Conference bookie::movies

42.0. "Breakfast of Aliens" by ALPHA::reeves (Jon Reeves, ULTRIX compiler group) Tue Feb 16 1993 18:18

I'm entering this review as a caution: avoid this.

Vic Dunlop plays portly loser Walter Clydepepper.  One morning, an
alien drops into his cereal and Walter swallows it.  The alien turns
Walter from a shy, retiring guy into (among other things) a headlining
stand-up comic.

The premise sounds promising, and in fact the first 20 minutes or so
are good.  However, it turns fairly boring after that, and perhaps the
biggest problem is that, as a stand-up comic, I didn't find Walter's
act very funny at all.  The movie was also intended to offend almost
everyone, and while I can live with that if there's a point behind it
(for instance, I thought The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
was a very good movie), here, there wasn't; it was sheer incompetence
on the part of the filmmakers.

This is probably headed straight to video, given the near unanimous
reaction of the audience I saw it with.  Worth watching only if you are
a big fan of the band Haunted Garage, which does a few songs in the
middle during a party scene (I'm not, but found it interesting they got
the spot in the ad credits usually reserved for the director).

Amazingly enough, the ending is *almost* worth it.  Suggestion if you
rent this: watch the first 20 minutes, fast forward, and watch the last
5.  Better suggestion: don't rent it.