Femalien (1996)

Posted on Feb 07, 2007 under Exploitation, Sci-fi |

Written and directed by Cybil Richards
Starring
- Jacqueline Lovell
- Matt Shue
- Kurt Schwoebel
- Vanesa Talor
- Brittany Andrews
Produced by Pat Siciliano
Executive produced by Charles Band (uncredited)

What the Puppet Master series was to Full Moon Entertainment, what the Prehysteria! movies were to Moonbeam Entertainment, Femalien was to Surrender Cinema: The flagship title of the post-Paramount era of Charles Band’s multifarous production entities, the feature which defines the production values, the narrative style, and the target audience for the rest of the titles under that banner. Many people would say that if you’ve seen one softcore feature from Surrender Cinema, you’ve seen them all, and I can’t dispute that; but if you’re going to see only one, see this one. Not that it’s a good movie, but it is exactly what it was meant to be, a goal which most features of any genre rarely achieve. I know one independent film reviewer who considers this the greatest non-hardcore erotic feature ever made. I claim no special expertise to confirm or deny his assessment (and no special interest in amassing the necessary expertise), but even I am enthralled by the aggressive adequacy of it all. This is a movie which makes no bones about its lack of ambition, but instead trumpets it. Not only does this movie hit all of the bases, it stops and jumps on each one, emphasizing the enthusiasm with which it aspires to unremarkability. This is the Platonic ideal of its kind.

In case you had no idea what kind of movie you were getting into, we open with the two images that define the experience: A cheap CGI spaceship, and a pair of breasts. Both the ship and the boobies belong to Kara (Vanesa Talor, a stage name obviously chosen on a day when marquee letters were in short supply). Kara is an alien who has taken human form for a research field trip to Earth to look into “human-to-human interpersonal relationships,” concentrating on physical intimacy, of course. Her inanimate minder, Dak (voice of Stu Gotz), looks like an extraterrestrial Erlenmeyer flask, and tells her basically to go out and have a good time. She begins in the buff, in the second-story California bedroom where she materializes — a bedroom which has a good view of the back yard next door, the sunbathing wife, and the business owner husband who tries but fails to escape his wife’s feminine wiles. Which means we get seven minutes of unrated frottage and grinding, while Kara watches and rubs her own breasts.

Direct from space, free from the effects of gravity!

The introductory scene out of the way, Kara determines that she is hungry, so she dresses and uses her handy wrist teleporter to arrive at a small restaurant (thus saving on all of the expensive and troublesome “travelling between locations” footage). The proprietor is Sun (Jacqueline Lovell), an young idealist hippy chick, who with her single employee Drew (Matt Shue) is just about to close up shop for good. The problem? Wait for it – the greedy capitalist next door! Yep, their mortgage has been taken over by workout and massage dude M.J. (Kurt Schwoebel), who wants to expand his operation at the expense of Sun’s ill-managed café.

So, with that semblance of a plot sketched in, we get back to the softcore, which comes in discrete chunks:

First, Sun spills hot coffee on herself, and has to strip off her T-shirt. Fortunately, Kara touches her torso and keeps it from burning – and in the process, gives Sun a powerful image of sensuality (that is, Jaqueline Lovell touching herself).

Then, at Sun’s recommendation, Kara walks down the block to a photographer’s studio in search of “unique experiences.” She discovers that the male and female models aren’t generating any heat, so she touches them with her “sex glow,” and suddenly they’re groining it up for the next ten minutes.

“So, I should sit one one shoulder, and you on the other? How intriguing!”

Then she wanders off to the lingerie store next door, where lesbian co-owners Angel (Stevi Conrad) and Gina (Taylor St. Clair) volunteer to put on a slinky barely-there fashion show for Kara’s benefit. I should point out, there’s no magic alien touch used here; apparently lingerie store proprietors are in the habit of putting on exhibits for random customers off the street. After their catwalk strut degenerates (or builds, depending on your point of view) into Sapphic loving between the two (while, naturally, Kara watches and gropes her own breasts), they give her an invitation to a kinky “performance art” presentation that evening, and even make a gift of an outfit. (Boy, and M.J. thought that Sun didn’t understand commerce?)

