Mars à table!

The 'let's make fun of 50's monster movies' thing has been done to death but TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN is a surprising and total delight. Where most comedies lately work with visual shock and gross-out gags, the humour in this movie--often as shockingly hilarious as anything by the Farrelly brothers--is almost completely verbal. The lines fly by with dizzying speed--a barrage of bad puns, silly one-liners, kinky innuendo and loony non-sequiteurs that had my head spinning! And the fact that it's a Canadian film is the cherry on the cake. Go see it!

Top of the Food Chain (A.K.A. Invasion!) is a very wacky film, but I recommend it to anyone with a good sense of humor, especially if you like parodies. The humor is delivered deadpan but takes turns you'd never guess. There are all the clichéd characters you could expect in a B-grade horror movie - the religious nut, the pompous scientist, the surly policeman, various suspicious characters, and the smart and spunky love interest - but each of them deviates from the norm in their own way. This is a low-budget film but that actually is a strength for a parody of other low-budget films. This is one of the funniest films I've seen in a long time. It reminds me of Airplane, although it's more subdued and yet more daring in its humor. Rent it if you get the chance.

This is a remarkable little movie. I didn't really expect much when I started watching it - after all it's a low-budget sci-fi spoof made in rather obscure circumstances. But it truly is excellent. It's finely written, well executed, and very, very funny - I stopped the playback of the movie numerous times just to give myself time to savour some of the great moments and laugh at them properly without missing anything else. The script is consistently sharp and intelligent... and the movie also has the other two requisites of great comedy - well-judged timing and high quality straight-men. It's sort of a spoof on old sci-fi movies such as The Thing and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers... but that's only the start... the movie just has an off-kilter insight into human craziness that's not quite like anything. Actually the film to which it bears the closest comparison is the Rocky Horror Picture Show... although it's not a musical. Still I could easily imagine audiences watching Top Of The Food Chain over and over again and reciting their favourite lines along with the characters. Unfortunately this probably won't happen... it's an obscure movie, and will probably lapse into oblivion without ever finding much of an audience - which would be a great shame... so go out of your way to see it - you won't regret it.

TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN (3 outta 5 stars) Canadian director John Paisz came out with some brilliant short movies back in the 80s... culminating in the brilliant "Crime Wave". He showed great promise at the time... his work sharing many surface similarities with the work of David Lynch. But for almost 15 years he seemed to disappear from the world of film... doing a little TV work in Canada and not much else. Well, he finally came back in 1999 with this zany B movie parody film and, while comes nowhere near the quality of his earlier work, it does have enough wit and style to make it worth seeing. The movie starts out TERRIBLY... so don't let the first five minutes put you off... it does get better. Man-eating aliens come down to a small Twin Peaks kind of town and start noshing on the citizens. Luckily a world famous atomic scientist (Campbell Scott) is passing through town to lend a hand. The movie's story isn't quite as well-scripted as the more recent "Lost Skeleton of Cadavra" but it does have some very funny lines... and some bizarre characterizations (the way-too-friendly brother and sister, the town policeman who goes around singing his own jazzy theme song). If you're in the mood for something silly you could do lots worse than this. Choicest lines: "An atomic scientist's life can be very lonely. There aren't many atomic lady scientists, after all." "I got backbone! Matter of fact when I was born I had a tail, too! That's just MORE backbone only it's furry!" "A genetically engineered band of devil worshiping serial killers... or a Sasquatch type thing? I don't like the sound of that!"

I picked this up in sales-crate at my local video store. Under genre it said :Splatter satire. This caught my attention.

The sci-fi spoofs are great, and the dialogue is genius. Campbell Scott plays a great Atomic Scientist and Fiona Loewi plays the sexy bed and breakfast hostess beautifully. Not only is she sexy, but even though she has an incestous relationship with her brother, you would still like to date her.

This movie is for people who understands irony (which apparently some IMDB-users haven't), and like the splatter genre. Though it isn't by far a hard-core splatter, the scenes that are gory, works very well.

Watch it as a comedy and as a caricature of old sci-fi movies.