FrightFest review – Welcome To G-Town
Full of the kind of jokes about Scotland in general and Glasgow in particular which would incite a diplomatic incident between Holyrood and London if made by English filmmakers, Ben and Nathan McQuaid’s Welcome to G-Town is a scrappy zero-budget science fiction comedy with a lot of squelchy green stuff (but no AI) and a slackerish vibe. It hammers a few of its running gags into the ground and would do well to get further away from Troma as an influence, but there’s a thread of great material running through the silliness and splat.
Bill (Danny McAllen), a media studies graduate, is fired from yet another job he can’t find it himself to be enthusiastic about and is overqualified for the street cleaner gig he goes for next. His mates Peter (Stan Ross) and Ronnie (Ruben Ross) are about to quit their fictional home town of Glasgow – played by the real Glasgow – for a job in England as a policeman (which will entail less being spat on by NEDS) and a new life in the Shetland Islands … and he is nostalgic for the time when they could get together and make cam-corder epics together. McAllen gives a nuanced, felt performance amid deliberate overactors, and Bill’s story is strong and interesting enough to support at least a BFI-backed short film in the realist life-is-glum mode … you know, as if Terence Davies grew up watching Peter Jackson films rather than listening to showtunes in Liverpool pubs.
But that’s not what this is.
While locals are all trying to get out of G-Town, aliens have arrived – under the mistaken impression that this is the capital of somewhere – and are trying to blend in by taking on all the clichés of Scots daily life from tartan-swathed tourist tat to Trainspotting-type stoned twat behaviour (of the traffic-cone-on-head persuasion). The aliens work out of the offices of a Scots independence movement which I suspect allows for in-jokes I’m out of about SNP political wranglings … though an in-joke I do get is that alien leader Dazinger* (Mark Dallas) and his lieutenant Nyah (Annabel Logan – a FrightFest regular from Death of a Vlogger and Hostile Dimensions) have character names roughly referencing a previous alien invasion of Scotland in Devil Girl From Mars. Stumbling over the alien presence, Bill makes a tactical error in reporting it to Alistair (Matthew Crawford Russell), a ranting paranoid who has been handing out they’re-here-to-take-over flyers in the street … and he escalates the conflict by interrogating a captured shapeshifter while torturing it with power tools, coming across as more dangerous to anyone than any alien invasion.
The third act gets into a runaround but an accommodation between Bill and Nyah, once the alpha boss type aggressors are out of the way, is kind of sweet. This has stretches which come close to making me lose my patience but many more scenes which got me back onside. I think this works when many comparable mess-about-with-the-lads splatter movies don’t because it remembers to be about something more than playing with monster masks and going for gross. Extra marks for the very very lo-fi stop motion effects – harking back to the DIY elements of The Evil Dead and Basket Case – used to show aliens and folks being gloopily skeletonised.
*Yes, I know it should be Danziger – but WtG-T extends a running joke about getting names wrong by giving one of its core characters the wrong name in the end credits.
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