Morons from Outer Space (1985) and Aliens in Movies

Nobody knows for sure what life may exist beyond the confines of our planet. People have been searching for years. They’ve sent rovers to planets like Mars and Jupiter and Saturn. Probes filled with Earth artifacts have been shot out beyond our solar system. Messages have been projected into space in waveform to try and communicate with distant lifeforms. So far, nothing has been discovered out there. As far as we know, our planet is alone in terms of life.

With a lack of evidence of life on another planet, imaginations have gone wild. People speculated about what could be out there. There could be planets similar to ours, filled with life like ours. There could also be more hospitable planets with different kinds of lifeforms that can survive in those conditions. People have imagined what those lifeforms would be. How could they live and what would they look like? People imagined how we would interact if we encountered these extra-terrestrials. What would happen if they came to Earth? That sort of thing.

When it comes to telling stories about aliens, people interpret their imaginary fictions in different ways. Most of the stories end up being aliens threatening Earth or aliens trying to help humans avoid destroying Earth. That’s basically it, aside from the odd outlier movie, like E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Or the E.T. rip-off, Mac and Me. Most of the differences come in the visuals, rather than the motivation. Storytellers have worked hard to make their aliens look different than what other people have described. It’s the different types of aliens that I want to go over.

Off the top of my head, there are four different kinds of aliens depicted in movies. I’m going to stick to movies because they are a visual medium, and this is a movie blog. The four types of aliens that quickly come to mind are humans, humanoids, humanoids as humans, and animalistic. I don’t have better names for them right now. I know you might be thinking “But there are grays!” And, yes, there are. But that falls into humanoid, and I’ll be getting to that soon enough.

When I mention human as an alien type, I don’t necessarily mean human as we are. I mean an alien that, for all intents and purposes, is the same as our species. The difference being that they come from another planet. They look exactly like humans. They act exactly like humans. The main difference between humans and these alien species would be cultural only. Growing on a different planet would give their culture some major differences. But, biologically, they share a great amount with homo sapiens.

Many of the major characters in the Star Wars franchise were human aliens. They came from planets like Alderaan, Tatooine, and Coruscant. The Skywalker family was human. But since they came from planets other than Earth, they were aliens. At least to us, they were. Obi-wan, Mace Windu, Padme Amidala, Poe Dameron, Finn, Rose Tico, Rey, and Han Solo were also human aliens. If the definition of alien is a lifeform not from Earth, they all fit the bill.

Morons from Outer Space was another movie that featured human aliens. Bernard (Mel Smith), Sandra (Joanne Pearce), Desmond (Jimmy Nail), and Julian (Paul Bown) were four aliens docked on a space station of sorts. When Bernard went to play some spaceball, the other three fooled around with their ship’s controls. They crashed into Earth, leaving Bernard behind on the station. The three aliens were quickly discovered and became major celebrities, under the management of Graham Sweetley (Griff Rhys Jones). He helped them avoid government officials that wanted to kill them. Meanwhile, Bernard found a way to Earth to seek out his companions.

The aliens in Morons from Outer Space were as close to human as they could be without being human. That was even a point in the story. When the aliens first arrived on Earth, the government people performed tests on them. The doctor working for the government determined that the aliens were humans. They came from a species that grew up much like ours on a planet much like ours with culture much like ours. There were differences like names and the fact that these alien humans were able to travel through space, but they were biologically as similar to humans through evolution as possible. That was what the doctor mentioned.

Human aliens aren’t as common as you might think in movies. Most of the human-looking aliens that you see on screen are actually a hybrid of human aliens and humanoid aliens. Before I get to the hybrids, I should probably explain what humanoid aliens are. For the sake of the writing I’m doing, my definition of humanoid alien might be different from other definitions of humanoid aliens. It’s past midnight as I’m writing this part and I’ve been awake since about seven this morning, so I’m a little too tired to look up specifics. I’m kind of just on auto-pilot as I write. At some point, I’ll go to sleep and pick up tomorrow. Anyway, my definition of humanoid alien is a bipedal lifeform with the basic shape of a human, though it is obviously a different species. Grays fall into this category, as well as numerous other alien beings.

I could go through a bunch of movies that feature grays. Movies like Signs, Paul, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But grays are maybe the most common type of humanoid alien. They’re the ones that people tend to describe when talking about abductions or alien autopsies. It probably has to do with the simplicity of the gray. It’s humanoid, so that gives you a basic idea of the body shape. However, they are kind of smooth and gray, making them easier to design or describe. The fewer features there are, the less a person needs to embellish. I want to go with some more distinct humanoid aliens, though, to give you a better idea of what I mean by humanoid.

