My Stepmother Is an Alien (1988)

The provenance of this picture is more interesting than anything on screen. Jericho Stone wrote it as a drama called They're Coming, pitched to Paramount as an allegory for child abuse. The studio thought it would play better as a comedy. Four years of turnaround and three sets of screenwriters later, the result is Kim Basinger as Celeste, an extraterrestrial who arrives to repair her planet's disrupted gravity field, dressed in diamonds and designer gowns conjured on demand by a tentacled handbag with a mind of its own.

The film's value system is unambiguous and entirely material. Bag the purse produces jewels, dresses, and a Rolls-Royce, and the camera regards each with the reverence of a catalog spread. Ron, the playboy brother, longs for a woman resembling Princess Stephanie of Monaco, a wish the finale grants him in the form of several identical flight attendants. Celeste exists to be looked at, to misunderstand a microwave, and to discover sexual pleasure in a single evening. The humor is crass, the gender politics are those of a beer commercial, and no character pauses to interrogate either. An earlier draft's interest in trauma has been thoroughly laundered out.

None of this is offered as instruction, and the ledger of contemporary social concern comes back empty. The film wants only to amuse, and by most accounts it failed: a seventh-place opening, $13.8 million against a $19 million budget, a 20 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and critics lining up to note that Aykroyd was miscast as a romantic lead. It found its audience on VHS, where it ranked among the year's most-rented titles, and it achieved a stranger afterlife as a South Korean Baskin-Robbins flavor called Mom is an alien. We are left with a harmless artifact, unserious about everything including its own premise, asking nothing of us but ninety minutes.