Up for your consideration today: two comedies. The first, and most idiosyncratic, is Rob Stefaniuk's Phil The Alien. This is Stefaniuk's feature debut, and he has crafted a picture that is a mishmash of genres, styles and tones. Phil The Alien is very rough around the edges, but there's no denying that it's also damn funny.

The young director plays the titular extraterrestrial, who finds himself a stranger in a strange place when he crash-lands in northern Ontario, then develops a drinking habit. If that's sounds like an odd premise, it is. Think of the resulting blend as something along the lines of E.T. meets Barfly. Stefaniuk's Phil spends his most of his time on Earth being terrified. There's something compelling and laughable about the frightened creature who calls to mind the late Andy Kaufman.

What's great about his interaction with the residents of this planet is the way all these fish-out-of-water situations are infused with a fun spirit. When Phil tells a young hunter that he has the power of telekinesis, for example, the boy's reply is an astonished "Moving things with your mind is the coolest f***ing thing in the world." And what does the visitor from another galaxy choose to levitate? Mostly beer bottles and doughnuts.

As might be expected in a movie about a marooned alien, a secret U.S. agency (located behind Niagara Falls) gets wind of Phil's arrival. Stefaniuk then inspires laughs by playing with the audience's knowledge of the way people talk and behave on the big screen.

For instance, when Phil gazes at the water feature that divides the U.S. and Canada: "There is something about those falls," his girlfriend says dreamily. "Yeah, I know what you mean," Phil replies. "They inspire urination."

Later, when two assassins square off in hand-to-hand combat, they preface their fisticuffs:

"You want to dance with me, Jones?"

"You mean in the fight way or the dance way?"

And not to be missed is the flashback in which the always-reliable John Kapelos, as the Head Bad Guy, commands an agent to dispatch a cardboard box full of young dogs. "Kill these puppies avec ça," he snarls, then produces a cheese grater.

Yes, Phil The Alien is a weird, albeit charming, mixture. It's packed with funnily absurd moments and lines, although the transitions between them are often clunky. You can be guaranteed that you will see more polished movies at this year's festival, but few can claim to be as original. It's hard to know what to make of Phil The Alien, which is part of the joke.

Childstar is the second feature from Don McKellar, the deadpan actor who brought us 1998's Last Night. It displays all the polish that Phil The Alien lacks, and is quite funny in its own way.

McKellar stars as an aspiring filmmaker who is hired to chauffeur an American actor around Toronto when he comes north to make a movie. The fly in the ointment is that the American actor in question is a 12-year-old boy, the knowingly named Taylor Brandon Burns (Mark Rendall) and, being a spoiled brat, he naturally creates a lot of headaches for the driver.

To make matters worse, the boy's mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has a hands-off policy when it comes to parenting. "Where I come from, in America, we don't blame the child," she explains when the boy acts up on the set. McKellar eventually gets the upper hand by bedding her, which leads to this exchange later in the film when Burns asks for advice on how to woo girls.

"You bagged my mom, didn't you?" the youngster pleads once McKellar says he can't help him.

"Yeah, but that was no great technical achievement."

McKellar also includes lots of knowing winks at the audience, like including Michael Murphy in the cast of The First Son, the movie-within-a-movie. The biggest in-joke of all, though, is the cameo by Alan Thicke, who plays the actor who plays Burns' father on the sitcom Family Differences. (Got that straight?) Just like Leslie Nielsen and William Shatner before him, Thicke is now an expert at sending up his own image.

"I can't believe it's you," a star-struck admirer says upon meeting him.

"Yes, more fabulous than you imagined," Thicke replies modestly.

The biggest flaw in Childstar is that the story's momentum is interrupted whenever McKellar is separated from Rendall. It's also worth nothing that Childstar is similar in some ways to last year's Hollywood North, both being about U.S. film shoots in Canada that go awry. Not only are Canadians good at making actual Hollywood movies, but it also seems we're becoming proficient at making Canadian movies about Hollywood filmmakers who come here to shoot runaway productions.

There's one joke that runs through Jay Dahl's short Boyclops. The eight-minute film is about a teenage boy named Johnny who is normal in every way except one – he is a Cyclops. The running gag is that we never get to see the facial feature that sets him apart from the rest of the world because he never – er – looks the camera in the eye.

Borrowing from sources like Rocky, the Halifax-based Dahl tells the story of how Johnny becomes captain of his school's Frisbee team and earns the respect of his peers. This is an amusing piece of work which is, in essence, an extended Kids In The Hall skit. That's not meant as a criticism, but rather a firm endorsement.