Gayn*****s from Outer Space (Lindberg & Kristensen Film Studios, 1992)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Tony Awards lurched to their conclusion at 8:15 p.m. Sunday, June 8, my husband Charles and I took a break from TV so I could make a salad, then watched the 1924 Harold Lloyd comedy classic Girl Shy on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase.” We’d already seen it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/01/girl-shy-harold-lloyd-corporation-pathe.html and I won’t need to write anything more about it. Eventually Charles and I watched a truly atrocious 1992 Danish film, directed by Morten Lindberg, with the God-awful title Gayniggers from Outer Space, a half-hour short Charles wanted to look up on YouTube. Apparently this became a cause célèbre in 2024, when various people on social media urged each other to bid this wretched movie up in the imdb.com and Wikipedia rankings by searching for such topics as “what space movie came out in 1992” or “space movie 1992.” Gayniggers from Outer Space is a sorry (alleged) spoof of science-fiction and Blaxploitation movies in which a spacecraft from the Planet Anus, crewed by ArmInAss (Coco P. Dalbert), Captain B. Dick (Sammy Solamon), D. Ildo (Gerald F. Hail), Sgt. Shaved Balls (Gbatokai Dakinah), and Mr. Schwul (Konrad Fields), visits various planets to seek out ones in which men are being oppressed by women and denied the chance to express their own native Queer sexuality. They find Earth and launch their attacks on Ukraine, China, and Germany, using ray guns to annihilate all the female members of those countries’ populations so the males will be “liberated” from them and feel free to express their inner Gayness. This rather airy acceptance of genocide is one of the many things that put me off this film, along with its ultra-cheap production budget and the line deliveries of the “actors.” I’d be tempted to say they reach porn-star levels of incompetence, except that the people on-screen in this film make your average porn model seem like Olivier by comparison. In fact, this film is so relentlessly misogynistic that if I were a Fundamentalist Christian making an anti-Queer propaganda video, I’d use clips from this movie to illustrate the idea that all Gay men utterly loathe and despise women, and seek their total annihilation.

Once they’ve exterminated all Earth women, the crew decide to put one of their number through a physical transformation so they can beam him down to Earth (though nowhere near the level of the ones on the original Star Trek, the beaming effects are actually done pretty well and are the only special effects that even remotely approach credibility), and in the process they turn him white. He thus becomes the so-called “Gay Ambassador” sent to Earth to teach the Earthlings how to be Gay – and when he beams down on this mission, the image suddenly turns from black-and-white into color as the Ambassador lands beside a swimming pool where various white male Earthlings look like they’re already having a pretty good time with each other. The film’s Wikipedia page compares this to The Wizard of Oz, which isn’t like this at all (except that both movies appeal, in very different ways, to Gay male audiences), and Gayniggers from Outer Space – pardon the pun – pretty much peters out with a final credits sequence for which Lindberg ripped off Tom Jones’s “It’s Not Unusual” and The Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” The fact that this film contains what’s become Donald Trump’s favorite song is funnier than anything else in the movie, including the parts that were clearly meant to be funny (and missed big-time). One of the film’s minor mysteries is how they found so many Black men in Denmark, though at least I enjoyed the “spacesuit” costumes they were wearing, which were clearly form-fitting linen which did a nice job showing off the cast members’ members. The film’s Wikipedia page mentions a 2019 book called It Came from Something Awful, whose author. Dale Beran, described the film as a “Queer-interest Dutch [sic] B movie in the hyper-transgressive tradition of John Waters” that appealed to an audience of “nerdy white boys” who liked the concept of Blaxploitation. Actually It Came from Something Awful is a serious political work on the rise of Right-wing social media sites like 4chan and 8chan and how these helped Donald Trump gain his first term as President in 2016 – its subtitle is How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office – and no matter how deliberately John Waters was being transgressive, there was always a strain of real wit in his work that kept it from being as downright offensive and lame-brained as this film.