Berserk Belgian bloodbath, Attack on Paradise is a rollicking triumph of creativity and heart over budget and plausibility.
Swarthy and brooding Sullyman has endured “seven years of grief and nightmares” after being jailed for leathering a couple of smug policemen over his sick mother’s pills. He goes to see his rapidly deteriorating mother at the Paradise apartment complex in Antwerp, only to find his former residence under the control of the viperous Prince Hamza, an evil drug lord with Bond baddie delusions, who practises bamboo torture. And prunes things, because all truly evil screen villains must prune things.
Meanwhile, a police squad that treats collateral damage as a charming hobby is preparing to storm the building with all guns blazing. With the help of a lone copper who passed training by “sucking of the commissioner”, Sullyman endeavours to extricate his dying mother.
Each floor is controlled by a different Capo, including a former Congolese child soldier turned mega-pimp, a merciless gun runner, and a disgraced MMA fighter who snaps people like cheese straws. There are also random unexplained goats, blacklight sex rooms festooned with sperm stains in the “action painting” mode of Jackson Pollock, and crackheads regressed into a virulent zombie state to contend with.
As a martial arts action movie existing in the same world as The Furious and The Night Comes for Us, this spirited Belgian ball buster is defiantly sitting in the bullpen of that ball park. Indeed, Attack on Paradise regularly rumbles across the screen like a Temu version of The Raid, while demanding more belief suspension than a Trump press conference.
Yet, as a completely insane B-movie with a broad comedic streak, it’s actually a highly entertaining blast of fist-pumping fun. The laughs are both at and with the film in equal measure, but always framed by self-awareness and irrepressible enthusiasm.
It fares better with ballistics than beatings simply because gunplay is more forgiving than grappling. That being said, the cast are as game as Pitbull’s for the bloody havoc and the inventive and plentiful gore keeps momentum from stagnating. Everything is made available as a weapon, including an armoury of fluorescent dildos. The numerous killings and finishing moves come thick and fast, including a final boss death for the ages, as do the utterly implausible scenarios and ludicrous match-ups.
The SWAT teams are more dangerous than the criminals, spraying bullets through closed doors as if fresh from the Oscar Pistorius school of covert incursion. Their stratagem for tactical room clearing, slamming doors and wandering blithely in front of each other’s line of sight had me howling. The whole operation is a total clusterfuck, and it’s brilliant.
Stylistically and thematically, the film more than flirts with the dangers of derivativeness, but these influences are so diverse it makes for a blast. Here we have the rustic mega-violence ethos of cult British filmmaker Darren Ward blended with peak dystopian sidebar John Carpenter, and the empathy-free tower block assault of Dredd stewing in the essence of Walter Hill’s The Warriors.
Attack on Paradise is another quintessential cult movie in waiting, uncovered by the Fantasia Film Festival. Unsubtle in its execution but still able to embed threads of humanism and hope into the broken bones of comic book violence. Barnstorming movie-making that rides proudly on the wave of a deliriously nonsensical plot in the name of shameless entertainment.
★★★★
Screened at Fantasia Film Festival on July 19th/ Achmed Akkabi, Jamal Ben Saddik, Said Boumazoughe, Clara Cleymans, Imanuelle Grives / Dir: Bob Colaers / Blue Finch Film Releasing
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