The Alien Invasion (Singapore-2004; short [17 min.]; dir. Rich Ho)
This great little film was made by university students in Singapore. A big success on the Asian film festival circuit, it parodies the 1950s alien invasion genre and is very funny, in that peculiar way that westerners sometimes find a little outré. Says director Rich Ho:
One of my lifelong reoccurring dreams was to see the educational institute that I was attending being blown up.
From my childhood days, I would paint stories of great adventures with my classmates; how the aliens would come to our school, how we would discover some hidden alien technology on the school grounds, how we would be able to turn their cool weapons back at the galactic monsters, and how we would save our school building and friends (saving the teachers was a debatable issue then).
It was our grandest dream to be heroes for a day (and skip class while we’re at it). When my university requested for a proposal for “something different” to play at their first ever graduation ceremony, I jumped on this final chance.
I wanted the film to not take itself too seriously (like some Hollywood-blockbusters had), but rather tell a story and shoot the film with a sense of fun and adventure.
The look of the film had to depart from the slick, timed camera moves and fluid action pieces. Thus a handheld camera style, along with shooting the film in digital as compared to 35mm, will allow it to have a raw, and at times an “amateurish-B-grade movie” look. This would prove to be a challenge in post-production as all the visual effects had to be camera-matched with the real life hand-held camera. To complement the madcap experience, we opted to ignore whatever misunderstanding a “serious-give-me-only-intense-alien-movies” audience might have, and go all out for exaggerated “bad”, “cheap-looking” visual effects, with a stylized look instead of realistic ones…
Synopsis:
After decades of watching aliens wreck havoc in America, The Alien Invasion brings the absurd “B-grade” galactic battle to the comical side of Singapore. After 7000 Earth years, the aliens have returned to harvest their newly grown planet of slaves. Discover how a glitch in alien technology allowed a small university, in a small country, to save the world.
Or download a high-resolution Quicktime version from here. [380.8 MB]
Source: Official website (which includes lots of extras) via Kaiju Search-Robot Avery
