Alien Love has Hill as Ryan Van Hill-Song, an astronaut in a world where astronauts are rock stars. When he finally gets his big chance to go into space with NASA, something goes wrong--he goes radio silent for 60 seconds! Luckily a NASA special agent has informed his wife Sadie (Ira Chakraborty) that there's nothing to worry about, even if he ventured all the way out to Australia to tell her. When Hill gets home, everything seems fine at first, but then she discovers her husband's not himself. He's jogging a lot, and sometimes has a larger-than-normal erection. Unfortunately she doesn't catch all these red flags before he impregnates her with his alien seed. As her world unravels, she's fortunate that she kept the NASA special agent's card--though he's already onto everything and has sent some folks out to take care of it.
This was a lot of fun. There were definite laugh-out-loud moments, like when Hill and Chakraborty are sitting at a cafe, he in a NASA T-shirt and Kennedy Space Station hat, and a young woman rushes up to their table and asks if he's an astronaut, then asks for his autograph. Hill's character's transformation is a lot of fun, from his ambling around the neighborhood with what could loosely be termed "jogging," to when he goes to a bar and orders champagne and hooks up with Demz Lato--who I swear I've seen in other Hill films before, but she's not listed on any I've seen. I also really liked Ira Chakraborty as the wife who thinks she's got it made with her astronaut husband, but then slowly sees that her life is falling apart. Unlike Hill, who could ham it up a bit as he was becoming more alien, Chakraborty always had to play it straight, which I can't imagine was always easy, but she pulled it off. 75 minutes, free to stream on Tubi, and a fun time, what more could you want?
Even though Hill didn't direct this, he co-wrote and produced it, so it still has the feel of one of his films. Unlike Lady Terror, where I missed initially that I should be laughing with the film, this one I could feel it right away; but I can also still see how people could miss it, especially us Americans who sometimes need to be hit over the head with the humor. The thing I loved about Alien Love was how his approach to making these movies can mitigate the budgetary limitations. If you don't have the budget for an expensive outer space set, if your hero astronaut is playing it straight but we know it's for laughs, the lower-budget set enhances that sense. If your stars are newer to acting--and based on the fact that very few have photos on their IMDb page, that's probably the case here--playing silly-ish dialog straight is a great way for them to be serious while we're having fun with the content of what they're saying and not that they're inexperienced as actors. I'm really glad Nate reached out to me to cover his films, because they're a lot of fun, and I can't wait to see what's next!
As you're reading this, you might be thinking "isn't that the plot to The Astronaut's Wife?" I'd actually forgotten that movie existed, but yeah, it definitely is, the same way Lady Terror was like the Haim/Feldman flick Blown Away, and Revenge of the Gweilo took elements from Drive. That's part of how Hill works, he pays homage to other films, and then puts his unique twist on them. What was crazier to me was that this year marks 25 years since The Astronaut's Wife came out, which explains why before watching this I'd forgotten about it. That was a time when R-rated movies were more common. If a studio were to remake The Astronaut's Wife today, it would have to be PG-13, though maybe now with the success off Deadpool and Wolverine, maybe R-rated movies in wide theatrical release will come back. If not, at the very least Nate can bring them back to us in his own special way.
This movie has a lot of flying saucer imagery, which made me wonder when flying saucers were first invented. According to Wikipedia, it was a sighting reported by a pilot in 1947, which then led to myriad other reported sightings. From there, 1950s sci-fi movies and TV shows made heavy use of it, so much so that now if we see a flying saucer in a movie, TV show, or even commercial, we know right away that that means aliens, the same way the opening wah-wah to "Let's Get It On" tells us something we're going to see is alluding to sex. The propagation of sightings makes sense too. It's like how one Karen's Facebook post about two people of color in the Hobby Lobby parking lot being potential traffickers will lead to thousands of Karens across the US thinking traffickers are targeting them in Hobby Lobby parking lots too. It's a fascinating thing about us humans, how one person sees something and then a bunch of us think we see it too, and popular media can exacerbate it, turning things into phenomena faster. In the 70s Sci-Fi imagery started to change, and the flying saucer became less ubiquitous, meaning maybe we'll also be released from the fugazi trafficking paradigm we're seeing in every third DTV actioner or Lifetime thriller--though to be fair, flying saucers were actually fun, as evidenced by how much fun they were in this film.
Finally, I don't know why, but whenever I see the film's title, Alien Love, I get Zapp's "Computer Love" stuck in my head. They aren't the same thing, I mean I guess they're both three syllables for the first word and "love" for the second, but that's it. After watching this I was making dinner, and our fluffy cat Luca was hanging out with me, so the whole time I was singing "Computer Fluff," which makes even less sense. It was really ahead of its time though, predicting how we'd all end up using computers to meet romantic partners. Zapp had some great hits, like "More Bounce to the Ounce" or their cover of the Smokey Robinson song "Ooh, Baby, Baby," and then in the 90s their music was a huge part of the West Coast hip hop scene. Here's to you Roger Troutmann and the rest of Zapp, you were great ones--now I just need to get "Computer Love" out of my head!
With that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Tubi here in the States. It's a lot of fun, and it's only 75 minutes. What better way to support indie creatives? Thanks again to Nate for having us review it, I really enjoyed it.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt28434918
Looking for more action? Check out my short action novel, Bainbridge, and all my other novels, over at my author's page! Click on the image below, go to https://www.matthewpoirierauthor.com/
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