Coneheads

If you are between 30 and 40 years old, then the marketing guns of this movie are aimed at you. Chances are you remember staying up until midnight to view Saturday Night Live, and chances are just as good that you remember the 1977 season for the Coneheads, a short weekly skit featuring Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd. Well, time flies, and so do the Coneheads, as they return in their spaceship to New York and wind up in the East River. What follows is many Conehead skits all tied together with thin and pointless plot, as the Coneheads try to fit into society while waiting for a ship to come and rescue them.

Although Aykroyd and Curtin do their best to make the movie work, and you may even find yourself walking and talking like a conehead thanks to Aykroyd's catchy way of playing his role, the script offers little to work with. Virtually all of the comedy comes from sexual innuendo and jokes. They chew condoms for bubble gum and make light of sexual relationships, especially when dealing with their teenage daughter. There is also a shower room scene with rear male nudity.

As the Coneheads try to hide in New Jersey's suburbia, a persistent immigration officer continues to pursue them, doing everything including presenting himself and his assistant as Jehovah's Witnesses at the Coneheads home. His other actions show him as being dishonest and is an obvious play by the writers suggesting that American immigration authorities are cold hearted and dishonest, especially as they suggest torching Mexicans when they try to run the border.

With a length that barely qualifies this film as a feature, this movie is a compilation of Conehead skits with a poor excuse for putting them all together. It's a shame, because this premise has so much potential for a very funny movie, and using the old standby of sexual innuendo to build comedy is unnecessary.