Close Encounters Of The Biker Gang Kind: The Zellners’ Alien Comedy Probes For Laughs
If you tell a joke and it doesn’t land, telling it even louder won’t make it funnier. It’s a bit of advice that sibling filmmakers David and Nathan Zellner might want to heed following Alpha Gang. Their latest is an overlong and overloud one gag movie that leaves a game, all-star cast looking for the punchline.
At first glance, the titular crew don’t look like alien invaders. Alpha One, Alpha Two, Alpha Three, Alpha Four, Alpha Five, and Alpha Six — played by Léa Seydoux, Dave Bautista, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Lily-Rose Depp, Doona Bae and Riley Keough, respectively — look like they’ve walked off the backlot of 1950s juvenile delinquent flick. All wearing matching leather jackets bedazzled with the name Alpha Gang on the back, they hang out in an abandoned Eastern European castle and dance to jukebox tunes by Elvis Presley, The Crystals, Conway Twitty, The Poni-Tails, and more (music supervisor Jillian Ellis working overtime). But the twist is that these groovy cats are actually aliens and they’ve got a mission: take over the planet.
It’s not going to be easy for these extraterrestrials for a couple of reasons. First, it seems that on the way to Earth some crucial information didn’t make it. Namely, they don’t exactly know who’s in charge. But more problematically, the more time they spend among humankind, the more they begin to realize they’re aren’t just autonomous fleshbags. “It’s a disease called emotions,” Alpha One explains to the rest about the strange sensations they’re beginning to feel inside their hominid form. Resistance to these feelings is futile, and soon the group are trying to avoid an infection of sentiment, when another alien (Chris Pine) shows up and reveals one of them is a traitor.
In the Seinfeld episode “The Serenity Now,” Jerry exclaims “What is this salty discharge?” when for the first time he sheds tears after confronting his own feelings. Now imagine that gag pushed to nearly two hours and that’s generally the experience sitting through the tedium of Alpha Gang. In fairness, the Zellners leave it all up on the screen. The production design by Scott Kuzio is top rate, making great use of brutalist buildings, pastoral fields, and funky sci-fi gear, and bringing it all together seamlessly. In its best moments, the Zellners genre mashup recalls the work of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Let The Corpses Tan, The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears), experts at warping genre conventions through their own unique sensibilities.
Most of all the Zellners get a committed performance from an ensemble that looks like they’re having the time of their lives. Every Alpha Gang member is given a stage to shine. Doona Bae, for example, gets one of the film’s biggest laughs with a gut busting line reading of “I’m Johnny!” when the group debates whether or not to change their names. The filmmakers also give a platform for Pine who essentially gets his own mini-movie in the middle of the picture, displaying comedic chops that Hollywood needs to be put to use more often.
Yet all these props, locations, and performances add up to very little. As the Alpha Gang start falling for life on Earth, they witness humans at war with each other. The aliens come to the wholly unoriginal conclusion that humanity will likely end up destroying themselves, so they can just wait them out and enjoy they pleasures that await them out in the big wide world.
The Zellners’ view on the capacity and range of human emotion is fairly limited, with a perception of sex that remains firmly PG-rated. It says something that their dialogue-free Sunset Sasquatch registered with more depth about the condition of humans and the natural world. And as the movie devolves into an unending and ear-rattling number of machine gun battles, audiences may wish to be beamed out of the cinema altogether.
Reviewed on September 14th at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival (51st edition) – Special Presentations. 109 Minutes.
★★/☆☆☆☆☆
