Dr. Alien

I haven't seen everything DeCoteau has directed, but yes I have suffered through most of his work -- even those cursed puppets. I don't really know why I put myself through this, but sometimes you get rewarded, and this is one of them.

Prior to seeing this film, my favourite was The Brotherhood (2001). But this one is just a bit better. It's got everything great about the 80s. Lots of naked boobies for those who are into that. Shirtless Billy Jayne and his painted-on jeans for me. Good music, pop-culture references (without going overboard like the Scream franchise), a plot, halfway-decent dialogue, and even effects that didn't look completely like leftovers from another film's trash. Most importantly, no minutes-long sequences of people walking down corridors in slow motion. We can all celebrate that, can't we?

This film doesn't deserve the horrible score it has received. It's not Shawshank, but it's certainly worth 6/10.

This was pretty close to being tolerable.

"Dr. Alien" (or whatever title it may happen to be under when you see it next) is basically a story about an alien (Landers) who tests a high school nerd Jacoby (Jayne) with a serum that makes him the object of desire of nearly every nubile girl in immediate range.

The fact that I remembered the plot is in itself amazing; everything here is just a setup for whatever lame-brained sight gag the film makers can come up with.

But some of them work. The flustered parent bit is tried and true, Jayne is willing to do what it takes for the laughs, he fronts a rock band in what must have been an afterthought, Landers actually turns into an alien at one point, Troy Donahue gets blown up before the beginning credits roll and then there's the women, God bless them.

If the movie starts getting boring, just pop in a half-dressed or undressed girl and then who cares about the plot? Not me. Two and a half stars. You want a good brain-dead night of laughs and T & A (heavy on the T), call this "Dr.".

I'll have to admit...I LOVE this movie. The movie itself is Comedy/Science fiction. The effects are great. The plot is..well..cheesy...but who cares? Anyone who would be reading comments/reviews for a movie entitled "Dr. Alien" obviously is looking for good old B rated Science fiction movies. I would recommend renting this film if you can find it.

My Rating: 7 out of 10

Dr. Alien looks so cool!

A witless teen sex comedy that typifies everything that went wrong with genre films in the late 1980s. Troy Donahue grabs a quick paycheck for his cameo as a college professor who gets injured in a car crash caused by a UFO. His replacement is statuesque blonde Judy Landers, who's really an alien doing fertility experiments on Earth to help cure the sterile population of her home planet. She injects some green stuff into a straight-laced, unpopular, necktie-wearing nerd, causing him to grow a tentacle/antenna thing that occasionally pops up from the top of his head and instantly hypnotizes women into wanting to have sex with him. Supposed hilarity ensues. You can tell it's supposed to be funny but there isn't anything clever about it. The nerd learns to loosen up and be himself, leading to a muddled moral message for teens, which naturally is the old "believe in yourself and you can do anything" bromide. Since the kid only became popular after developing an impossible new body part that automatically hypnotizes people, the message feels as ill-fitting as it is trite. The pleasant surprise is the makeup. When Landers pulls off her human face to reveal the bulbous-headed, pointy-eared, bug-eyed alien form underneath, the special effects are so good that it's amazing to see them in a movie this cheap and lowbrow. Greg Cannom provided the alien effects, and his makeup work is really terrific. It's a great looking alien that deserved to be in a better film. The same director made (among tons of other undistinguished junk) CREEPAZOIDS, referenced several times here, once as the name on a prop breakfast cereal box and again when one character is shown watching it on TV. Linnea Quigley and Michelle Bauer appear briefly as tramps. For some reason, promotional art for DR. ALIEN used an altered photo that crudely replaced Landers' hypo with an awkwardly positioned test tube. Somebody must have worried that a photo of a woman holding a syringe full of bright green fluid would be interpreted as an endorsement of heroin use. Only in America. This was announced as I WAS A TEENAGE SEX MUTANT, and a very 80's-sounding song by that title is heard on the soundtrack.

Judy Landers plays a doctor from space who selects a teenager as a guinea pig for her sexual experiments (just don't expect to see her bare anything in any version: her typecast wholesome and innocent nature remains mostly intact for this film, keeping her at least a step above Farrah Fawcett in talent). This leaves the teen with a phallic antenna on top of his head that drives women crazy, leading to many odd and often uninvited sexual encounters with everyone from the cheerleader squad to the school faculty.

In this millennium, we have films like Not Another Teen movie and the direct-to-video American Pie: Band Camp. In the 80s and 90s, teenagers in the throes of puberty had movies like this, which aired on USA's Up All Night several times during the late 80s/early 90s under the title "I Was a Teenage Sex Project." I gave this movie a 4 out of 10 for its place in filmdom, but for movies of its genre it deserves a 7 at the very least. I'd say it was one of the last great T&A movies to make it to the masses, more for Judy Landers than anything, and I put it right up there with Zapped, Once Bitten and a few others. After "Up All Night" went off the air and Ronda Shear and Gilbert Gottfried had to get real jobs, the line between simple eye candy and soft-core porn became so blurred that movies like this are only seen on premium cable after midnight, and T&A movies these days no longer try to be subtle with their humor. This film was produced just as the quality of this genre began to die of asphyxia, and very few made after it are worth seeing (and those of us who remember seeing Dr. Alien when it first came out are just a bit old to be watching 19-year-olds bounce around in the nude). Simply put, this was one of those movies that didn't need too much editing to be enjoyed for a good tease on basic cable, but of course you'd have to hit a local video store to see all the bare skin (That's why these movies were made, folks, so don't shoot the messenger). If you were a teenage boy in late 80s or even a bit younger, you might find this good for a nostalgic cheesy laugh coupled with an anatomy lesson, but if you're a teenage boy now with the same afflictions, then something more recent is probably what you're after (by this time most of the girls are old enough to be your mother anyway).