A couple of would-be vanquishers of Earth opt instead to play bluegrass in a Brooklyn bar in the sweetly wacky caper “The History of Future Folk.”
Building a decidedly low-fi origin story around a real-life musical duo, the movie could have made its points — war is bad; music is the universal language — in half the time. But the harmonies are sweet, the acoustic picking impressive.
And if the matter of Planet Hondo’s fate is more a thinly veiled showcase for the two-man band than an involving story, J. Anderson Mitchell and Jeremy Kipp Walker’s ultra-low-budget sci-fi comedy delivers a few intergalactic laughs with down-to-earth warmth.
New York dad Bill (Nils d’Aulaire) has kept his true, Hondonian identity a secret from his wife (Julie Ann Emery), turning it into a bedtime story for their young daughter (Onata Aprile, of “What Maisie Knew”). He still aims to find a new home for the people of his doomed planet, but having discovered this earthly thing called music, Bill has forsaken the destruction-of-earthlings part of the mission and taken up the banjo.
Flesh-eating viruses just don’t make sense when you’re building a fan base.
At a friendly neighborhood dive run by Larry , Bill and fellow Hondonian Kevin (Jay Klaitz) develop an ardent following of hipsters. The stage patter that the New Yorkers consider finely tuned comedy is just straight talking, Hondo-style. It’s a charming confluence of earnest delivery and irony-steeped interpretation, and the movie could have used more of it — and less of the goofy nods to Darth Vader.
