Alien Addiction

  I normally try to avoid stoner comedies. If you've ever been sober around stoned people, you'd probably understand why; They find anything funny. For every Smiley Face or Harold & Kumar movie you get tons of quarter-assed shit like... I dunno- Dude, Where's My Car? or Your Highness, to give a couple high-profile examples; Lots of mugging, a high (ha!) concept, and tired, hacky juvenile humour.

 Case in point: 2018's Alien Addiction, which has the distinction of being the first Kiwi comedy that's completely failed to make me even chuckle a single. Fucking. Time.

...Yeah, this seems about right.

 Riko (Jimi Jackson) is a deadbeat stoner who spends his days getting high with his dimwit friends and getting up to sub-Beavis and Butthead shenanigans in the ass-end of New Zealand. The same ass-end where a couple of aliens have just crash-landed their UFO in; These two dress like bargain-bin cenobites and their puffy faces look a little like... remember the Terry Gilliam cartoon/collage segments in Flying Circus? Kind of like that, but with an ass in their forehead.

 These aliens have come to earth to... suck things up into a sort of high-tech bong and smoke them, as part of a science survey or something. They almost immediately run into a tourist taking a shit in the woods and, mistaking her turd for an offering, they blaze it up... and get high on it.

 In their subsequent hunt for non-metaphorical good shit, they run into Riko while he's masturbating in the shower. He ends up agreeing to act as their supplier, looking for ever more pungent shit. This somehow leads to Jacinta (JoJo Waaka), a very overweight woman whose shit the aliens get addicted to. Oh, and Jacinta has a sex drive, isn't that hilarious? Well, no, but the film disagrees to the point where there are almost as many "jokes" about that as there are about the aliens' quest for feces. Thomas Sainsbury pops up as some sort of tabloid reporter hunting for the aliens later on, but sadly he's as unfunny as anything else in this film.

 As the plot above should make clear, this is a gleefully crude, offensive, juvenile movie. It's built around toilet humour and fat jokes - you know, the sort of thing people keep insisting 'wouldn't get made today'.  Going by this movie, that might have more to do with quality control than any type of wokeness.

 There's exactly one ingenious idea in the whole movie: at one point one of the characters tries to lure the aliens with stool samples, in a way that ineptly parallels the way Reese's Pieces were used in E.T. Other than that, it's all deeply lazy crap. It's so devoid of ideas that at several points the script just... gives up and lets Riko mug or dance for the camera, something that never fails to get old almost immediately. Jackson seems like he may be fun to hang around with, but he sure as hell doesn't make material as turgid as this worth watching. The same goes for everyone else in this pretty much worthless film.

 As low-effort as... well, almost everything here is, writer/director/cinematographer/editor Shae Sterling at least ensures that the film is competently shot, with lots of very crisp footage of its lovely New-Zealand setting - That's no small thing! His choice of compositions and comic timing, however, are basic at best.

 This is probably ok to watch with chemical assistance, but then again, so are the Teletubbies.