Aliens in the Attic is a 2009 science fiction family comedy directed by John Schultz, written by Mark Burton and Adam F. Goldberg from a story by Burton. It runs 86 minutes and stars Carter Jenkins, Austin Butler, Ashley Tisdale, Ashley Boettcher and Robert Hoffman, with Kevin Nealon, Andy Richter, Doris Roberts and Tim Meadows in support, and the aliens voiced by Josh Peck, J.K. Simmons, Thomas Haden Church and Kari Wahlgren.

This was a pleasant little surprise. And I want to be clear that I am not claiming it is a good film, because it is not. But it was an easy watch, and there is genuine value in that.

There is some cringe humour, and some genuinely bad acting. But it is 2009, and Austin Butler is basically a child in this.

Which brings me to the thing that properly reframed the film for me afterwards. This is Austin Butler’s film debut. His first ever credit. He was born in August 1991, which made him seventeen during production. The man who would go on to earn an Academy Award nomination for Elvis and build the career he has now began right here, in a holiday house attic, fighting computer generated aliens alongside Ashley Tisdale.

And he is not the only one caught at an interesting moment. Tisdale was in the middle of the High School Musical run when this was made. The aliens, meanwhile, are voiced by Josh Peck, J.K. Simmons and Thomas Haden Church, which is a startlingly good voice cast for a film almost nobody talks about.

There were definitely some funny moments in this. Robert Hoffman in particular, as the obnoxious boyfriend who spends a chunk of the film under alien mind control being used as a physical puppet, is the best thing in it, and reviewers at the time singled him out. The Los Angeles Times went as far as to say the film belongs to him.

But the whole time I was watching, it kept reminding me of what these films used to be, and for some reason I could not stop thinking about Small Soldiers, which remains one of the greatest childhood films ever made.

That turns out not to have been my brain wandering. Reviewers at the time drew exactly the same line. One wrote that in addition to Gremlins, the film borrows a lot from Small Soldiers. Another noted that the alien character designs and the fantastical weaponry strongly evoke that same style of film. So the thing I was reaching for was genuinely there in the DNA.

A few other details I enjoyed finding out.