After conquering the small screen (the pair were given Lifetime Achievement gongs by the National Television Awards when they were only 27), Geordie jokers Ant and Dec make their feature film debuts in this curious comedy from “Phoenix Nights” director Jonny Campbell.
In a semi-true story they play Ray Santilli (Dec) and Gary Shoefield (Ant), a pair of British chancers who in 1995 convinced the world they had discovered a videotape of an alien autopsy filmed at Roswell, New Mexico, nearly fifty years earlier.
In reality, the lads had knocked the video up in their Gran’s kitchen - using a tailor’s dummy stuffed with haggis and pig’s blood - but this didn’t stop them earning over a million quid from the hoax, travelling the world and becoming celebrities in their own right until the truth finally came out.
They say:
Total Film: "Bumbles along in its sub-sub-sub-Ealing comedy manner towards an improbable conclusion that will have the intellectually normal not so much rolling in the aisles as pegging it down them.”
Empire: "Often funny and infectiously silly - Ant and Dec conquer (or at least have a good stab at) another visual medium. Eric and Ernie would be proud.”
Guardian: "The combination of oddity and Arthur Daley cheek made me smile sometimes: like a Sunday Sport front page about Elvis on the moon.”
We say:
The US military’s rash statement that a UFO had crashed at Roswell in 1947 (a story which was then retracted four hours later saying that it was actually debris from a weather balloon) kick-started one of the longest running conspiracy theories in history.
“The X-Files” and “Independence Day” are probably the most famous incarnations of this myth, and now we have the inferior on all fronts “Alien Autopsy” to add to the list.
Sporadically amusing but lacking in purpose, excitement and – most importantly of all – mystery, Ant and Dec’s first foray onto the big screen is a resounding disappointment.
Furthermore, asking us to believe that Santilli and Shoefield actually saw the real Roswell autopsy – not least because they admit already having lied about it in 1995 – is just plain insulting.
Celebrity or not, long before the credits start to role any sane minded viewers will be thinking “Get Me Outta Here!”
Extras:
Quite a few, but they don't save it. Director's audio commentary, making of, deleted scenes, an alternative opening and outtakes...
CAST
Declan Donnelly, Ant McPartlin, Bill Pullman, Harry Dean Stanton,
Omid Djalili, Jimmy Carr, Nichole Hiltz, Gotz Otto
DIRECTOR
Jonny Campbell
TIME
94 mins
POSTED...
Mon 10 Apr 2006 at 11:07pm
