PLOT: A naive alien crashlands in Northern Ontario and discovers the joys -- and the evils -- of booze, rock 'n' roll, gun-worship, talking beavers and Jesus-freak devotion. It's like a Stompin' Tom "Sudbury Saturday Night" jam.
Most Canadians like to laugh at themselves. But we usually do not get to do it in our own movies, obsessed as our filmmakers are with angst and misery. Phil The Alien is one of the singular exceptions.
Written and directed by the unassuming Rob Stefaniuk, who also stars as the title character, Phil The Alien is homegrown hilarity with heart and and a delicious sense of the absurd.
The plot device -- a solo alien crashlands in the woods near a small town in Northern Ontario -- is wonderfully simple, especially because his spaceship goes down to the sounds of Neil Young's Helpless. Obvious, perhaps, but amusing.
Phil quickly ends up in Graham Greene's bar, where the alien soon discovers the joys of whiskey, the camaraderie of new friends and the insights of a talking beaver (voiced by Joe Flaherty), who happens to be a brainiac.
Contrast this scenario with John Sayles' sly alien flick, The Brother From Another Planet. That visitor, the Brother played by Joe Morton, ended up in New York City in the midst of racial tensions. Sayles had a serious agenda. In Jeff Bridges' charming Hollywood alien flick, Starman, the goal was romance and wonderment. There are other examples of the American approach, including in TV's Morky & Mindy.
But in Phil The Alien, Stefaniuk takes familiar icons of small-town Canadian life -- such as beer, booze, beavers, the lure of Niagara Falls and the related religions of God and guns -- and messes around with them for comic effect.
Nothing much is said or done as overt social commentary, nor is there anything in bad taste. Instead, Stefaniuk's scattergun approach, which shoots wildly from wry satire to broad slapstick comedy, results in a farce that makes it feel cool to be Canadian.
I personally do not relate to some of the hijinks, specifically the broad comic stuff. There is a subplot involving a gaggle of mad-cow Americans (led by John Kapelos) who are hunting aliens, with extreme malice, from a lair underneath Niagara Falls. Stefaniuk over-reaches so far in these segments that the jokes fall flat -- at least for those with subtler tastes in comedy. Droll would have been better.
Nevertheless, the segments with Stefaniuk as Phil, with his eyes wide and his hair electrified to stand straight up, are pure, sweetly savage and just plain funny.
Despite the unevenness of the piece, Phil plays upbeat. It is a brisk-paced 85 minutes. And it looks and sounds good, especially for a super-16 mm film blown up to 35 mm for its theatrical release. No excuses have to be made. This low-budget Canadian comedy rocks the house like few others.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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