If you take the bicycle riding kids from E. T. and turn them into neighborhood gangsters with no social support – cops, army, NASA – and put them up against a bad alien, you have Attack the Block. Joe Cornish's British film takes place in what is called a housing estate in South London, and commences one night when a nurse, walking home from work, is attacked by a gang of toughs. The mugging is interrupted by an intrusion from – an alien, which crashes into the car they happen to be standing next to during the mugging. Led by Moses (John Boyega), the kids track down the alien and kill it. As it happens, though, the monster is simply the lure, the queen bee as it were who attracts others of her kind floating behind her in outer space for mating. Soon under threat from the successive newcomers the gang have retreated into their building, the Wyndham Tower, possibly an allusion to John Wyndham, author of Day of the Triffids, one of many in jokes, whose top floor houses a Fort Knox like pot growing enterprise run by Nick Frost of the Simon Pegg movies. The monsters are convincing looking hairy beasts with phosphorescent teeth and no eyes. They leap around with parkour agility – but then, so do the kids. In addition, the lads in their hoodies have limited weaponry, consisting mostly of fireworks, rods, and the odd samurai sword. Several battle scenes are amusingly staged and employ haphazard materials at hand including bedsheets and ice skating boots. One of the most interesting elements of Attack the Block is how Sam, the nurse (Jodie Whittaker), eventually becomes an ally of the gang, and also how the fearsome persona of the boys is slowly eroded as we see them with their various parents and with girls of the same age who can't take their tough stance seriously. A variation on the siege style of horror films which were rejuvenated by Night of the Living Dead, Attack the Block also shows a "London can do it" spirit as the residents band together in the absence of the cops who, as one kid says at the end, "always arrest the wrong person," a provocative comment in light of subsequent events in London at the end of summer, long after Attack the Block was photographed.
