Illegal Aliens

Scott Hardie: “It sucked.”

There are bad movies that slowly win you over with self-deprecation and a sort of weird appeal. Then there are bad movies that make you burst into laughter every few minutes at how seriously they take themselves. Then there are some that are just plain depressing, making you sink into your couch with despair at the human race that made them. Illegal Aliens is that kind of bad movie. It got a small wave of attention for being Anna Nicole Smith's last movie, posthumously released, but it's as trashy and unappealing as anything else she created in her sorry life.

This spoof of Charlie's Angels and Men in Black casts Smith in a trio of alien-fighting protectors of Earth. Her partners are "the competent ones," not because they do their jobs effectively, but because they don't spend critical scenes poking a dildo in their ears and talking on a dildo like it was a telephone. For some reason, Smith adopts the chirpy, high-pitched voice of a grating cartoon character, and the phrase "nails on a chalkboard" doesn't do the character justice. But she's nothing compared to the villain, a temper-tantrum-throwing caricature of whatever the director thought he was lampooning. Joanie Laurer's performance makes her WWE career look like Masterpiece Theater: She channels her inner 4-year-old, alternately screeching and gutturally groaning her dialogue as loudly as she can, all with pouty, constipated expressions on her face, like Judy Tenuta covering Cannibal Corpse. It's the worst performance of its kind that I can recall seeing.

How am I supposed to evaluate anything else about the movie when these two central performances are so off-putting they force you not to pay attention? Furthermore, who really cares? This is a bad movie thoroughly aware of its own badness and hopeful to entertain in spite of itself. It attempts to be clever with sight gags and cheap stock footage, which I would give it credit for if the attempts were successful. This is not a bad movie for bad-movie enthusiasts, just a depressing ninety-minute eulogy for a bottom-feeding celebrity who didn't deserve the attention in the first place.

− October 20, 2007 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply