No Good Very Bad Movies 18: The one with Jeff Goldblum as an alien

 

Title: Earth Girls Are Easy

What Year?: 1988

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity/ mashup

Rating: Guinnocent!!! (Unrated/ NR)

 

In the course of this feature, something I decided very early on was that it worked better not as an actual “worst” list but as a showcase of some of the stranger movies I run across. These are the likes of Phenomena, Death Bed and Troll, movies so odd and unclassifiable even I couldn’t do much with them anywhere else. This feature has worked all the more for the ones that catch me off-guard enough to require attention on short notice. This time around, I have one that hits that description so well I actually set aside a review already in progress to cover it. Needless to say, this is a weird one indeed, and the weirdest part of all is that on paper, it’s as close as I get to “mainstream”. Here is Earth Girls Are Easy, a romantic comedy with Jeff Goldblum as an alien, which in fair warning is a rare case of equal opportunity cringe.

Our story begins with a group of furry, neon-bright aliens who complain about not having female companionship while they coast through space on a ship whose designers seem to have decided Flash Gordon was too low-key. The adventure begins when they land in the swimming pool of an Earthwoman named Valerie who has broken up with her fiancée over a very indiscrete indiscretion. Though wholly anthropomorphic in anatomy, the extraterrestrials are truly alien, speaking in an unsettling language that seems like a cross between dolphin and velociraptor with occasional infusions of perfectly imitated but clearly imperfectly understood human speech. As usual, they learn the ways of humans, though only the blue guy named Mac makes much headway blending in. Once they assume human form, the three aliens make their way through a night on the town, an encounter with the ex-fiancée and an accidental convenience store robbery, all while a romance blooms between Mac and Valerie. Will he stay, will she go, and will there be one musical number that makes any sense???

Earth Girls Are Easy was a science fiction romantic comedy/ musical made by the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group and general operation (see Maximum Overdrive, Leviathan, Conan The Destroyer, etc.) The production was reportedly developed and then dropped by Warner Bros before being picked up by De Laurentiis. The final film was directed by Julien Temple, previously known for short films and music videos, and filmed beginning late 1987. The cast was led by Jeff Goldblum as Mac and Geena Davis as Valerie, previously paired in The Fly, with Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey as the remaining aliens. Julie Brown appeared as Candy Pink, performing the previously-released theme song as well as “Big and Stupid” and “’Cause I’m A Blonde”. Reports emerged of significant editing and reshoots that delayed the film’s release, which ultimately coincided with the bankruptcy of DEG. The film was a box office failure, earning $3.9 million against an estimated $10M budget. It became more popular on home video. It remains available in multiple formats including free streaming from Youtube.

For my experiences, I can barely remember seeing this one advertised on ‘90s TV. My strongest and most relevant memories, however, are seeing ads and perhaps an episode or so of In Living Color, which I now know helped introduce Jim Carrey as well as the Wayans Brothers (see Meteor Man, kiiind of). With that frame of reference, my unavoidable impression is that this is what a feature-length episode of that show would have been like… and that this should have been a much better thing than it is. Aside from that, the main thing I have to say is that I’m doing this review now because I didn’t want to have to come back later; also, I’m trying to go through this in a lot less time and space than I usually would, because I’m off to a very late start.

Moving to the movie, the obvious pros are in the cast. Goldblum and Davis are predictably charming, as they were for Cronenberg. (It crosses my mind, The Fly just might be a case of a movie “too good” for me to review in my usual rounds.) Carrey and Wayans are even more impressive in their own way, to the point that it gets hard to tell their natural performances apart from the quite good practical effects and sound effects. Beyond that, what prevails is an impressive atmosphere of anarchy. The pretense of a plot serves to move from one joke to another. Over-the-top sight gags abound, like a bowling ball rolled straight into a CRT monitor. The musical numbers are surreal, especially an opening scene on the space ship that seems to echo the Star Wars holiday special. Then there is the dream sequence, a very clever parody of 1950s sci fi complete with Robbie the Robot. Alas what it comes down to is that the parts are better than the whole.

On the con side, the common denominator to every con is that this material makes Caveman look nuanced and sensitive. On this movie’s warped terms, the girls aren’t just “easy” but obliviously self-centered. Of course, this is supposed to be a parody, and its chief targets are clearly men, both real and stereotyped. It leads to some clever moments, conspicuously “Big And Stupid”, not incidentally from the same warped mind as “The Homecoming Queen’s Got A Gun”.  If one’s aspiration is to rise from sketch-format parody to full-fledged satire, however, this should come together into a message or at least a “point”. What we get here feels far too much like trying to have it both ways. It’s all well and good to show women being as superficial and objectifying as men, but neither side can be said to learn from the experience. Even the comparatively functional example of Mac and Valerie, who actually treat each other with respect the whole time, doesn’t seem to rub off on anyone else. Then there is the surreal stick-up by Wayans, which is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the aliens care more about candy than the freely offered cash.

That drops me right in the middle of not just the “one scene” but the one reason I reviewed this movie at all. For context, by the time the final act started, I was paying more attention to a correspondence on other stuff to review, when I looked up and saw Ms. Brown performing “’Cause I’m A Blonde”, an anthem to being obnoxious and very, very dumb and having men reward you for it. The number itself is as indescribable as it should be, in its own way even more mindboggling than “Homecoming Queen”, which somehow has yet to be wiped out of every continuum in the multiverse. What gets odd and increasingly hard to take as part of the joke is how completely the camerawork and choreography fails to make the performer actually attractive. Ms. Brown (who would have been 29 when this was filmed) has the kind of face and figure that would be striking more than “pretty” in ideal circumstances, and this is absolutely not doing her any favors. The real problem is that this comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, by all accounts because it was pushed into the movie to fill time. Then my conclusion about the only way to redeem this as contextualized satire is for someone to shake her and shout what I’m loudly thinking, that she’s just annoying and most of the men being nice to her are either desperate enough to hit on anything with a pulse or just trying to get her to go away.

In closing, this is another movie where I find I don’t have anything to say about the rating. This is the kind of movie that’s weird and wonky yet honest enough to take it or leave it. For myself, I can respect the people who like this movie. I’ll even allow that I would probably appreciate it more if I gave it another look, something I will need quite a bit more time. The real sum of all that’s good and bad is that it got my attention enough to change my plans. And from me, that’s high praise indeed.