REVIEW: Flytrap

- By Allan Lear

Cultural touchstones are, paradoxically, a highly individual thing. Have you seen that quiz show Pointless? (This is what I mean, by the way; I’m two sentences into the review and already I’m having to check whether we share the same cultural markers.) The object of the game in Pointless is not merely to give the correct answer to a question, but to give the least well-known answer. Therefore the skill is not merely in general knowledge, but in correctly assessing how common that knowledge is.

I suck at Pointless. I hopelessly overestimate how many people know some things, and I am pathetically ignorant in areas that have apparently been mastered by the entire population of the known universe. For example, there are undiscovered multicellular organisms living on the undersea volcanic vents of frozen Jovian moons that can name more Take That singles than I can.

There are two reasons I bring this up in relation to Flytrap. The first is that Flytrap makes a really big thing about people being named after characters in Gilligan’s Island. I have never seen Gilligan’s Island. I am only vaguely aware that there used to be a TV show called Gilligan’s Island. What it was about, who was in it, I have absolutely no idea. That annoying whistling thing that one of the characters in Flytrap does, is that something to do with Gilligan’s Island? I do not know, nor do I especially care to, so long as he stops it right now.

The second reason is that I am going to go right ahead and assume you’ve seen Species.

Flytrap begins with a first-person narration expertly delivered in wonderfully smooth, velvet tones by our lead, Jeremy Crutchley. Crutchley continues to be excellent throughout the film, never knowingly overplaying. As a consequence, he achieves more with a facial expression than many lesser actors do when squealing and waving their arms in the air.

Crutchley is driving through an American backwater when, for seemingly no reason, his car breaks down. Noticing that he is being watched from a nearby house, he goes to use the observer’s phone to call for assistance. The phone belongs to the unusual but lovely Ina-Alice Kopp and, despite her peculiarly flat affect and the urgency of his journey, he knocks the phone call on the head in order to get half-cut and have sex with her. Only on waking the next day does he start to realise that all is not what it seems, and it’s then that he discovers that Ina-Alice is not alone; and that finishing his journey is going to be even harder than it seems – especially when a mysterious voice starts whispering warnings through the air ducts…

From then on the plot is pure Species territory. Kopp is an alien from another world (which world? The clue’s in the title) and she intends to procreate with a suitable Earth male in order to produce a crossbreed that can survive on our world unaided. She and her fellow invaders have chosen their names from the cast list of Gilligan’s Island, which is why that was relevant; it’s a step up from “Ford Prefect”, I suppose. From then on the film concentrates on Crutchley’s experience of captivity, while Kopp is caught in a tug of war between loyalty to her alien compatriots and care for the father of her mutant crossbreed child. We even get a scene where the father gets to feel his alien lover’s unnaturally quickened womb burgeoning impossibly with rapidly-expanding, genetically unnatural life.

The principle difference between the two films is that Species is a film about a lot of very well-regarded actors making total fools of themselves, and Flytrap is a film about a handful of largely-unrecognised actors doing a good job very quietly. Crutchley excels as our immoral and self-centred protagonist, and Kopp’s performance is a well-judged exercise in quiet discomfort, every sentence and action being subtly wrong in a way that underscores the disconnection between her and the people around her.

The remainder of the cast have only small roles, though in the main, they make the most of them. Jonah Blechman is good as the mysterious, sadistic Gilligan, who does that annoying whistling thing while torturing his pet human. The only disappointment is The Skipper, who is built up as a double-hard bastard but only appears for two minutes before leaving the baddying duties to Blechman again.

Shot in faded colours and with a claustrophobic atmosphere, Flytrap is a good example of how lower-budget films can make better use of their ideas than their big-budget rivals by the simple pressure of creativity that restricted financial resources inevitably bring. It’s a character piece rather than a spectacle, and it’s all the more involving as a result. The simple conceit of being held hostage in a classic suburban background, a la Hallowe’en and what have you, brings a suitable air of frustration to the lead character’s imprisonment, and the unknown nature of the alien islanders’ bigger plans only lends itself to the small-scale and personal nature of the drama.

I enjoyed it very much, and when I discovered that it was all building up to a silly B-movie style punchline, well, that made me even happier.

- By Allan Lear