by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars movie screening (http://marsmovieguide.com/) consisted of
two relatively recent films, Earth Girls Are Easy (1988) and Vampirella (1996), both of which were intended as campy spoofs
of the science-fiction and fantasy genres. Oddly, Earth Girls Are Easy, despite some talented people both in front of and behind the cameras
— the stars included Geena Davis, her then-husband Jeff Goldblum and Jim
Carrey, while the story was written by Julie Brown (who made the screamingly
funny Madonna spoof Dare to Be Truthful) and among the screenwriters were her then-husband, Terrence E. McNally (not to be
confused with the much more famous and Gay Terrence McNally, author of The
Ritz and The Lisbon Traviata) — was an almost total misfire, while the far less
ambitious Vampirella was a quite
entertaining film that aimed low but hit the target on all counts. I remembered
hearing about Earth Girls Are Easy
when it came out in 1988 but I had somehow formed an almost totally wrong idea
about its content. I had thought it would be about a bunch of alien astronauts
from Mars (the aliens in the film are actually from another planet, presumably
outside our solar system, though there’s an apparent Mars reference some but
not all of our audience members caught) hitting the San Fernando Valley,
seducing the local dumb-bunny girls and then leaving them in a state of
hopeless dissatisfaction with any terrestrial males. Indeed, my putative
version would have ended with a Village of the Damned-like postlude set nine months after the main action
in which all the women who’d been seduced by the Valley Boys from Outer Space
suddenly gave birth since on their planet you do get pregnant the very first time you have sex with
one of them.
Alas, Earth Girls Are Easy turned out to be a pretty ordinary love triangle with a few
interesting supporting characters and one great musical number (in fact, the
music — credited to Nile Rodgers but also including a quite good selection of
pop-rock from the period, including the B-52’s “Cosmic Thing”) set on a beach
in which one of the peripheral characters sings of the glories of being a dumb
blonde. (According to imdb.com, this number was prepared and shot after the
rest of the film was completed to make up for the amount of footage they’d had
to delete due to censorship and ratings considerations.) The plot: three
Martian astronauts, covered head to toe in fur but otherwise humanoid, come to
Earth when their spaceship malfunctions and land in the swimming pool (which
she, alerted to their impending arrival, had drained for them) of Valerie
(Geena Davis) and her fiancé Ted (Charles Rocket). Valerie and Ted are planning
a big wedding but first she has to go to a hair-setting convention — she works
in a beauty salon — only Candy Pink (Julie Brown), her co-worker and best
friend, talks her into staying home. So she’s predictably nonplussed when,
thinking she was going out of town for the weekend, Ted brings home one of the
nurses at the hospital where he works, intending to carry on his affair with
her. When she meets Valerie she figures she’s been invited over for a three-way
and bails, and Valerie angrily throws Ted out of the house — leaving her fair
game for the attachments of one of the aliens, Mac (Jeff Goldblum, who oddly
does not do any of the campy
asides he was famous for in his other roles and therefore makes his character
personable but boring). The aliens — who look totally human once Valerie, with
her hair-styling skills, removes their fur — also include Wiploc (Jim Carrey)
and Zeebo (Damon Wayans, though there’s no racially related humor in this film — not that there’s that much of any humor in this film, even though it’s clearly
intended to be a comedy!) — and they have a wild ride through Earth’s female
humanity.
Actually Valerie and Mac pair up pretty seriously through the whole
movie, but Wiploc and Zeebo go off with Valerie’s terrestrial friend Woody
(Michael McKean, who turns in a far better and funnier performance than his
better known co-stars) for a wild ride through the beach community in which
they inadvertently hold up a convenience store (a toy gun has got stuck on
Wiploc’s finger and the counterman mistakes it for a real one) and ultimately
get caught by the cops when an accident hurls them into that huge
doughnut-shaped sign that also figured prominently in a far better (and
funnier!) Mars-invades-Earth movie, Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! The writers get the aliens out of that one by
putting the “love touch” on the two (male) cops who’ve arrested them, thereby
causing them to fall in love with each other (a gag done better in the
Madonna-Griffin Dunne comedy Who’s That Girl?, made in 1987 and the third and lamest, but still
engaging, incarnation of Bringing Up Baby). The finale is a mash-up of The Graduate and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — Ted (ya remember Ted?) emerges to re-propose to Valerie just as the
aliens have their spaceship ready and are about to leave Earth, only at the
last minute Valerie bails on her earthling partner and boards the ship (which
was designed, probably intentionally, to resemble the one from Universal’s Flash
Gordon serials) to fly off with Mac to his
home planet (whatever and wherever it is). This could have been the premise for a good and very funny movie, but alas Earth Girls Are Easy falls flat on just about every particular except
Nile Rodgers’ musical playlist — it’s nice to remember that he was good for
something besides disco — the
film attempts both romantic comedy and slapstick and isn’t particularly good at
either. It’s just a cinematic waste of time, albeit with a provocative and
engaging title, and it’s not surprising the original studio, Warner Bros.,
turned it down once it was finished and dumped it on Dino de Laurentiis’s
company instead.
