When, over the course of a
forty years plus career, you’ve worked
with Terrence Malick, Francis Ford Coppola, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese
and Steven Spielberg it’s safe to say you can pat yourself on the
back, and congratulate yourself on a job well done.
But such artistic success means nothing unless you can proudly say you’ve
also co-starred with a wise-cracking puppet from a cancelled TV show.
And that, presumably, is why you can find Martin Sheen as the pantomime
villain of this agonising spin-off from the momentarily popular Eighties
sitcom.
The show, which ran from 1986 to 1990, followed the madcap adventures
of a short, brown hairy alien dubbed ALF (Alien Life Form) who crash
landed on Earth and set up home with an exasperated American suburban
family, turning their lives upside down with his zany jokes and appetite
for cats.
In other words, imagine Bugs Bunny crossed with Mork & Mindy, and
then crush any residual traces of wit or humour with the bludgeoning
hammer of smug Eighties sitcom formula. For reasons that we mortals may
never fully understand it was decided that, six years after limping off
the small screen, an ALF TV movie was
required to tie up all those lingering unresolved plot threads.
His TV family unceremoniously removed from the picture, we open with
ALF in military custody. Assorted bigwigs are meeting – in a vast
empty aircraft hangar – to decide what should be done with him.
Dr. Mulligan and Dr. Hill are two nice army scientists who share a blindingly
obvious romantic attraction to each other. They like ALF, think that
the tests he’s been subjected to are cruel and believe he should
be set free.
Captain Milfoil, played by our slumming star Mr. Martin Sheen, on the
other hand, claims ALF is a menace who should be destroyed. He believes
this because his mother was an alien abductee and she went insane when
nobody believed her. Motivation, people. It’s the key to a great
character.
Mulligan and Hill realise that Milfoil is planning to have ALF killed
before a decision can be reached, and so they break him out of the military
hospital (where he’s set up a burgeoning black market empire, like
some hairy extra-terrestrial Bilko) and plan to deliver him to Moyers,
a respected ex-NASA scientist who will reveal ALF’s existence to
the world, the media spotlight presumably putting him beyond the grasp
of Milfoil’s poisonous plot. We know Moyers is clever because,
in true Eighties style, he lives in an automated House Of The Future,
and has even built a hilariously snooty robot butler to serve meals.
And, of course, Moyers also turns out to be evil. In a pulse-pounding
final twist, he reveals he merely wants to use the publicity to sell
ALF to the highest bidder. Such drama!
Of course, throughout all this sub X-Files claptrap, ALF interjects constantly
with random asides, glib observations and woefully outdated cultural
references. It’s no exaggeration to say that every single line
that blurts from his stiffly animated plastic lips is a ham-fisted attempt
at humour. Given that the plot would have struggled to fill a half-hour
episode of the TV show, this leaves a truly horrible amount of screen
time to be filled with twittering quips from the cocky puppet.
Martin Sheen’s role as the nominal villain of the piece doesn’t
require much more than a rehash of brusque military clichés, and
it’s notable that he only shares one scene with ALF himself – right
near the end, as he interrogates the recaptured critter – and even
then, his face is rarely seen in the same shot as the gurning puppet.
Why, you’d almost think he was embarrassed…
Need to know: One of the doctors who tests ALF at the
start of the movie is played by the briefly-famous Ed Begley Jr. The
role of Moyers was
played by Miguel Ferrer, cousin of George Clooney,
star of Crossing Jordan, the short-lived Bionic Woman revival and popular
character actor in flicks like Traffic and RoboCop.
Following the less-than-enthusiastic reception for this TV movie (which
apparently still gets a lot of airplay on German TV) ALF vanished once
more from the screen. He resurfaced yet again in 2004 for the unfortunately
named ALF’s Hit Talk Show, in which the jovial puppet interviewed
celebrity guests. Only two episodes were broadcast and, thankfully, he’s
not been seen since. For details on how Martin Sheen’s offspring
have fared in the world of cheap crap, see: Emilio
Estevez, Charlie Sheen.
Honourable mentions: Other unusual Sheen outings include the time-travelling
battleship yarn, The Final Countdown (see: Kirk
Douglas), the incomprehensible
Civil War horror The Killing Box (see: Matt Le
Blanc), the UFO thiller
Roswell and another villainous turn in uniform as corrupt government
agent Jason Wynn in the astonishingly awful comic book spin-off, Spawn.
Availability: Project ALF can be found on DVD in all nations where tolerance
for wise-ass puppetry remains undimmed.
