From the Director of DEADTIME and Crying Wolf comes Cute Little Buggers! Will you let them take our women? It’s Gremlins meets Hot Fuzz set in the English countryside. When hostile aliens crash land on local farmland the villagers at the summer ball get suspicious when young women start going missing. The villagers soon band together around our hero Melchoir to fend off the invaders and bring back peace to the sleepy English countryside! B-movie laughs in this creature feature from Director Tony Jopia.
Less than five minutes in we get to see a pair of boobs. 6 minutes in, the bearer of said boobs and her suitor are mauled in the woods. Yep, Cute Little Buggers knows exactly what it is and pushes on it hard. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this film that aspires to be both scary and funny lumbers along with such a plodding pace that nothing takes us by surprise. Clocking in at 1 hour and 48 long minutes, this mess elicits none of the promised screams or laughs.
Okay, I hated the movie, enough already. What is it about?
“…chose ‘rabbits’ as their weapon of choice and set loose the little alien creatures…”
Aliens from a distant planet are in need of females, as is always the case. Two bumbling creatures hover above Earth plotting how to infiltrate society, capture a clan of women, and impregnate them to begin anew. They chose “rabbits” as their weapon of choice and set loose the little alien creatures in a small village in England.
There is the average, run of the mill subplots happening here. Melchior (Kristofer Dayne) returns to let his father know that mum is dead and runs into his old flame while the town is preparing for a Summer Festival to welcome pop star Randy Rocksoff (Gary Martin) for a bit of a concert. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the jokes are that broad.
As the festival continues in what appears to be an abandoned warehouse, very bad, CGI rabbits scurry around the countryside killing men and absconding with women. All of this culminates in the townspeople rallying together around the hero, Melchior, in order to fend off the Cute Little Buggers and rescue the kidnapped women.
“…some really funny ideas…a bunch of energetic performers, eager to provoke laughter.”
I wanted to love Cute Little Buggers. There are some really funny ideas at play here. There are a bunch of energetic performers, eager to provoke laughter. There are even some great gore effects when stuff actually happens. But rarely is anything funny.
I can forgive the low-budget special effects that scream for a few more passes in rendering. I can even forgive the shite jokes and broad adult humor rampant in the campy-as-hell script. But if you are gonna go, go all in! Really give us the low-brow humor, show us boobs, blood, sex, and farce, but for god’s sake, make me laugh and make me cringe.
It baffles me that a total of four writers worked on this (Garry Charles, Andy Davie, Kristofer Dayne, and director Tony Jopia) without generating a singular chuckle. Killer Bunnies are hilarious but even Monty Python knew that one scene was enough.
Work on that script next time guys, and trim anything that doesn’t advance the plot or generate the reactions you are going for.
Cute Little Buggers (2017) Directed by Tony Jopia. Written by Garry Charles, Andy Davie, Kristofer Dayne, Tony Jopia Staring Jessica Arterton, Jack Brett Anderson, Liam Kelly, Leslie Mills, Robert Lowe, Pierse Stevens
3 out of 10
