There are few rings of cinematic hell worse than bad broad comedies. Watching Rasmus Merivoo’s Alien 2 or: The Return of Valdis in 17 Episodes at this year’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, after coming off a 12-hour flight, felt like sitting down to enjoy a torture device. The sequel to Merivoo’s popular Estonian short film from 2006, Alien or: The Escape of Valdis in 11 Episodes, Alien 2 is a broad comedy with Farrelly-esque shock jokes and toilet humor. It’s the type of movie where blow jobs, circle jerks, and groin-kicks represent the high-points of its comedy; the low-points, then, are misogyny, homophobia, and rape. It all feels very 2006, and perhaps that’s the point. If this writer wanted to be charitable, the angle would be to call it a satire on rampant far-right lunacy and patriarchal worldviews. A more honest approach would be to characterize it as vulgar trash with the same ugly politics it pretends to be lampooning. An Estonian film programmer assured this writer t was the former; even taking his word on it, it was a highly contemptible viewing experience regardless.
After getting beamed up by a UFO at the end of the first movie, Valdis (Märt Avandi) opens Alien 2 being returned to earth in the nude 20 years later. Taken in by his old friend Märt (Ott Sepp) and Märt’s sexually-frustrated wife Maili (Liisa Pulk), Valdis spends his first few days cuckolding Märt, riding along in his cop car, and getting ridiculously stoned. Growing tired of watching an old friend steal his wife and get him into trouble at work, Märt decides to get Valdis vaccinated to qualify him for the social services that will find him a place to sleep other than Maili’s bed. The doctor, a queer new-agey Neanderthal (yes, a literal Neanderthal) pumps the whole gang up with hallucinogens, convinces Märt and his friend Ott (Vallo Kirs) to jerk each other off, and then lets Valdis escape. On his way home, Valdis gets picked up by a group of anti-vax right-wingers engineering a conspiracy to bring back the patriarchy by building cars that run on hand sanitizer. Valdis becomes embroiled in their scheme to help men grow their balls back and recruits Märt to help him sabotage their 20-year high school reunion.
Alien 2 is pure lunacy, and that’s perhaps the best thing about the film: even if it’s not funny, it’s at least wholesale ridiculous and mildly inventive. True to its title, the film unfolds across 17 chapters (with headings like “8. Valdis doesn’t see shit” and “16. Boys fuck the girls”), and the constant shuffling of the deck is far from boring. Some asides like a conspiracy nut trying to make a car out of hand sanitizer or a police station that’s turned partly into a diner because of falling crime rates (so low, in fact, that the Estonian government is thinking of renting out prison space in real life). The gonzo-ness might have even been inspired if the filmmaker’s had decided to expand the comedic purview beyond such raunchy masculine stock-types. As the film builds toward its explosive conclusion, wheeling out a few explicit references to the state of modern Estonia amid all the orgies, explosions, and UFOs, one might begin to hope that something more ambitious could start to emerge from all the muck. Alas, it’s all spectacle with no substance and a penchant for a little too much violent cruelty. When the main takeaway seems to be the waning power of white Estonian heterosexual men (or WHEM’s as Maili, avid of old-school patriarchy, calls them), it’s hard to feel particularly inspired.
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