Review by Kit Rathenar
CAUTION: NSFW Photos below.
“Don’t you know it’s the eighties?!”
Believe me when I say that between the music, the costumes, the haircuts, the cars, and the cinematography, I COULD TELL. I came away from David DeCoteau’s 1989 flick Dr Alien fairly certain that it was objectively dreadful, but not quite sure whether I’d loved it or hated it.
I’m not even sure whether its own director loved it or hated it, to be perfectly honest. Possibly best described as a heartwarming teen coming-of-age comedy with added boobs and aliens, this is without doubt one of the corniest, worst acted, and most cringe-inducingly scripted films I’ve seen in years – and yet at the very least, I’ll say I got a heck of a laugh out of it. The plot follows hapless freshman Wesley (Billy Jayne, here billed as Billy Jacoby), who has no confidence, no style and no luck with girls. When he volunteers to help stunning substitute biology teacher Ms Xenobia (replacement for unfortunate regular teacher Mr Ackerman, who is in traction after his car was run off the road by a UFO during the opening credits) with an after-class project for extra credit, he isn’t expecting to be injected with a sex serum that turns him into a magnet for lust-crazed girls. This is all the narrative excuse this film needs for a series of spills, thrills(-ish), sight gags, pop culture jokes and eighties high school movie cliches as Wesley tries to fight off the wrong girls, win the heart of the right one, and find out what’s happened to him in the hope of reversing all the parts of it that he doesn’t like. The results are, of course, predictably bedlam.
Much of Dr Alien is simply formulaic – a knockoff of every American high school comedy you’ve ever seen, think Teen Wolf and all its kind for a frame of reference – but it descends just that little bit further into sheer bizarreness than most. Ms Xenobia, alien in disguise, and her Igor-esque sidekick Drax seem to have wandered in from a low-end production of the Rocky Horror Show and conduct themselves accordingly, Raymond O’Connor in particularly hamming it up magnificently as Drax. And while there’s enough female flesh in here to provide wank material for a small army of adolescent boys, for some reason Dr Alien randomly ends on a ridiculously schmaltzy, heartwarming sentimental note, complete with pro-teenage moral. It’s enough to make you want to watch it with your parents, if it weren’t for the fact that that would mean having to look at boobs with them.
Personally I’m not really susceptible to boobs anyway, and I’m chary of any film that relies on them to cover its other shortcomings. But my personal Kryptonite is eighties hair metal, and so instead Dr Alien scores with me for having Wesley randomly end up fronting a band. Gotta love that habit eighties directors had of letting a band do an entire song in mid-movie just to add an extra four minutes to the running time, because for me on this occasion those four minutes are my payoff for all the titty shots and terrible acting I had to sit through to get there. Admittedly the effect is slightly spoiled by Wesley’s abysmal performing chops – Sammi Curr the boy is not, even if he’s clearly trying very hard to be – but the song itself, a cover of Lancelot’s “Killer Machine”, is a belter. So yes, just to show that even a terrible film can still do okay as long as it scratches the audience where they itch, Dr Alien gets a few points from me purely for the musical interlude – and the sappy ending, because I secretly like that kind of thing. I wouldn’t actually recommend this film unless you’re a serious connoisseur of eighties cheesiness, but for a feelgood (and mildly porny) popcorn movie at a party where everyone was already drunk, it wouldn’t be a terrible choice.
However, you actually get two films for the price of one on this particular release, the 88 Films Region 2 edition. The other, hiding in the bonus features, is a Charles-Band-devised, Harry-Hurwitz-directed pseudo-documentary called Auditions, dating from 1978. The premise of this is that the makers of a fairytale-themed porn movie supposedly filmed their auditions to find the world’s sexiest man, the world’s sexiest woman, and the most unusual novelty act, and give us the highlights – and a few lowlights – of the events that occurred. The quality of both footage and sound is fairly ropey but even so, this film is going to stick with me in a way that Dr Alien assuredly won’t. There’s a deep surreality to the experience of watching from a wholly dispassionate viewpoint as a sequence of interchangeable and stereotypically seventies men and women, directed by a disembodied directorial voice, strip off, answer revealing questions about their sex and fantasy lives, and participate in sex-scene auditions including a selection of S&M fantasy sequences. It’s a peek into the inner workings of one of Hollywood’s seedier dream machines which for the most part is anything but erotic simply because everything that’s going on is so matter-of-fact, and yet its appeal lies instead in the glimpses of truly odd, sometimes disturbing, sometimes touching humanity that flash through it. Definitely one for which I think every viewer will come away with a different favourite scene or character, as there’s nothing more personal than sexuality and this film very much showcases that fact. However, I defy anyone not to at least enjoy the moments of comedy gold that are scattered through this: the recurring presence of E Eddie Edwards, the world’s most annoying talent agent who can’t take a hint and turns up repeatedly in a Pythonesque fashion that’s only enhanced by his resemblance to John Cleese, is genius, as is the beautiful subversion of the traditional porn-movie “handyman” setup when the studio’s house electrician finds himself dragged into an impromptu audition after coming in to fix a light on-set.
And most of all I can’t help but love the way this film has been sneaked onto this disc, as though the utterly disposable Dr Alien is a mere carrier – a relatively innocent movie that’s simply acting as a brown paper wrapper for something much more profoundly perverse. An homage, if you will, to the pre-internet age when we still had to be at least a little furtive about our porn stashes. Dr Alien is fine if you like that sort of thing, but it’s really Auditions that makes this DVD worth owning. Just be sure not to let your mum catch you with it…
Dr Alien is out now on Region 2 DVD from 88 Films.