Ugh. MORONS FROM OUTER SPACE is a chore to finish. I've now seen it twice and both times I lost total interest and played games on my phone for about 15 minutes or so in the middle of the movie. It challenges you to watch it from start to finish and I failed each time. It's 90 near insufferable minutes of juvenile gags and thoroughly unlikeable characters. Many of the worst movies have a charm that I love but comedies don't often reach that level of "so-bad- it's good". They're so bad at being intentionally funny that it becomes almost painful to witness. Let's start with the "plot": four human aliens are wandering lost through the universe. For whatever reason, they get tired of the one named Bernard (Mel Smith, who I only recently realized was the Albino in THE PRINCESS BRIDE) and abandon him, leaving him locked outside of the main ship on the spaceball court while they bail in the smaller shuttle. Crashing immediately on Earth, the three aliens…Desmond (Jimmy Nail), Sandra (Joanne Pierce), and Julian (Paul Bown)…are taken by the British government and discovered to be absolute fools. A low-level TV news employee (Griff Rhys Jones) bumbles his way behind government lines and gains access to the aliens, helping them to make an escape. Once they're on the outside, he becomes their manager and tours the nation with them as some sort of garbage rock band or something. Meanwhile, Bernard is determined to reconnect with his fellow idiots.The movie aspires to be a spoof of popular science fiction titles with nods to ALIEN, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. But spoofs are funny so I refuse to acknowledge this as one. My disgust stems from the fact that the movie tries so hard to be zany. I hate failed zaniness. We're talking gags like Bernard's conversation with a roadside trashcan he believes to be a dominant life form. Or his fumbling to scratch his nose through his space helmet before a sneeze covers his faceplate in a violent blast of snot. It always takes the easy route, opting for lamest of slapstick humor or the corniest dialogue. The writing, from co-writers Smith and Jones, is atrocious. The aliens come a planet known as Blob. Desmond proudly shows off a piece of alien technology: a pen. You get it everyone? They're morons! It's a joke! Seriously though, MORONS FROM OUTER SPACE feels like a movie for children, but kids aren't going to get the references. And what about scenes like the one where Bernard is rescued from his isolation by hitchhiking with an alien who looks like a mummified corpse (one of the few funny moments in the movie)? A mummified corpse who was hoping for "special payment" for the ride until he discovering Bernard is male and ejecting him into space. Dead creepers don't really have a place in a kids' movie. Who is this movie for and why are we supposed to care?There isn't a single character I care about in this movie. I have no idea who the main character is supposed to be. It might be the three aliens who become a travelling rock band. But they're horrible people, so that can't be right. They're ignorant and selfish. And Sandra's singing, that the aliens' musical career seems contingent on, is ear-splitting. She's horrible but the movie acts as if she's a phenomenal talent and we're expected to go along with it. On the subject of the aliens' musical tour, did anyone else get a Katy Perry Super Bowl halftime show vibe? The aliens dress in colorful costumes and ride out onto the stage in an enormous toy spaceship. Just me? Anyway, no, I didn't care about them. Bernard? Maybe. He's portrayed as a victim. Ditched by his fellow aliens. Nearly sexually assaulted by a space zombie. Hit by a car, assumed to be a raving lunatic, and committed to an asylum. And all he wants is to be rich and famous like the others. I don't know. I can't really stand any of them, especially Desmond who can be best described as Cousin Eddie from NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION (if he were a British alien). Because the movie never wrangles my interest, it's quick and easy to forget. It's been less than 24 hours since I last watched it and it's already fading from my memory like I failed to get it's parents to make out at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance.Final nail in the coffin: if you make it all the way to the end of the movie, the credits play out over an 80's pop title song written in part by Mel Smith and performed by the Morons themselves. So…have fun with that.

