REVIEWED - ALIEN AUTOPSY: THE Sunday newspapers like to fill themselves up with stories about unlikely celebrities becoming attached to proposed - actually imaginary - "major motion pictures" based on notable current events. We are, for example, still waiting for that touted Michelle de Bruin biopic featuring Nicole Kidman.
Many sane punters, upon hearing that Ant and Dec were to take on the roles of the two English chancers who claimed to have discovered film of an alien autopsy in 1995, would have bet their houses against the project ever making it into cinemas. Yet here it is. "It's not a disaster," Ant (or Dec) says at one point. "Bits of it are quite good." I couldn't have put it better myself.
The production notes reveal that Ray Santilli and Gary Shoefield have decided to own up that the film was faked. Yet, there is an audience out there - only part of which is on day release from the puzzle factory - that believes dead aliens were found at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and that, after cutting them apart, the US Military suppressed all evidence of the supposed visitation.
Eager to placate the men in tin-foil hats, Santilli and Shoefield straight-facedly claim they did acquire genuine footage, but that it decayed shortly after they brought it back to the United Kingdom. The fake film, based closely on the original, was put together as part of a cunning scheme to repay their investors.
The two leads overcome the handicap of being permanently attached at the abdomen to deliver reasonably charming performances. Dec (or Ant) is perky as the market-stall wide-boy who devises the scheme. Ant (or Dec) is amusingly sat upon as his less forceful mate. There are some decent jokes in the lead up to the re-enactment, and nostalgia for the far-off days of the mid-1990s is evoked through careful deployment of trip-hop and large mobile phones.
But, some way before the film reaches its halfway point, the frail plot runs completely out of steam. Still, as whichever-one-it-was said, it's not a disaster.
Donald Clarke
