Kids vs. Aliens is a film that answers the age-old question, “What would result if a screenplay intended to be produced by Amblin Films in the 1980s inadvertently landed in the hands of the schlockmeisters at Troma Films instead?” Unfortunately, the question raised by Jason Eisener’s film proves to be far more interesting than the answer that he provides. Teenager Samantha (Phoebe Rex) is helping her little brother, Gary (Dominic Mariche), and his friends Jack (Asher Grayson) and Miles (Ben Tector) film a monster movie in their backyard when their space is invaded by bad boy classmate Billy (Calem MacDonald), who puts the moves on her. She swoons, much to her brother’s distaste, but it soon transpires that Billy’s only real interest in her is in using her house to hold a wild Halloween party. However, just when the truth has been revealed to her in the middle of the shindig and Billy begins to demonstrate the depths of his delinquent depravity, the party is disrupted by a group of aliens that lay siege to the affair and snag a number of samples—including Gary and his friends—to take back to their ship, currently hiding at the bottom of a nearby lake, while Samantha is left to mount an increasingly grisly one-woman rescue mission.
The film began life as Slumber Party Alien Abduction, one of the short films that comprised the 2013 anthology project V/H/S/2 and has not gained very much in its expansion to a full feature. What transpires is essentially the kind of film that Gary and his pals are making—derivative, exhausting and filled with noise, gore and self-consciously foul language to cover up the lack of any actual cleverness or wit. It doesn’t even really deliver on the lurid promise of its title—the aliens don’t even show up until the halfway point and when they do, neither they nor their various gruesome ways of dispatching their test subjects do much to hold interest. As for the kids, they are, with the exception of Rex, whose performance as Samantha is stronger that the film deserves, all grating to various degrees. Then, after all that, Eisner and co-writer John Davies don’t even bother to give their tale a proper ending, preferring instead to end on a nihilistic cliffhanger that is more interested in setting up a sequel than in resolving its own narrative. All in all, Kids vs Aliens is a tedious bore that manages to wear out its welcome long before its haphazard conclusion, which is oddly impressive since the film itself clocks in at about 69 minutes when the end credits begin. It does have a reasonably nifty title—maybe someday, someone will come along and utilize it on a project that deserves it.