Turd Alerts!

The big "joke" for Morons from Outer Space (1985) is that aliens are standard-issue trailer trash.

If it doesn't seem like much of a joke that the alien spaceship includes everything you could get in any other second-hand trailer house, or isn't it funny they happen to speak a language exactly like English with the same accents as the earthlings in the cast, then there won't be many chuckles here for you.

I was warned this was a stinker but I had refused to believe a fairly decent director like Mike Hodges could be this dull. After all, he already had Get Carter (1971) & Terminal Man (1974) under his belt, so surely his comedy sci-fi film would possess a certain level of competence.

Was I ever wrong. It attempts to be a pop culture satire as the Morons are not too moronic to become rock stars, a fact that is offered as proof that pop culture is retarded. But the only thing retarded here is the film itself.

Anyone who liked Mel Brooks' stinker Space Balls (1987) may find enough slapstick in this one to enjoy as well, though the awful Space Balls was a hundred times funnier. No one else need bother.



And while on the topic of films not worth the bother, oh man is Alien Abduction (2005) a bad movie. It was filmed in about ten days, probably took even less time to write it. Watching for the sound boom's shadows is more suspenseful than the story.

The most momentous stuff that happens are the continuity problems, like when our heroine takes video of a UFO, runs off with the video in her hand still shooting the bouncy countryside, then she comes back to the camp to look for where she dropped the video camera now presumedly left behind.

It's very clear we're deep in Amateurville here, yet the awfulness is not from the lack of budget but from the lack of imagination.

It might fool the occasional tween into being creeped out by the horror of it all, but mostly I suspect no one could like Alien Abduction who wasn't on the crew, & since they'll never be employed again they were able to spend the rest of their days on the web posting fake positive reviews in newsgroups & on bulletin boards.

Plastic-clawed aliens with jack-o-lantern heads & towels as their weapons catch two young couples with & deposit them in an alien ship made of black plastic sacks. Demonic aliens cut out their guts very noisily, though later on they're not all that bad off.

Our heroine Jean (talentless babe, Megan Lee Ethridge) wakes up in a military hospital which looks a bit like a high school portable. The military is trying to do mindwipes of saucer-kidnap victims, using a three-inch wide lobotomy drill.

She finds her way into an area where people are pointlessly tortured & have gone crazy after their brains were scrambled with the wide drill. Talentless babe Jean is next.

All the set decor appears to be stuff found in the director's dad's garage, including card tables, cheap cots, aluminum lawn furniture. There's zero attempt to make anything look like what it's supposed to be.

Trying to escape, Jean finds her way into a warehouse of plastic shoeboxes (also from dad's garage) & reclaims her video cam & some clothes, taking a really long time to get dressed since the filmmakers were having such a hard time stretching this out to feature length.

Armed with pepper spray she takes on the whole military hospital/highschool portable until she finds her way back to the black plastic bag spaceship area.

By now who knows if they're still on the spaceship or if the spaceship was fake & they really are in a military hospital. The best defense by now is to make a sandwhich out of the video cams digital chip & eat it.

Turns out everyone's a clone including Jean only she's a more perfect pod-person than the others so she thinks she really is Jean. When she finds the "real" Jean she kills her in order to put her out of her misery. Then the chief pod-person of the asylum makes fun of pod-Jean for being a murderer like a real human, when pod-people don't kill, they just drill holes in brains & carve out guts.

Oh yeah, whenever she kills one of the clones, a parasite crawls out of it. There are a few other angles to this unamazing turd, but who the hell cares.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl