B-Movie of the Week: Illegal Aliens

It's no industry secret that morgue-ready celebrities make wonderful marketing gimmicks. Professional Hollywood freakshow Courtney Love is well aware of that fact, as are the owners of Elvis Presley's oh so profitable estate. America's increasingly morbid curiosity with the lives of the recently deceased is becoming a very big business; I'm sure countless entertainment agents across this glorious nation are encouraging their lightweight clients to consider suicide as a shifty form of career advancement. After all, nothing moves product like a bloated, maggot-ridden corpse.

A fine example of this macabre theory in motion is director David Giancola's intentionally campy B-movie extravaganza Illegal Aliens, starring that mind-boggling entity known only as Anna Nicole Smith. Were she still attempting to walk and talk and breathe at this very moment, nobody would give a good goddamn about this so-called motion picture. It would have been dumped into the retail marketplace with little fanfare whatsoever, promptly fading into obscurity as soon as it hit video store shelves. Assuming, of course, that anyone would want to stock this turkey in the first place.

However, thanks to the opportunistic bastards at MTI Home Video, we now have the luxury of sitting down with Anna Nicole Smith's final attempt at going Hollywood, a thoroughly trashy affair that lacks any sort of redeeming qualities whatsoever. It's cheap, it's stupid, and it barely qualifies as anything other than a posthumous curiosity from a dead chick nobody gave two farts about when she was a living, breathing member of the human race. Fortunately for those of us who thrive on this kind of low-budget nonsense, Illegal Aliens is a deliriously trashy good time. A masterpiece of moronic cinema, you ask?

You'd better believe it, buddy.

If you take a look at its cinematic DNA through an electron microscope, you'll discover that Illegal Aliens is essentially a Charlie's Angels knock-off with extraterrestrial babes in place of the hairless monkeys from Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts' mid-'70s television classic. To put a finer point on it, three airhead aliens in the former of curvy American bimbos are the only thing that stands between us and total extinction. Things get particularly ugly when one chick's otherworldly ex-boyfriend arrives on our planet dressed like former pro wrestler Chyna, which is a serious fashion faux pas in any galaxy. Cars chases and countless explosions ensue. Can these busty buffoons stop their manly arch-enemy before the moon crashes into the Earth?

I'm not kidding.

It's incredibly sad and embarrassing that I enjoyed this movie as much as I did. Though I wanted to hate Illegal Aliens with every inch of my tiny little soul, the film kind of marches along to the beat of its own weird one-armed drummer, forcing you to give in to its goofy charm despite yourself. It reminded me of the kind of stuff I used to watch on USA's Up All Night back in the '90s. I know for a fact this flick is truly God-awful, but that didn't prevent me from sitting back and letting that thick, moldy cheese clog my razor thin arteries. To be brutally honest, there's no way yours truly could ever hate a movie that makes good use of mind control suppositories. Sheer poetry.

Article Author: T. Rigney

T. Rigney was specifically designed for the mass consumption of B-grade cinema from around the world. His roughly translated thoughts and feelings can be found lurking suspiciously at The Film Fiend, Fatally Yours, and Film Threat. …

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