Director/Music – Flying Lotus, Screenplay – Jonni Remmler, Producers – Nate Bolotin & Matthew Metcalfe, Photography – Richard Bluck, Visual Effects Supervisor – Carol Petrie, Visual Effects – PRPVFX, Special Effects – Film FX (Supervisor – Steve Yardley), Prosthetics Designer – Deidre Cowley, Production Design – Ross McGarva. Production Company – XYZ Films.
Cast
Eiza Gonzalez (Riya Ortiz), Aaron Paul (Brion Cargyle), Iko Awais (Adhi), Kate Elliott (Catherine Clarke), Beulah Koale (Kevin), Flying Lotus (Shawn Davis)
Plot
Rita Ortiz comes around in a spaceship that is part of an exploratory expedition landed on the planet KOI-442, nicknamed Ash. She finds that all of her fellow crew are dead while she has amnesia. She is joined by Brion Cargyle, another crewmember who was in the orbiting space station, who has arrived to see what has happened to the rest of them. As they investigate, they discover that the planet had already been colonised by aliens that were in the process of terraforming it. During their investigations of the alien operations, members of the crew returned infected by an alien parasite.
Ash was the second feature film from Flying Lotus. More mundanely born as Steve Ellison, Flying Lotus became a rapper and has put out six albums, while also turning his attentions to filmmaking. His first film as director was Kuso (2017), a film so deranged and incomprehensible I gave it Worst Film on my Best/Worst of 2017 list. Flying Lotus next made the Ozzy’s Dungeon episode of the horror anthology V/H/S/99 (2022), a much more watchable outing, before returning with Ash. Flying Lotus can be briefly seen on screen here as the dreadlocked member of the crew during the flashbacks. The film was shot in New Zealand and comes executive produced by Neill Blomkamp, director of District 9 (2009) and Chappie (2015).
With Flying Lotus, I was expecting Ash to be a film that was completely deranged and made no sense. The surprise about it is just what a traditional film it ends up being. It is conventionally plotted – and okay there are some conceptual reversal twists and outlandish creature effects, but these come within the confines of a script that makes (mostly) logical sense out of them.
In fact, Ash almost goes the other way from Flying Lotus’s other films – he has done nothing more than make another copy of Alien (1979). It feels exactly like one of the Alien copies that were being made by the bucketload in the 1980s/90s, or perhaps even more so some of the better budgeted ones that started to come out in the 2000s. There is the same basic mix of elements as Alien – the ship landed on the dank and inhospitable planet; the alien ruins; the alien organism that infects humans and emerges in monstrous form to pursue the heroine through the ship at the end.
Aaron Paul and Eiza Gonzalez
Where you expect a mishmash of incomprehensible surrealism from Flying Lotus, Ash is actually plotted to tried-and-true cliché. That said, I did spend nearly halfway into the film trying to work out what was going on. A lot of the film seems to be not a lot more than people creeping down darkened spaceship corridors as per the Alien standard. And even then, it is a plot that fails to make a lot of sense. It took me a second viewing of the film to finally work out why a bunch of things were happening.
Flying Lotus does conduct some very imaginative variants when it comes to the creature effects with the alien nasty at the end. The film also pulls some Conceptual Reversal Twists on the audience, turning a number of our assumptions about what is going on on their heads. One of the major twists reminded me a great deal of a similar twist in Pandorum (2009) but feels kind of indifferent in the way it is rehashed here.
