Purely Joyful Movie!

Am I Missing Something?

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

In 1985, 'Jim'll Fix It' made one boy's dream come true by giving him the chance to review a movie Barry Norman-style. The movie he saw was the recently released 'Morons From Outer Space'. He loved it. When I went to see it at my local cinema, I found the place was packed with kids. 'Morons' was the big screen debut of Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, following their successes in both 'Not The Nine O'Clock News' and 'Alas Smith & Jones'. Lots of television comedians have made chumps of themselves making the transition to the big screen; the year before this came out, Kenny Everett starred in the vile 'Bloodbath At The House Of Death' and more recently, Horne and Corden's 'Lesbian Vampire Killers' failed to set the world on fire.Here Smith and Jones were unable to blame the writers - they were the writers. Smith plays 'Bernard', one of four aliens from the planet Blob enjoying a holiday in a spaceship that resembles a caravan, when an accident sees them crash on the M1. Bernard, who was in space at the time, finds his way to Earth, and tries to track down his friends. Usually in sci-fi movies, aliens are depicted as being super-intelligent, but here its the other way round. The Blob people are idiots, pure and simple. With the help of a manager named Graham Sweetley ( Jones ) they go on to become celebrities.Aside from penning a script lacking in humour, the other major mistake Mel and Griff made was keeping their characters apart for much of the movie. Anyone who saw 'Alas' will tell you they worked best when bouncing their humour off each other.'Aufpet''s Jimmy Nail raises a few chuckles as one of the aliens. When the military blows the door off the spaceship, Nail's road rage-style outrage is amusing.Mike Hodges, the director, was responsible for the Michael Caine classic 'Get Carter', so what he was doing here is anyone's guess. He is completely out of his depth. It is equally surprising to find the great Verity Lambert credited as 'Executive Producer'.There are a couple of bright spots - Bernard's encounter with a skeletal space-pilot and the 'Close Encounters' spoof where Andre Marianne's French scientist tries to communicate with the aliens by playing 'The Entertainer' on a Wurlitzer but overall the film has little to recommend it. It is basically a two-minute sketch stretched well beyond its limits. When Dinsdale Landen's character burst into song I nearly walked out. The kids I saw it with seemed to enjoy it though.For their next picture 'Wilt' ( 1989 ), Mel and Griff sensibly hired Andrew Marshall and David Renwick to adapt a Tom Sharpe novel. It corrected every fault critics found in 'Morons'.Viewed now one can draw parallels between the Blob people's celebrity status and that of reality show contestants. So yes Mel and Griff were ahead of their time in that respect.I do not hate 'Morons' but considering the talent involved in its making, it should have been far better.

British big-screen comedies have always lagged behind in quality when compared to British TV-series, and it's a bit of a mystery why that is. After all, a script is a script, right? To say that British films are weaker than British shows is a major understatement. UK comedies are usually terrible, even the rare successful ones like that mid-90s male-strip film or "Four Weddings & Hugh Grant's Bloody Funeral" are average at best.MOFOS isn't that bad, but there is a sense that it could have been much better, in spite of the overly simplistic and cretinous premise. A decent budget and a cast of well-knowns indicate that a measure of optimism existed about this project. However, it's once again the script that is to blame. I have no idea why certain people got excited over this script. Nevertheless, MOFOS is watchable, rarely dull, and even provides one or two chuckle-worthy moments...I'm sure that had Ron Howard or Peter Bogdanovich made the same exact product, MOFOS would have been praised and praised until our collective ears bled away.

It's British, so it's not going to look or feel like the American style of sci-fi comedy. It compares well with Spaceballs or Galaxy Quest. The humour is subtle and ironic, it spends as much time sending up the tabloids and cold war paranoia as it does spoofing contemporary sci-fi. It also goes down the one road that sci-fi doesn't travel very often: What if we are well up the food chain compared to our neighbours? The answer it arrives at is "Then we are in trouble." Above all this is as gentle as ET, with a big heart and a good moral at the end of the story. If you like this movie, try the 2000AD strip 'Skizz' a much darker treatment, but again from the alien point of view.T.

It's tough to review this movie, isn't it? I thought I had done a write-up several months previously but, in retrospect, I remember now that I scrapped it due to lack of inspiration.Well, let's be honest...it's hard to critique because it's kind of a stinker, and in an aggravating way, too. My brother picked up the DVD, and within days he hid it amongst my collection just so he wouldn't have to face the indignity of owning it himself. It's a shame, really, because some excellent talent went into this. Verity Lambert is a classy producer, and Mike "Get Carter" Hodges is a magnificent director when his heart's in a project. Unfortunately, he agreed to do this movie as part of some package deal, so his heart was clearly elsewhere.I actually find the production values surprisingly good, by British standards; the spaceship zooming down the highway is an amusing and impressive image. And some of the acting is fine: Dinsdale Landen and James B. Sikking, two of my old sci-fi buddies, strike just the right OTT note. But the aliens themselves are played by a drippy bunch of third rate comedians with no charisma whatsoever. Their flatness sinks the whole project (the meandering story might also share the blame).Alas, sci-fi comedy is a pretty lousy genre, and this film is no exception to the rule. I can see where "Morons from Outer Space" inspired later--and similarly flawed--efforts such as "Red Dwarf," but for some reason the formula doesn't work in any of its forms. Sci-fi is dorky enough without turning it into a screwball comedy; once those genres are crossed, there really is nothing recognizable for an audience to latch on to, is there?