Welcome to G-Town (FrightFest 2026)

For all it’s a major horror festival, FrightFest always finds the space for little low-budget oddities, and sometimes these can be the most rewarding films on the schedule. A case in point is Welcome to G-Town, directed by twin brothers Nathan and Ben McQuaid. It opens with a caption explaining that “The action of this film takes place in a fictitious town called Glasgow (Earth)”. This might be a nod to the fact that a region of Mars has been named after Scotland’s largest city – or it might just be an acknowledgement that what follows is the McQuaid brothers’ personal take on Glaswegian life.

The influence of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s collisions of genre pulp with everyday banality is palpable, and as with Nida Manzoor’s Polite Society it does remind you what a fruitful influence this can be for directors looking to develop their own style. It is an influence that actively demands you mix up your cinephilia with observations of the place where you live, and so it proves with Welcome to G-Town. There is a lot of affection for Glasgow here, and there is also a lot of mockery of it.

Most importantly, there is a lot of claymation gore. The claymation gore starts up more or less immediately, as a street sweeper is swiftly dissolved to his bones by one of the film’s invading aliens. The alien then takes on its victim’s form – surely the only part of the film that might remind people of Jonathan Glazer’s similarly Glasgow-set science fiction horror Under the Skin – and we get the first of the film’s really inspired gags. Staggering uncertainly down the street in a body that isn’t his, the alien sees Carlos Marochetti’s statue of the Duke of Wellington and decides its famous traffic-cone ornament must be what Earthlings wear on their heads.

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Fortunately, in the McQuaids’ “fictitious town called Glasgow”, there are plenty of weirdos around to help him blend in. Our hero Bill (Danny McAllen) is frequently the straight man adrift in a sea of people who’ve turned one characteristic into a whole personality. His boss refers to himself in the plural to emphasise that his opinions are the opinions of the whole company, his friends have allowed their careers to drag them away from the amateur film-making that they all used to enjoy, and there’s a ranting conspiracy theorist on the streets talking about alien infiltration. As per genre rules, that conspiracy theorist turns out to be entirely right, and Bill and his friends form an uneasy alliance with him to fight back against the lumbering green men who’ve become Scotland’s most sinister bodysnatchers since Burke and Hare.

Right from the start, Welcome to G-Town has a very strong aesthetic. You’re always aware that this is a very low-budget film, not least when the wilfully silly-looking rubber-suited aliens appear. Equally, though, the aforementioned stop-motion animation for the gore scenes turns a limitation into a strength, and Archie Lewis’s cinematography provides some surprisingly haunting views of Glasgow nights and sunrises. The throbbing synth score by “Stanley Twobricks” recalls both John Carpenter and Basement Jaxx’s work on Attack the Block (also a likely influence). By about twenty minutes in, this style is so firmly established that the movie can actually make a joke about it, with Bill and his friends realising a local chippie has been taken over by aliens because “it’s all… neon?”

And aesthetics is, on one level, what the movie is about. This is certainly a film with a strong regional identity, but it also features a strain of wicked satire about nationalist kitsch as the aliens attempt to infiltrate civic life as part of a pressure group called “Saltire Salvation” (“tartan is the texture of change!”). In the offices of Saltire Salvation, the aliens’ half-baked, stereotypical attempts to look Scottish actually become valid camouflage, lumbering around bumping into each other in their ginger wigs and tam o’shanters. Perhaps this could only be a source of comedy now, over a decade after the independence referendum, with Scottish national identity currently feeling pretty settled and confident despite that defeat. Either way, it adds an extra level of affectionate venom to the film’s lampooning of Glasgow culture.

The film has a lot of these smart touches, as well as a lot of things that are wilfully stupid, and it always knows when to switch between those modes. It has its limitations, but those limitations are the ones you’d expect from a film made by a bunch of mates on next-to-no money, which is also the source of everything that’s delightful about the film. It is very funny, with a go-for-broke energy, a lived-in knowledge of how to use its Glasgow locations, and its central trio feel like real long-term friends – because in all likelihood they are. Its script is consistently smarter and more ambitious than it needs to be; a torture scene that would absolutely kill the humour in most other comedy-horrors turns out to be exactly what this film needs to raise the stakes. It also pays enough attention to the technical and stylistic aspects of film-making to suggest the McQuaids could make something really special once they get a bit more money. I’m particularly fond of the mirror in Bill’s boss’s office, which is positioned to create an infinite recursion effect; how often do you see a micro-budget film with a visual gag as good as that?

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE – WELCOME TO G-TOWN