Welcome To G-Town

Bluesky

G-town? Where is that? When one of the protagonists in this ambitious little home-made comedy pronounces the titular line following an assault on an alien, he gets called on it by his pal, who has never heard the expression before. But this is, as we are advised at the very start, not the Glasgow we know. It’s an entirely fictitious one, where anything might happen.

At first it’s a little unclear where the boundaries of that fiction lie. What is supposed to be happening for real, and what is part of the filmmaking process being worked on by ambitious but profoundly lazy graduate Bill (Danny McAllen) when he’s supposed to be working? After an opening scene in which an alien attacks a street cleaner (with delightful plasticine special effects), we move on to focus on Bill, who gets fired (“again,” as he tells his pals) and begins the search for a new job. Having a film degree, he’s overqualified for the street cleaning job that just became available – an experience that many well educated unemployed folk will relate to – so he tries a mysterious office which happens to have a ‘hiring’ sign on the door. It’s this that leads to his first encounter with the interplanetary enemy.

The idea behind this is that aliens newly arrived on Earth, and some way off from their originally intended target – are trying to disguise themselves as locals by adopting every available Scots-related cliché. One of them is inspired by the famous statue of the Duke of Wellington to wear a traffic cone on his head. Others wrap themselves in tartan and saltires, and they’re led by an individual in a See You Jimmy hat (a tartan bonnet with attached ginger wig). Naturally, this isn’t as effective as they hopes, and despite their interstellar technology, master plan and ray gun, they are out of their depth in a city known for greeting international terrorists with the phrase “We’ll set about you.”

Welcome To G-Town draws on aspects of Glaswegian culture more commonly brought to the fore 40 years ago than today. There’s a fair bit of violence (often encouraged by a trainee police recruit), and a hard man torture scene which goes on longer than it needs to. This feels a little odd coming from graduates, who would traditionally be in a different social space, but the film gets away with a lot thanks to its self-deprecating humour and the absurdity that emerges from costume and props work which, in places, looks as if it has been created by a pre-school class. This is not a weakness. It adds character and charm, where low quality but more realistic effects would have been damaging.

Underscoring everything here is the can-do spirit to be found in the film’s heroes and in its creators. At no point does the story feel as if it has been pared back for budgetary reasons. instead, a practical solution has always been found, and so what if it looks a bit ridiculous? The story still powers along and the evident fun that the cast is having will encourage viewers to warm to it. Those who have no patience with this sort of thing are very unlikely to watch in the first place. It was a natural fit for the 2026 Frightfest audience. Whilst parts of it owe a debt to Peter Jackson genre classic Bad Taste, it has enough original spirit to keep it going, and it ‘s nice to see Glasgow getting to play its (fictional) self for a change instead of New York, Philadelphia or Gotham City. It’s no small achievement to pull off an amateur production like this, and one hopes that the team behind it will keep on going.

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