Super 8 : BuzzGuide.com-The Best in Entertainment and Recreation

Set in Ohio in 1979 Super 8 focuses on a neighborhood group of middle school friends who are planning to make a zombie movie. The director is chubby Charles (Riley Griffiths), but the main character is Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), a talented model-maker who agrees to be the make-up man. Joe's mother has recently died and his dad Jackson (Kyle Chandler) is the town's deputy sheriff. The rest of the filmmakers includes firecracker-obsessed Cary (Ryan Lee), their gangly leading man Martin (Gabriel Basso) and brainy extra Preston (Zach Mills). Joe is really thrilled when Charles casts pretty Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning) to be in the film, despite the fact that she’s the daughter of the gruff town drunk Louis (Ron Eldard), whom Joe's dad blames for his wife’s death.

The story really gets going when the kids begin filming at an old railway station one night and a train coming by crashes because a pickup truck driven by one of their science teachers deliberately derails it. That leads to the arrival of troops under the command of nasty Colonel Nelec (Noah Emmerich), and the realization by the kids, once they get a chance to look at the film, that the train was carrying something very strange and dangerous.

Writer/director J.J. Abrams fills the screen with scenes of rowdy adolescent horseplay and big action sequences full of explosions and flying debris and the final shots of awe-struck faces looking skyward is bound to remind you of E.T. and there are also some scenes that seem to have been influenced by a few of those old horror movies like Tarantula, but it's all so well put together and so efficiently executed that even gaps in the plot don’t matter much. Parents should be warned, though, that some of it may prove to be a bit intense for younger children.