[With Seiji Chiba's Alien Versus Ninja screening as part of Toronto After Dark tonight, now seems a good time to revisit my earlier review from Fantasia. This film is a big bucket of fun, people. Don't miss it.]

Though the festival is still young and there are literally scores of films remaining to screen at the 2010 edition of Montreal's Fantasia Festival, if this morning's reaction to Seiji Chiba's Alien Versus Ninja is anything to judge by the festival may have already found its Audience Award winner. Know this: Any film that has a prayer of unseating AvN has a literal mountain of hooting, hollering, laughter, spontaneous waves of cheering and applause and other related expressions of joy to overcome. A party broke out in the Hall today and Alien Versus Ninja was the pretty girl everybody wanted to take home.

Considering that the entire plot is summed up in the three world title I will leave any description of story or character entirely out of what follows. Instead, I present here a list of things that make Alien Versus Ninja such a resounding success.

First, director Seiji Chiba and action co-ordinator / co-director Yuji Shimomura deliver on the promise of the title. When you brand your film with a moniker like Alien Versus Ninja you immediately accomplish one very important thing. You divide the world neatly into two groups of people - one group which wants to see ninjas fighting aliens and one which does not. The ones who don't want to see it are never going to so there's not point in worrying about them, their tastes or their criteria for judging quality even a tiny little bit. Put them to the side. However, the people who DO want to see aliens fighting ninjas REALLY want to see aliens fighting ninjas and so you'd better give that to them. And this film does. A lot. A whole lot. There's barely anything but violent ninjas and even more violent aliens in this film. And that's fantastic.

Second, Chiba and Shimomura understand that whatever else this film may need to be, it must be fun. And they deliver the fun wholesale. They do it with charismatic performances. They do it with clever sight gags. They do it by making their alien a guy in a rubber suit fighting hand to hand with weirdly anachronistic ninjas. They do it by keeping the pace absolutely frenetic. This is a film that promises entertainment and then delivers it.

Third, Shimomura demonstrates once again that he is one of the most consistently creative, clever and entertaining fight men in the world. His work here is wildly varied - almost impossibly so for a film shot on such a short schedule - with every action sequence - and there are loads of them - given its own distinct feel. Some are deadly serious, most are acrobatic and playful. Some are hand to hand, some are weapon to weapon. Lots are combinations of the above. All of them are impeccably planned and executed by an extremely capable stunt team.

Four, in both the script - which he wrote - and the camera work Chiba knows when to throw in a bit of flair and when to keep it simple. There really isn't any waste in either. He knows where he's going and he knows how he wants to get there and he does so efficiently at all times. This is a remarkably rare trait and one that deserves mention.

Five, the gore and prosthetic effects provided by Soichi Umezawa are delightfully squishy and tactile, owing a great deal to Japan's history of kaiju cinema while pushing those influences into some wildly unexpected new directions. Yes, this is a man-in-suit film but it's not quite like any you're likely to have seen before.

While those five may be the key factors, mostly Alien Versus Ninja succeeds for one very simple reason: It manages to give the audience exactly what they want while also throwing in more than a few things they hadn't realized they wanted until they saw them. And now they're just going to want more.