Morons from Outer Space

1985 "They came, they saw, they did a little shopping..."
4.5| 1h30m| en
Details

The story begins on a small spaceship docking with a refueling station. On board are a group of four aliens, Bernard, Sandra, Desmond, and Julian. During a particularly tedious period of their stay at the station, the other three begin playing with the ship’s controls while Bernard is outside playing spaceball. They accidentally disconnect his part of the ship, leaving him stranded while they crash into a large blue planet close by...

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Reviews

Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece
Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful
Usamah Harvey The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.
Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.
FlashCallahan A spaceship stops at an intergalactic fuel station. While the captain's refuelling, one of his idiotic companions plays with the controls and accidentally starts the ship and crashes into the earth. This causes a sensation, and the media celebrates the extraterrestrials, the military interrogates them for eternal wisdom. However soon they recognise that the visitors are not the brightest sparks - although some generals believe it's just a mask.......It's unbelievable that two of the finest comedians of the eighties could write such inane, tiresome, lazy rubbish like this? These are two of the creators of Not The Nine O' Clock news, and were regarded as masters of their art.So the film follows three Aliens, with obvious cultural reference and winking at the general public, saying subliminally 'you'll buy anything the most popular thing on the planet tells you to buy, and I'll get rich from your stupidity'Pretty much life imitating art back in March of 1985.On the other side of the story, we have Mel Smith in his own One Flew Over The Cuckoos nest movie, with even a pseudo chief!!! Oh the hilarity.It's just another worthless British Comedy where famous comedians/Celebrities thought they were so popular, people would flock to see their film.See also The Boys In Blue, Alien Autopsy, Keith Lemon: The Film, and Guest House Paradiso. All utterly appalling, but featuring endearing small screen stars who are bearable in small 30 minute segments.It would have gotten a lower score, but to see Dr Legg from Eastenders shirtless, that's priceless.Otherwise, horrible stuff..
brando647 Ugh. MORONS FROM OUTER SPACE is a chore to finish. I've now seen it twice and both times I lost total interest and played games on my phone for about 15 minutes or so in the middle of the movie. It challenges you to watch it from start to finish and I failed each time. It's 90 near insufferable minutes of juvenile gags and thoroughly unlikeable characters. Many of the worst movies have a charm that I love but comedies don't often reach that level of "so-bad- it's good". They're so bad at being intentionally funny that it becomes almost painful to witness. Let's start with the "plot": four human aliens are wandering lost through the universe. For whatever reason, they get tired of the one named Bernard (Mel Smith, who I only recently realized was the Albino in THE PRINCESS BRIDE) and abandon him, leaving him locked outside of the main ship on the spaceball court while they bail in the smaller shuttle. Crashing immediately on Earth, the three aliens…Desmond (Jimmy Nail), Sandra (Joanne Pierce), and Julian (Paul Bown)…are taken by the British government and discovered to be absolute fools. A low-level TV news employee (Griff Rhys Jones) bumbles his way behind government lines and gains access to the aliens, helping them to make an escape. Once they're on the outside, he becomes their manager and tours the nation with them as some sort of garbage rock band or something. Meanwhile, Bernard is determined to reconnect with his fellow idiots.The movie aspires to be a spoof of popular science fiction titles with nods to ALIEN, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. But spoofs are funny so I refuse to acknowledge this as one. My disgust stems from the fact that the movie tries so hard to be zany. I hate failed zaniness. We're talking gags like Bernard's conversation with a roadside trashcan he believes to be a dominant life form. Or his fumbling to scratch his nose through his space helmet before a sneeze covers his faceplate in a violent blast of snot. It always takes the easy route, opting for lamest of slapstick humor or the corniest dialogue. The writing, from co-writers Smith and Jones, is atrocious. The aliens come a planet known as Blob. Desmond proudly shows off a piece of alien technology: a pen. You get it everyone? They're morons! It's a joke! Seriously though, MORONS FROM OUTER SPACE feels like a movie for children, but kids aren't going to get the references. And what about scenes like the one where Bernard is rescued from his isolation by hitchhiking with an alien who looks like a mummified corpse (one of the few funny moments in the movie)? A mummified corpse who was hoping for "special payment" for the ride until he discovering Bernard is male and ejecting him into space. Dead creepers don't really have a place in a kids' movie. Who is this movie for and why are we supposed to care?There isn't a single character I care about in this movie. I have no idea who the main character is supposed to be. It might be the three aliens who become a travelling rock band. But they're horrible people, so that can't be right. They're ignorant and selfish. And Sandra's singing, that the aliens' musical career seems contingent on, is ear-splitting. She's horrible but the movie acts as if she's a phenomenal talent and we're expected to go along with it. On the subject of the aliens' musical tour, did anyone else get a Katy Perry Super Bowl halftime show vibe? The aliens dress in colorful costumes and ride out onto the stage in an enormous toy spaceship. Just me? Anyway, no, I didn't care about them. Bernard? Maybe. He's portrayed as a victim. Ditched by his fellow aliens. Nearly sexually assaulted by a space zombie. Hit by a car, assumed to be a raving lunatic, and committed to an asylum. And all he wants is to be rich and famous like the others. I don't know. I can't really stand any of them, especially Desmond who can be best described as Cousin Eddie from NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION (if he were a British alien). Because the movie never wrangles my interest, it's quick and easy to forget. It's been less than 24 hours since I last watched it and it's already fading from my memory like I failed to get it's parents to make out at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance.Final nail in the coffin: if you make it all the way to the end of the movie, the credits play out over an 80's pop title song written in part by Mel Smith and performed by the Morons themselves. So…have fun with that.
razorwyre1 Goodness knows here are many worse, and dumber, comedies out there, but its truly a shame that Smith and Jones didn't put this script through some more refinement, and hired a veteran comedy director (one who has a sense of timing), before blowing their chance at international fame. The main problem with the film is it tries to do to many things and use too many comedic styles at once. On one hand it tries to satirize our celebrity focused culture, while on another it tries to send up the conventions of science fiction films (and films in general)a la the Zuckers. At the same time that its trying to juggle those concepts, its also trying telling a story that could have been inherently funny on its own, without the distractions of the slapstick and the parodies. The idea that the first aliens to openly visit Earth are here by accident simply because they're too stupid to pilot, let alone understand the workings of, their rented spacecraft had great potential, but the movie is too distracted by everything else it tries to do for it to work. Despite its problems, there are some genuine laughs to be had here, and its well worth a watch.
tcc-6 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.