My Sorority Sister Is An Alien

 

It's rare to discover a movie made in Canada that fully acknowledges it was, you know, made in Canada. Maybe it's my own history with Hallmark (I once paused once during Once Upon a Holiday at exactly the right moment to catch a screenshot of characters wandering by The First Bank of Ontario despite the film being set in New York) but it's shocking in the best of ways when a film rampant in aboots embraces its own politeness and ice hockey obsession.

Quick Plot: It's Halloween, and a teen jock enters a home to discover a pair of frozen frat bros watching static. Put a pin in that because now, it's winter at St. John's College and virginal freshmen Luke and Roger are very, very horny. 

Luke meets the dorm neighbors of his dreams in the laundry room. Lilly and Constance are a pair of pre-med sorority blondes eager to flirt with the Elijah Wood-by-way-of-Jonah-Hill Roger and CW-pretty Luke. It seems too good to be true because obviously, it is! Playing peeping tom like the typical college nerd of cinema history does, Luke discovers there's more to those beautiful bodies than pilates classes.

Tentacles! We've got CGI-spewing tentacles because as you probably figured out by now, Constance and Lily are aliens on a Canadian mission to find food and breeding opportunities. Not surprisingly, Luke has a hard time getting anyone to believe him, even after a few male students sporting bucket hats and pooka shell necklaces turn up dead in mysterious ways. 

He has two lady allies: ex-girlfriend and detective Nicole Eggert (give me that movie) and misfit classmate Alex, whose misfit status seems to stem from the simple detail that she has dark hair. As Roger grows closer to Constance, Luke knows their time is running out. What's a boy to do?

Decoys is a strange little film, one that plays like a junior version of Species but with (thankfully) a knowing wink. It took me just about up to the big talent show -- one that involved baton twirling, flame throwing, ventriloquism, and flight attendant safety lessons -- to confirm that director/co-writer Matthew Hastings expected his audience to chuckle more than scream. 

How much of that is fully intentional and how much came about when the 2004 computer effects kicked is probably up for debate. I'm guessing the target audience was more the age of the college characters than 40something horror bloggers, so while I can't really speak to how well the actual film works for its goals, I'll say that somewhere in its 90 minute running time, I stopped rolling my eyes and found myself rooting for it. 

High Points

Oddly enough, it's the absurdity of the "cold Canadian college beauty pageant" setup that somehow packs the most successful laughs

Low Points

On the other hand, icky frat pledges talking in rejected Animal House jokes as a language is pretty painful

Lessons Learned

Yanni fandom is the clearest indicator of alien origin

You can do a lot of bad things at a frat party, but spilling beer on angora is an unforgivable offense 

In Canada, a "red dress" (deliberately in quotation marks) is actually blue

Rent/Bury/Buy

When you find yourself in the mood for a mild Canadian sci-fi alien thriller with a sense of humor, I don't know how many more choices you'll have than Decoys (well, maybe its sequel Decoys 2: Alien Seduction).  It's streaming on Peacock in all its 2004 glory.