REVIEW: Campy Sci-Fi Is Alive And Well In ‘Alpha Gang’

The last screening of Austin, TX’s Fantastic Fest went to a film made by Austin filmmakers and festival vets: Alpha Gang. Having already premiered at TIFF 2026, its Texas premiere played to a packed house that was just the right audience for the chaos, camp, and self-aware deprecation that the film has to offer.  

Directed and written by filmmaking duo David and Nathan Zellner, Alpha Gang is an alien invasion made up of beings who choose the form of hot people dressed like 50s bikers. Taking some direction from Tom of Finland for the male actors’ costumes, the 50s biker aesthetic clashes with the wide-open landscapes and old castle the titular Alpha Gang calls home as they plan world domination. 

Only, human bodies are too small and inadequate to store all of the information that their alien selves would have known or need. Without the large-scale epic battles blowing up the White House, Alpha Gang takes a different approach to the alien invasion.

More interested in seeing the aliens handle life as humans. The gang, Alpha-1 (Léa Seydoux), Alpha-2 (Dave Bautista), Alpha-3 (Bae Doona), Alpha-4 (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Alpha-5 (Lily-Rose Depp), and Alpha-6 (Riley Keough), are all learning the basics of human life. Like needing to evacuate the fuel you process, injuries, and the disease that ravages humans called emotions. 

Absurdity is the spice of life, and Alpha Gang is perfectly seasoned. 

The endearing quality of all these baby, doe-like characters is how much they attempt to mask the emotions that they are feeling. For the Alpha Gang, it’s about logic and nothing else, but pesky feelings aren’t something you can escape, especially when romance is in the air. Many of the performances feel like adults learning life, like any coming-of-age story, and that’s what gives each character their own charm. 

With a big jukebox at the center of the entrance room, we meet Alpha Gang as a group immediately taken by the music they find on Earth. It speaks to them, even if they don’t understand why. Dancing speaks to their emotions; they feel them deeply, even when they pretend not to, and we see it. Dance and music, despite the place they hold in the heart, aren’t seen for what they are, but art still allows the group to speak to their hearts when they can’t. 

It also reminds the audience that the Alpha Gang is like learning the world for the first time. Learning themselves and everything around them, all at once. As much as Alpha Gang is about an alien invasion, it’s also about feeling and acting on those feelings. It’s about how emotion drives us, and how we should give in to it from time to time, and how sometimes when we hide it, we just make things worse.

This isn’t a story about mass destruction or extinction, with humans serving as props. Each member of Alpha Gang offers up someone that the audience can hold onto, each learning a different part of themselves, be that love, independence, or loneliness as well. 

Dave Bautista is one of many standout performances in a film that focuses on vulnerability and naivete in ways that run counter to the traditional expectations of the roles they play. Additionally, Léa Seydoux’s performance also makes an impact. She’s fiery and strong, but she’s also deeply in love, even if saying so will hurt her authority as a leader if she gives in to the disease of emotion. While each character feels unique in their own right, with actors behind them that are hard to forget, visually or performance-wise, it’s those three that will stick with you. 

The absurdity is the point, and the emotions are the heart of Alpha Gang. But when the Beta Gang comes to Earth, Alpha Gang’s plans begin to take a back seat to figuring out what this new gang means for them. Beta-1 (Cate Blanchett) and her subsequent Beta 2, 3, etc., stand in the way unless the Alphas can convince them otherwise.

From fashion to performances, Alpha Gang embraces cult cinema with flair. 

Here, Cate Blanchett sings supreme with her Australian accent, skirt chained to her hand, eyepatch, and twisted lip. She’s intimidating, funny, and the real deal of a John Waters character. But where Waters embraced transgression and filth, Alpha Gang is embracing something softer, and Beta-1 is here to smash that with a warhammer. 

With a soundtrack that hits on every level and performances from actors who lean into the camp, this film embraces its influences, falls in love with comedy, and doubles down on love. Cinematically charming and effortlessly funny, Alpha Gang doesn’t look to transgress any boundaries, other than the expectations of sci-fi itself. 

Alpha Gang is a weird, funny, cult-film lover’s dream of a sci-fi film. It’s bloody, funny, and so over-the-top it makes you wonder how the star caliber was assembled for their roles. And most importantly, Alpha Gang is just the kind of film that I feel like we have started to lose. It doesn’t push boundaries like John Waters, but it uses the genre Waters popularized, blending joy, love, intimacy, and violence into a campy sci-fi story that is easy to love and hard to forget. 

Alpha Gang does not currently have a release date but has played at Fantastic Fest, TIFF, and Telluride film festivals.