Wyndham Tower looms over a London slum like a fortress, or a prison. Long corridors mark off equally spaced, nondescript doors, some of which (on the higher levels) are barred. It breeds a tough kind of people, so tough that, when an alien crashes into the area, a group of youths quickly kill it and proudly parade the creature about the place as if it were the boar's head in Lord of the Flies. Then more creatures rain from the sky. Stronger, scarier ones.Attack the Block is the first feature of Joe Cornish, a comedian indirectly known to nerds for his work on featurettes for the home video releases of Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Cornish's chamber horror takes several cues from the former film, not only in its breakneck style and banal British setting but in its social cleverness. By limiting the action to a council estate and writing in British street slang, Cornish brings up racial and class divisions in the inner city, focusing specifically on how those division shape youths.
