Amanda and the Alien (1995)

A Showtime cable movie from a story by Robert Silverberg (who has a wordless cameo as a talkshow guest at the end), this teases with a premise that seems to set up a Channel 5-style erotic thriller before segueing into an odd mix of Mork and Mindy and The X-Files. The authorities – represented by unsmiling and not exactly ept types like Stacy Keach, Michael Dorn and John Diehl (whose nasty general disappears from the film for no reason) – have captured a pair of aliens who look in their natural stake like flatfish with extruding scorpion-tails but can 'ingest' humans, at once eating them and taking on their form. One of the creatures escapes in the form of a bodacious but snarly just-fired base waitress (Alex Meneses) and a statewide hunt is on for her. Amanda (Nicole Eggert), an aimless artist wannabe who works in a clothing store and has boyfriend troubles, sees the alien in a coffee bar and recognises from her mismatched outfit and obvious lack of basic understandings (she leaves skin-traces by trying to pick up a scalding coffee cup) that she has heard about human beings but never seen one. Even though she knows the alien is a killer, Amanda feels sorry for it/her and takes her home for a make-over and a shower – the alien discovers during the latter process that masturbation is fun, but the expected lesbian angle never comes along and instead Amanda sets up the creature to a) fuck and b) ingest her faithless rat boyfriend (Michael Bendetti). Aliens, it seems, react to paprika like cocaine, and Amanda has more satisfying sex with the transformed ET than she did with the former guy. But the authorities close in, and the alien has to become first Dorn and then Keach to make a rendezvous with a ship home – having learned that humans are an intelligent life form it's not nice to eat, he needs to call off the invasion. And Amanda goes on a talk show.

It is padded (Dorn in the coffee house and Keach in a diner have gag confrontation-with-clientele scenes just there to bring up the running time), and the sitcom-like presentation of the authorities and victims gives it a very uneven, almost unsettling tone – or perhaps Eggert just isn't good enough an actress to make credible her character's interest in the dangerous invader. Meneses is sexy in a sulky sort of way, and it's a shame the film doesn't have her play the alien longer – most of the good jokes come during her tenure. A late attempt at poignance as the body-hopping creature declares love for the human and laments the passing of its mate doesn't work, and some of the escape stratagems (Eggert pretends to have been taken over) are obvious. Directed by Jon Kroll.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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