ALIEN GIRL
Directed by Anton Bormatov
Produced by Konstantin Ernst & Igor Tolstunov
Released by Paladin
Russian with English subtitles
Russia. 100 min. Not Rated
With Natalia Romanycheva, Evgeni Tkachuk, Kirill Poluhin, Anatoly Otradnov, Alexander Golubkov & Evgeny Mundun
 

Alien Girl might be the worst named movie of the year. Maybe something is lost in translation, but one expects a straight-to-cable soft-core flick about an unnaturally buxom interstellar traveler visiting Earth to sample the pleasures of its men. Luckily, that’s not the case here. What you get instead is a blast from the past, something very much like those Pulp Fiction imitators that flooded independent cinema two decades ago.

Based on a comic book written by an ex-mobster, this gangland thriller is set in Ukraine in the roaring 1990s, shortly after she wrested her independence from a collapsing Soviet empire and started her long, grim trudge through a decade of corruption, economic recession, and exploding crime. A low-level crook is caught by the police while rubbing out some rival hoodlums, and Rasp (Evgeny Mundun), the offender’s crackhead mob boss (“Crack empties the head,” he helpfully explains), sends a few of his goons to Prague to kidnap his sister. Rasp figures he’ll use her as insurance in case the shooter decides to make a deal with the cops to escape the death penalty.

When they get there, the goons experience some cross-cultural comedy in a country much more successfully emerging from Soviet control. They’re led by Kid (I warn you, this is post-Tarantino kitsch—they are all given one-word names like this), played by Kirill Poluhim, a dead-ringer for the Israeli actor who plays the mummy from the latest Mummy series. They don’t have much trouble tracking the sister down. But the girl (Natalia Romanycheva) earned her nickname, Alien, for a reason. She says it’s because she’s an orphan who has a hard time fitting in. Her brother says it’s because, like the creature in the Ridley Scott movie, she’s an acid-bleeding monster that lays eggs in her victims and has to be destroyed.

Debut Filmmaker Anton Bormatov likes to play up the horror movie aspects. Alien is only introduced halfway through the story. When we first meet her, we see the world from her point of view as she lumbers druggedly in a gypsy gangleader’s den. The technique means to call to mind other screen bogeymen: she could be Jason wheezing through a hockey mask. But the movie, not terribly gripping up to this point, loses its way altogether when she arrives, partly because writers Vladimir Nesterenko (adapting his comic book) and Sergei Sokolyuk choose to kill off most of the other characters to focus on her.

I don’t think it’s the actress’s fault. Romanycheva’s captivating without being cheaply sensual—a sort of Euro art-house babe, tough yet feminine, whose rather subtle beauty grows on you throughout the film. But her maneuverings and manipulations—mostly over young gun Whiz (Evgeni Tkachuk), whom she begs to flee with her to a “normal country”—are less interesting and more B-movie obvious than earlier scenes sketching the gangsters’ post-Soviet inhumanity. An episode where the crooks pick up a random farmer and drive him around for no purpose other than to mildly terrorize him nicely shows that these men, while not exactly evil, have a hole in their souls. You have a feeling if they made it to a “normal” country, they would just screw it up. Brendon Nafziger
December 17, 2010