Culture

Weekly DVD corner

Where discs hit the fan

Gary Dretzka

Illegal Aliens ($19.95, *) If life were fair, the news directors and reporters who provided viewers with hysterical overcoverage of the travails of Anna Nicole Smith would be forced to sit through repeated showings of Illegal Aliens. Then they would be asked to craft an apology, admitting the notorious heiress was neither an actress nor a person worthy of more than passing interest to the media. If they refused, they would be forced to watch Illegal Aliens—in which Smith played a blond bimbo from outer space—until they put ink to paper. In a production that probably didn’t max out anyone’s credit card, Smith and two slightly less statuesque brunettes assume the guise of skin-mag models to blend into their surroundings. Their mission is to save Earth from yet another intergalactic threat, this one in the form of Joanie Laurer (aka the non-blond wrestler and, yes, former Playboy model Chyna). The obvious influences for this spoof of cheesy straight-to-video movies were Charlie’s Angels (the theatrical version), Men in Black and Dinosaur Island, in which bikini-clad lesbians save a group of mutinous soldiers from stop-motion dinosaurs. Even as parody, Illegal Aliens makes Plan 9 from Outer Space look like 2001: A Space Odyssey. Recommended only for people with access to news directors.

  • Get More Stories from Tue, May 8, 2007
Top of Story