‘Alpha Gang’ Review: The Zellner Brothers’ Gleefully Gonzo All-Star Sci-Fi Comedy Is A Big Blast Of All Kinds Of Crazy – Toronto Film Festival

Fun comes with a big F.U. in this outrageous and frequently pant-wettingly funny aliens-are-among-us comedy from David and Nathan Zellner. Their last film, Sasquatch Sunset (2024), seemed hard to top, taking two high-profile indie stars — Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keogh — and rendering them entirely unrecognizable under head-to-foot Bigfoot costumes, with a freewheeling script made up entirely of grunts and gibberish. What would they do for an encore?

Well, this, a ridiculously starry gonzo romp that invites an international A-list cast to jump off a cliff in the pursuit of the most eccentric kind of entertainment. That everyone commits so fearlessly — and with such straight faces — to the Zellners’ berserk world-building is a joy to behold, aided by a terrific jukebox soundtrack and a chaotic, entropic plot that builds and builds to insane levels of carnage.

Shot in Croatia, which only adds to the strangeness, the film begins with a montage of space vistas before cutting to an ominous stone monolith, where Alpha Three (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) is waiting with his motorcycle, dressed in the sharp style of a ’50s biker gang. Alpha Three is waiting for Alpha Six (Riley Keogh), who suddenly materializes out of nowhere, dressed in an identical leather jacket, jeans and boots combo. Three takes Six to meet the rest of the Alpha Gang at their base in a deserted castle, where they find them dancing frantically like Max Bialystock’s secretary in The Producers (think “Ulla, go to work!!!”) while the jukebox blasts out “He’s Sure the Boy I Love” by The Crystals.

If this doesn’t work for you, get your coat; there’s not much point in staying, as the going is only going to get weirder. Everybody in the castle dresses like Wanda Woodward, Traci Lords’ character in John Waters’ 1990 film Cry Baby — including Dave Bautista’s Alpha Two, which is quite a sight to see — and it soon becomes clear that the Alpha Gang don’t know too much about the human race, which will become increasingly problematic as they attempt to take over the planet. “Humans are the most advanced of the options here,” says Alpha One (played by a hilarious Léa Seydoux), “but the bar is extremely low.”

In fact, the Alpha Gang are actually slumming it on Planet Earth (“We can only transfer a fraction into their limited neural structures,” notes One), and some of them find it strange having “only” five senses. Much like Sasquatch Sunset, this is a story of wide-eyed naifs at sea in an industrialized world they don’t understand, only this time because it’s beneath them, with their advanced knowledge and skillsets. Their incomprehension is highlighted by the fact that some kind of internecine civil war is going on outside their base, which, from time to time, they join in with, blasting at warring soldiers with space-age machine guns.

In between, the Alpha Gang spend their days listening to ’50s and early ’60s pop music, concluding solemnly that the songs they’re hearing — by Conway Twitty, The Poni-Tails, Les Surfs — “aren’t just random words and vibrations, they are messages”. “Perhaps it’s a coping mechanism,” says Bautista’s deadpan Alpha Two. Meanwhile, Alpha One is filling everyone’s heads with horror stories about an epidemic — a disease called “emotions”, for which there is no antidote. But the longer they stay, the more their insecurities come to the surface, leading the lovelorn Alpha Three to ask a carrier pigeon for a date.

The quirkiness is already off the chain by the time Alpha Seven (Chris Pine) makes a surprise appearance. Pine is just hysterical as he acclimatizes to his new body, having a violent brawl in the filthy bathroom of a windmill and emerging victorious with a piece of toilet paper stuck to his shoe. And when he finally gets to HQ, Seven drops a bombshell. There is an impostor in their midst: The Alpha Gang has been infiltrated by their rivals the Beta Gang, a ragtag mob who listen to electronica/post-rock (Nitzer Ebb, Sparks, My Bloody Valentine) and want to destroy the Alpha Gang from the inside.

The range it displays, from stylish to stupid, is beyond eclectic, like a crazy mash-up of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire and Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs, with a tip of the peaked leather cap to Kenneth Anger, whose seminal Scorpio Rising is clearly a huge influence, right down to the inclusion of that film’s signature song, “Fools Rush In”. Like Rick Nelson’s fools, the Zellners also rush in where angels fear to tread, and their love for the bizarre, the cool and the crazy is, like the epidemic of emotions facing the Alpha Gang, wildly infectious.

Title: Alpha Gang
Festival: Toronto (Special Presentation)
Directors: David Zellner, Nathan Zellner
Screenwriters: David Zellner
Cast: Léa Seydoux, Dave Bautista, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Lily-Rose Depp, Doona Bae, Riley Keough, Chris Pine, Cate Blanchett
Sales: MK2 Films (International), CAA (US)
Running time: 1 hr 49 mins