Australiens

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nick s It looks like they had fun making this. Some of the child actors struggled to contain a smirk or two. However, for people who enjoy mildly realistic acting this is unwatchable. Actors really need a bare minimum amount of coaching. I can't really comment on the script because I didn't get that far through the movie before tapping out. But the dialogue I did see was pretty cliche. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 08/30/24 Full Review Audience Member I thought it was pretty funny. gotta give up to those Australians. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 02/10/23 Full Review Audience Member Refreshingly funny Australiens shows that it is possible to make a funny cult spoof film even on a low budget. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 01/25/23 Full Review Audience Member With a ridiculous title and the Monster Pictures label to back it up, Australiens sounded like a real piece of Australian dumb fun. The standard for acting and scripting in Australiens is immediately asserted within the first minute of the film. With pretentiously untalented child actors delivering heavily hokey dialogue, the film's status as an intentionally so-bad-it's-good doesn't even give audiences a second to adjust to it before it begins hitting them over the head with its ridiculous nature. And soon enough, it goes into utter excess with this. There is a line for how stupid a film can intentionally be before it becomes pretentiously bad. Australiens is a film which crosses this line at every conceivable opportunity and endlessly hits viewers over the head with its utter stupidity to the point that it very much sweats it. The film is so determined to be the stupidest possible B-movie it can relies on the writing style and production values of a really silly YouTube-grade comedy sketch, but this is not enough of a hook to last a feature length running time. The premise in Australiens is very simple and the story itself is never really a problem, but the dialogue itself is merciless in its bad sense of humour while the characters are very annoying. I wasn't sure if the cast was terrible or if they were just portraying the awkward stereotypes as explicitly as possible, but they are so loud and abrasive about it that it's fairly unbearable at times. If the characters aren't obsessively self-centered and egotistical, they're awkwardly silent and make things worse every time they speak. This makes them flat-out annoying and unlikable, and the small cast of the film ensures that they are essentially all we get for the film's entirety. They grow tiresome very fast, and as a result their sense of humour fails to land all that well. Australiens would be funnier if the cast was a lot faster with their delivery, a fact which I learned by fast forwarding the film in an attempt to enjoy it more. This actually worked because it cut through all the awkward pauses between lame dialogue of the characters while speeding up the fact that they take every joke one sentence too far. But since director Joe Bauer did not see the sensibility in how to appropriately pace his overbearing sense of humour, I ultimately didn't even laugh once. I don't know why the director chose to be so abundant with this theme, but it didn't work the first time nor did it work the following hundreds of times over the following 112 minutes. Australiens felt like it had gone on for too long with just a few minutes of the film over, so attempting to deal with it for close to two hours is clearly not going to create a result which is any more satisfying. As well as that, there is little about Australiens to capitalise on the fact that it is an Australian film. The title of the film suggested there would be more of a patriotic self-parodying sense of humour to the film, but it is extremely rare throughout the film. The feature could have utilised better Australian stereotypes such as bogans and drongos in their war against Aliens, but the feature instead attempts to replicate that which has been long-established by Hollywood narratives. This betrays the film's potential to utilise the originality suggested by its title, and frankly there is too little about the film to signify that it is all that Australian in any way. I know you can't expect every Australian film to hit viewers over the head with its cultural background, but when the potential is right there and the title suggests that the film is going to work off of this theme, the arbitrary result can prove really dissatisfying. It's also obvious how amateur the production's technical department is. Even though the film aims to be ridiculously bad, poor audio dubbing and bad sound recording is concerning just as generally bad filmmaking. It may be an arbitrary element in a film which aims to be intentionally bad in so many departments, but slack sound editing is just a work of general cinematic incompetence. The cinematography itself is rather inconsistent because Australiens is relatively tame in its visual quality and presentation yet sometimes it proves to be appropriately moody with the way in which it's cut together. There's nothing particularly special about how it's all filmed, but at least the editing ensures that none of the shots really linger on for too long. The one production value I will voice a mild appreciation for is the visual effects. I expected that the visual effects in Australiens would be very intentionally bad, as in the kind of quality you'd get out of a film distributed The Asylum. But actually I enjoyed them. Most of the time they were obviously visual effects, but the kind you'd find on a good old fashioned Saturday morning camp TV show. They make the experience fun and pay solid credibility to the filmmakers, while also hinting that the film could have succeeded if it went in a different direction with the story. There's the added benefit of how they are used in the action scenes; despite there being no major cinematic grace to the action sequences, they are cut together nicely and utilise the best of the film's production values well enough to create momentary visual spectacles at sporadic points throughout the film. The musical score is also very well composed. Rather than just being a repetitive and simplistic background theme, the musical score in Australiens actually carries a classical alien feeling to it which reinforces the science fiction nature of the film. It is also very energetic which helps keep the mood of the film consistently progressing forward, so there is at least some consistent life in the film. It's so effective that the moments of extended dialogue which are bereft of music feel lifeless by comparison; but I suppose that was bound to happen either way with such a ridiculous screenplay. Australiens has the best intentions and a strong use of campy visuals and music, but its overbearingly repetitive sense of humour and annoying characters shift away from sensible satire and parody into straight-up juvenile territory. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 01/27/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Australiens

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