas Townend
/ Music Steven Price
/ Editor Jonathan Amos
/ Producer Nira Park, James Wilson
/ Production Big Talk Productions
/ Cast Nick Frost, Jodie Whittaker, Luke Treadaway, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Franz Drameh, Leeon Jones
/ Contact Studiocanal
Joe Cornish (b. 1968) is an actor, screenwriter, and director working in television and radio. While at secondary school in Westminster he met his future work partner Adam Buxton, then went on to study film in Bournemouth. From 1996 to 2001 he and Buxton cowrote the television program "The Adam and Joe Show.” Since 2006 the same-named program has aired on radio station BBC 6. In 2004 he shot Making "Little Britain” Too about the making of the TV series. Attack the Block is his feature directorial debut, and Cornish had this to say about its inception: "Attack the Block is the result of watching films like Critters, Tremors, and Gremlins and wishing it would happen where I lived in south London.”
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