Several dim-witted aliens crash-land their spaceship on Earth. Opportunistic small-time television reporter Graham Sweetley (nicely played by Griff Rhys Jones, who also co-wrote the blithely silly and crafty script with Mel Smith) exploits the aliens by transforming them into celebrities. Director Mike Hodges relates the enjoyably dippy story at a snappy pace and pitches the amusingly off the wall humor at an uproariously broad level (the climactic rock concert set piece in particular is absolutely sidesplitting!). The game cast has a field day with the wacky material: Jimmy Nail as the boozy Desmond Block, Joanne Pierce as the ditsy, but sexy Sandra Brock, Paul Brown as amiable dolt, and especially Smith as the hapless Bernard are all extremely engaging as the lovably idiotic extraterrestrials, Dansdale Landen is a complete stitch as the smitten Commander Grenville Matteson, and James B. Sikking almost steals the whole show with his spot-on deadpan portrayal of paranoid fanatic Col. Raymond Laribee. Moreover, for all its rampant stupidity this movie does deliver a slew of clever sight gags, sly touches of deliciously dry'n'droll British wit (Bernard's odd encounter with a rotting skeleton spacecraft pilot who briefly gives him a lift rates as a definite gut-busting surreal highlight), and inspired send-ups of such famous films as "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Both Phil Meheux's polished cinematography and the zany score by Peter Bewis are up to speed. A total hoot.

Is this flick an incredibly sharp look into one of the great truisms of man? Visits to Wikipedia and IMDb provide useful reminders that, although smart people keep advancing the accomplishments of science and technology, most people are no smarter than most people were a thousand years ago. In a few years you will be able to contact & communicate with your friends simply by scratching your butt. You shall be able to travel to Topeka, Kansas, in two minutes with out even having to get out of bed. Mankind will have colonies throughout outer space. But they won't be just populated with today's astronauts. The bulk of earth's population--stupid people--will not all be left in LA & NYC. No, there shall continue to be stupid people everywhere that there are intelligent people, and that'll include extraterrestriality.However making a straightforward point of that in a science fiction film was too simple for EMI to bother with. Oh no, they decided to go one better and really drive their point home by using only stupid people to write and direct their flick. I suspect they also were trying to drum up a little sympathy for Britains from us charitable Americans, "Wow, Britains have to settle for so-called 'comedies' like this which are not funny? OK, I won't complain about Congress sending them more financial aid." How can someone not like a movie which tries to poke fun at aliens by mocking crappy pop singers & Belgian drivers? Did you miss the first vomiting gag? Don't be glum. They puke throughout this flick. I did find this DVD interesting for the further little insights into British culture that I picked up from watching it. I figure that's worth an additional two stars. And, although only several lines were actually funny, I did laugh AT this film a lot; I was laughing at the failure of the lines & situations to be funny that were obviously MEANT to be but, yes, I was laughing, so I figure that's worth a couple stars (if you laugh at people falling down stairs, as I do). And for those of you who bought the DVD and need a reason to ever watch it again, it featured a view of a man's naked penis. Look to see if you can spot it. That's worth a fifth star in a PG-flick.

You know, I usually have respect for British comedy such as Monty Python or for British comedy/sci-fi, such as Doctor Who, Red Dwarf or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.I list those because I want to establish a standard for good.This movie didn't have a single laugh in it. Essentially, a spaceship full of slackers crash lands their space ship (which oddly enough, resembles a trailer-home on the inside) in the UK, and an international team of British and bad American stereotypes proceeds to examine them. Hill Street Blues' James B. Sikking plays a CIA officer who delights in torturing the aliens. The aliens escape with the help of a friendly reporter, who turns them into rock stars.Meanwhile, their captain is stranded in space, and is dropped off in Arizona by a gender confused alien. He is confined to a mental institution (bad parody of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" ensue) before catching up with his rock-star comrades in NYC. A spaceship reminiscent of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" arrives and takes them home.The American scenes are poorly done because it is fairly obvious that the producers have never been to America. (The sign on the diner that reads "Chile" being the most glaring example. "Chili" is food, "Chile" is a country.) The Americans are nothing but bad stereotypes, and in many cases, are more alien than the British accented aliens.It's essentially a one-joke movie. The aliens are dumb. The Earth people are dumb. The problem is that they aren't funny.