You have to give director Tony Jopia (Deadtime, Dawning Of The Dead) credit for letting us know right from the go just what to expect from Cute Little Buggers. Within the first few minutes, we get aliens here to mate with our women, a set of large, bare, silicone-enhanced breasts, tentacles, killer rabbits and bloody impalement. Shakespeare this isn’t.
Melchior (Kristofer Dayne, Crying Wolf) returns to his rural English home town to bring his estranged father (Tim Hope) the news of the death of his mother. Not that his father could give a shit either way. Complicating things is his ex Rose (Lydie Misiek, Adam Et Eve), there’s still some chemistry behind them. But she’s engaged to Mechoir’s nemesis Charles (Samar Sarila, Dawning Of The Dead).
Local girls start going missing and men turn up torn apart right before the towns music festival. The police try to cover it up. But soon they have no choice to deal with the threat of killer alien rabbits who want to get our women and fuck like bunnies.
Obviously, Cute Little Buggers is not a serious horror film. It is a cheerfully, rude, crude and over the top exercise in exploitation. The plot keeps spiralling off in all manner of directions. Gangsters, hitchhikers, rock stars and even the psychic Mystic Mary played by genre icon Caroline Munro (The Haunting Of Margam Castle, Maniac). All the various plot threads do get a bit much at times. And it runs a bit long at an hour and forty-eight minutes. But for the most part, the demented plot twists and frequent bursts of blood and bare flesh keep it entertaining.
Cute Little Buggers features plenty of effects and they’re a fairly mixed bag. The CGI spacecraft and bunny creatures aren’t the worst I’ve ever seen but they’re far from great either. Think one of the better SyFy originals and you’ve got the idea. The blood and gore effects, however, work a lot better, seeming to be a mix of practical and computer-enhanced.
Cute Little Buggers is the kind of film you put on when you have friends over for beer and movie night. Assuming, of course, your friends have a twisted sense of humor. And in that case, you can toss on Alien Party Crashers and Australiens to make a night of it.
Cute Little Buggers is available on DVD from Uncork’d Entertainment.