The other film on the Mars movie bill was a 1999 theatrical version of the 1960’s TV show My Favorite Martian, a film so relentlessly unfunny it made RocketMan seem like a masterpiece by comparison! This time Walt Disney Pictures, which produced both films (a credit which has ol’ Walt himself doing a few cartwheels in his grave), got genuinely talented actors to play a script by Sherri Stoner (whose last name probably describes her state of mind when she wrote it) and Deanna Oliver, and hired a director, Donald Petrie, who’s at least the son of a genuinely capable (if rather stolid) filmmaker, Daniel Petrie. (At the same time anyone like me who grew up watching The Dick Van Dyke Show on TV in the 1960’s has a hard time taking seriously anyone named “Petrie”!) It was based, of course, on the dated but still quite amusing 1960’s TV sitcom My Favorite Martian, created by John L. Greene and produced by Jack Chertok, with the titular Martian (Ray Walston) living with and generally discombobulating Earthling Tim O’Hara (Bill Bixby), a reporter continually on the outs with his editor. The Martian posed as Tim’s “Uncle Martin” and got into various scrapes, as well as fending off the amorous intentions of their landlady, Mrs. Brown. This time Tim is played by Jeff Daniels — a talented actor but also a schlub who seems to have been cast mainly so Bill Bixby would look butch by comparison — and Martin is Christopher Lloyd, Disney’s go-to guy for comic villains just then. The schtick is the same as that in the TV series: due to a malfunction in his spacecraft (here shown as something that can shrink to miniature size and then swell up like one of those pocket life rafts that automatically inflates when needed — “Does it inflate with Earth air or Martian air?” I joked — Uncle Martin is stranded on Earth. Only where Ray Walston’s Martian was given a lot of acidulous comments about Earth’s customs but was mostly a charming person (well, as charming as Walston’s dry-ice persona could make him), Lloyd’s version was an out-and-out crab.
Among the many unfunny gimmicks Stoner and Oliver came up with for this was a series of planetary gumballs which Martin uses to take on the appearance of an Earthling (and, when chewed by Earthlings, make them look like aliens from the planets represented on each gumball); giving Martin an allergy to ice cream (it literally drives him crazy every time he eats any); and having his spacesuit, Zoot (Wayne Knight), have not only a mind but a voice of its own. Apparently the original plan was for the suit to be animate but remain silent, but the filmmakers decided to add a voice in post-production, so they hired Knight to dub a line of patter obviously derived from the late and very much lamented Robin Williams’ virtuoso performance as the voice of the Genie in Disney’s animated Aladdin. Aside from one clever scene in which the spacesuit pops out of a washing machine and sings a bit of James Brown’s hit “I Feel Good,” almost nothing amusing comes out of this idea — or any other idea in the film, including the gag scenes of Martin dressed as a surfer dude. The plot features Tim O’Hara as a TV news producer in love — or at least lust — with Brace Channing (Elizabeth Hurley, far too good an actress for this dumb-brunette role), daughter of his boss (Michael Lerner). Only he embarrasses her on the air and gets fired, and he sees Martin’s alien status and presence on Earth as the story which will make Channing take him back. Meanwhile Martin desperately tries to repair his spaceship so he can go home, and a sinister deep-state conspiracy within the federal government led by scientist Dr. E. Coleye (Wallace Shawn) — and yes, it’s all too indicative of Mesdames Stoner and Oliver’s non-sense of humor that they named this character after the deadly bacterium E. coli, found in shit (which means this movie is probably full of it!), who’s determined either to kidnap Martin or, if he dies, to dissect him.
About the only character in this movie who actually manages to
maintain his dignity is Armitan, an acronym for “Martian,” played by Ray
Walston with some of the same dry wit he brought to the original show. He’s
supposed to be Dr. Coleye’s boss in the government program (which actually has
the same name as a real one — SETI, for Search for Extra-Terrestrial
Intelligence) but at the end [spoiler alert!] it’s revealed he’s actually the same character
Walston played on the original TV show, a Martian who’s been stranded on earth
for 35 years (he complains that the gum he has to chew to keep from reverting
to his normal Martian form lost its flavor in 1966) and who finally gets a chance to go home by hitching a ride on the
new Martin’s spacecraft — only at the last minute the new Martin decides he
wants to stay on Earth after all and continue to make living hells out of the
lives of Tim and his new girlfriend Lizzie (Daryl Hannah, yet another highly talented actor who comes off in this movie as
blitheringly incompetent). Walston gets a few genuine laughs towards the end of
the film, but for the most part it achieves a near-perfect level of
humorlessness, as if the filmmakers were trying to take Macdonald’s dictum
about films that “in form and intent must be classified as comedies” but aren’t
actually funny to the absurd level of making a film that contains no laughs at
all. I joked during My Favorite Martian that if Ed Wood is in heaven, he’s probably looking down at films like
this and saying, “And people thought my movies were terrible?”
