My Stepmother Is an Alien (1988)

_**Weird 80’s comedy in the silly mold of “Earth Girls are Easy” and “Coneheads”**_ A low-paid widowed scientist (Dan Aykroyd) makes contact with aliens and they send an agent (Kim Basinger) to meet him. She has a one-eyed serpentine counselor in her purse and ends up marrying the physicist, even though the counselor’s intention is to destroy the planet (!). Alyson Hannigan plays the winsome daughter while Jon Lovitz is on hand as the researcher’s annoying brother. “My Stepmother Is an Alien” (1988) is cut from the same cloth as the contemporaneous “Earth Girls are Easy.” Although it’s not as good and has a strange off-kilter vibe, it’s vastly superior to future duds "2001: A Space Travesty" and "What Planet Are You From?" (both from 2000). While I’m not a fan of Basinger (I don’t NOT like her either), she does comedy surprisingly well, better than you would expect. This was the feature film debut of future “stars” Alyson Hannigan and Juliette Lewis, as well as one of Seth Green’s early movies. The roles of the latter two are almost unnoticeable. Meanwhile, whoever wrote the script loves Jimmy Durante. There’s a surprising scene involving porn that, while it doesn’t get outrageously out of hand (and I could care less about its inclusion), it seems out of place for a warm-hearted family flick. The film is considerably overlong at 1 hour, 47 minutes. It was shot at Studio City and points nearby in the Los Angeles area. GRADE: B-/C+