Useless Humans

By: Arlene Allen

If you’re looking for lessons on how to make a great horror comedy, give Director Stephen Ohl and his crew a call. In addition to having 2020’s most appropriate film title, Useless Humans is the perfect blend of camp, smarts, familiar tropes and innovation. It’s got party humor, retro aliens, two tough chicks and a group of thirty-year old “kids on bikes.” That it has jump scares and gory bits. This has to be one of my favorite horror films of 2020 so far and I’m betting it will be one of yours, too.

Brian (Josh Zuckerman) is an assistant at a planetarium and it’s the day of his thirtieth birthday. He has a choice between spending it as his self-aggrandizing windbag boss’s whipping boy or getting together with his college besties whom he hasn’t seen in decades. Fortunately, Brian has as much heart as he has smarts and he goes to meet up with Louis (Rushi Kota), the doctor, Jess (Davida Williams), the environmentalist he has had a crush on since college, and wild child Alex (Luke Youngblood) at a cabin they would stay at during college at Summer’s end to watch a meteor shower.

What they don’t know is that this year the cabin is already occupied by an extraterrestrial being with a dastardly plan to destroy the planet Earth!  Yes, it’s campy, but in a Scooby-Doo/Goonies/kids-on-bikes kind of way it is a tip of the hat to all “meddling kids” coming of middle age story. There are the James Franco/Seth Rogan yuks, but it’s made quite clear that these are intelligent men and women who are also (thank goodness) genre savvy. They’re joined in their fight by two agents being paid to retrieve the alien’s otherworldly device (whom we don’t know), Wendy (Maya Kazan) and…Chum. (Star Edy Ganem wins Deadpan of the Year when she says “Chum.”) The film offers up a very 1950s science fiction alien – except this one has disemboweling fingernails and can teleport.

I love that the heroes actually formulate a smart solution to defeat their alien rival instead of just being blind luck. Our four young leads generate real warmth on screen; it really did feel as if they’d been best friends forever. I may have given too much away already, so I will stop here and praise director Ohl for a minute about the classy looking production values, the well placed and well timed special effects and the wickedly designed alien creature that reminded me of the Saturday afternoon science fiction horror films of the 1950s (which I loved as a kid).

If you need a little escape from all the news and negativity and you want a little stabby-stab with your belly laughs during these crazy times, Useless Humans is your film. Horror never blended so well with comedy than it does here.