Back at the restaurant, Kara decides that she’s had enough of watching from the sidelines; she’s ready for the first-hand experience. Since Drew is obviously smitten with her charms, she snuggles up to him, then teleports the two of them back to her place to engage in another ten minutes of almost-but-not-quite hardcore. (She conveniently put him to sleep before each teleportation to and from her digs, so as not to blow her cover as an alien.)

After returning Drew to the restaurant, Kasra ventures out to watch the performance art piece — which, naturally, involves three women on stage getting it on, while various members of the audience behave sympathetically. Again, I want to point out that Kara uses none of her alien love magic here; she just happens to have picked for her terrestrial field trip the free-lovingest street in the free love capital of the world. Just imagine how different her experience had been if she had chosen the main street of some small Nebraska town for her data-collection mission.

**Bonus footage: The Femalien premiere!**

And back at the café, Drew tells Kara about how bummed out Sun is at the loss of her business, so Kara determines to get the deed back from M.J. How? Simple; she takes him up on his lecherous offer of a free massage next door (it’s not easy to appear lecherous in a movie like this, but he succeeds), then turns the tables on him, starts stroking him, and gives him such a monumental charge of Alien Love Glow that he happily gives her Sun’s deed. (I’m guessing he’ll be dead within five years from massive melanoma, but that’s the price of alien passion.)

Kara victoriously takes the deed back to the restaurant to find out that Sun’s down the block at “Astral Projections,” the meditation center. So Kara heads down there, gives Sun the deed, and just for fun turns the half-dozen other meditators into a New Age orgy all over the paisley pillows. In the middle of it, M.J. bursts in with a cop, trying to get the deed back, but the cop is too overcome by the passionate ambience to do anything.

Back at the restaurant, Sun declares that she can’t keep the deed because M.J. will just keep trying to get it, and that maybe she ought to just give up and move on. So instead Kara teleports her back to her place, and makes love to her, because one of Sun’s big fantasies had always been to meet and greet a real-life alien.

Because only an alien can give you a massage and a suntan at the same time.

By the time their love scene is done, Kara decides to stick around on Earth for an indeterminate time to experience all there is, and even teleports Drew into the same bed, without his clothes. And we cut to the closing credits before their threesome can get busy.

If you simply count up all of the scenes in the movie, you’ll wonder how it could possibly have filled a full hour and a half. That’s because you’re not reckoning on a full seven to ten minutes of softcore sex in each scene. You’ll note that the director also wrote the script; I think in this case the word “wrote” really means, “So, what empty set is available tomorrow? Great, Kara will go there for sex next.” You have to appreciate and almost admire the sheer arbitrary nature of Kara’s location-specific encounters. Photo shoot! Lingerie shop! Performance art theater! Meditation room! I don’t know if anyone watching this movie would recognize the Earth that Kara visits as the same one they inhabit.

On the other hand, the movie looks terrific. Although probably half of the locations are simply redressed sets in the same warehouse, they don’t all have that same “shot on a soundstage” look. Similarly, the acting (in those isolated moments in which the performers are called upon to act) are, if not necessarily good, perfectly suited to the scenario. Jacqueline Lovell has always exuded a giddy enthusiasm in her performances, resulting in a string of “bliss ninny” roles in which her hippy-chick role here fits perfectly. Drew manages to seem nobly reticent and even tongue-tied at Kara’s advances, despite the fact that he’s a blond ponytailed beefcake. And Vanesa Talor… I honestly can’t assess her as an actress from her role here, because as an alien in human form she’s supposed to speak with stilted diction and express innocent confusion about her surroundings. So either Talor is a vapid starlet perfect for the part, or she’s an accomplished thespian who pulls off this role impressively.

“That’s right, just follow the instructions on that cue card, and everything will be fine.”

What I especially love about this movie, and what establishes the priorities for the narrative and for the following offerings from Surrender Cinema, is the way in which Sun simply gives up in her fight against M.J. It seems as if writer/director Cybil Richards was as disinterested in the “greedy capitalist” plot as we were; or probably more to the point, she wasn’t willing to pursue any storyline which would demand focus which could otherwise be placed on naked groping. As soon as that story idea got to the point where it would require more effort to pursue, and take away from the naked frolicking, it was simply jettisoned so we could get back to the bedroom.