Battleship is one of my favourite movies to feature humanoid aliens. The aliens had a similar figure to humans. If you were to draw a featureless figure of them, it would be the two leg, two arm, one head figure that humans have. When you get into the specific features, though, there were some differences between the aliens of Battleship and humans. The aliens had needle-like protrusions on their chins. Their eyes couldn’t handle sunlight. Their hands were different, as well, though I’m having a tough time coming up with the words to describe them. The Battleship aliens weren’t humans, but they felt like a distant planet’s equivalent to humans. The differences could be attributed to the differences in the planets’ ecosystems.

Bringing things back to Sunday “Bad” Movies, I’m going to take a moment to discuss Mac and Me. Yes, it’s a rip-off of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. The two biggest differences, though, were the MacDonalds product placement, and the design of the alien. The alien in Mac and Me was much more humanoid. It had the basic human shape, with changes to make it clearly seem of another world. The fact that some of the aliens were able to wear clothes, like a suit, and have it look like it fit properly was proof that they were just intergalactic species substitutes for human. The alien in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was humanoid as well, though the stubby legs and chubby body made it much less of the stereotypical humanoid alien.

I would be remised if I didn’t bring up both the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises when talking about humanoid aliens. Each franchise has a scope so large that there have been numerous humanoid aliens throughout. Star Wars had characters like Greedo, Chewbacca, and Jar Jar Binks who each fit into the humanoid category. Different skin, multitudes of hair, and gills don’t change the fact that they had the basic bipedal human shape. The same could be seen in Star Trek, with characters like Spock, Worf, and Jaylah looking like other planets’ equivalents of humans. With the number of planets out there in each franchise, there were bound to be a whole bunch of humanoid aliens.

Now that we’ve gone over a few examples of humanoid aliens, we can get to the hybrid kind of alien. The hybrids exist in a world between humanoid and human. They are humanoid aliens that can hide their true species and blend in as humans. There may be technology involved, or the aliens might simply be able to use some sort of shapeshifting ability. Whatever the case, they seem like humans to the outside world. Underneath that façade, however, they are a different type of humanoid, alien lifeform.

The thing about the hybrid aliens is that the most famous I can think of from the top of my head comes from television. For that reason, I’m going to break the “only movies” rule I had set myself for this post. The 1980s and 1990s were a big time for network television miniseries. One of the biggest of that era was a miniseries followed by a sequel miniseries followed by a one season series and a 2009 reboot. That franchise was V. In it, a bunch of aliens showed up on earth and acted like they were friendly. In reality, there were ulterior motives. The aliens looked just like people. Well, they did until it was revealed that they were humanoid lizards disguising themselves as humans. They pretty much just put human skin over their real skin. People were tricked. It was a big shocker to anyone watching.

I watched Earth Girls Are Easy as a child. I’m not entirely sure why. I think I was flipping through the channels one night, saw Jim Carrey, and thought I’d watch it. I don’t remember too much about it outside of the look of the aliens. Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, and Damon Wayans each played an alien that was a primary colour. One of them was blue, one was red, and one was yellow. It ended up being fur that covered them. When the fur was shaved off, they looked like any other human being. If it weren’t for the fur that made them look like aliens, they would fall into the human alien category. But they only look like humans without the fur and furry is how they normally look. So, hybrid for them.

I also want to touch on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, were there have been multiple hybrid characters. I’m sure that people sometimes forget that Loki falls into the hybrid category. They tend to only think of him as Tom Hiddleston, and not as blue Tom Hiddleston. There have also been shapeshifters known as Skrulls. They’re a green humanoid alien race that can shapeshift into human skin. One of them even pretended to be Nick Fury for a while.

I want to note that the hybrid category doesn’t encompass all the aliens that can take on the appearance of humans. The hybrid is specifically the aliens that are already humanoid that can make themselves look even more human. If they already had the human shape, even if some of the details were different, they were humanoid. By those humanoid beings making themselves look just like humans, they became hybrids.

The final type of alien that should be mentioned is the kind that wouldn’t fall under humanoid of any sort. They aren’t a human alien. They don’t have a human shape, which means they aren’t humanoid. They don’t disguise themselves as humans. Well, maybe some of them do. Some of them definitely do. But they aren’t humanoid when not in human form. These aliens are much more creature like. They are more like animals than humans. These are what I call the animalistic aliens, even if they’re not all animals in the normal sense.

One of my favourite movies is Starship Troopers, a movie all about a war between Earth and a race of aliens that look exactly like bugs. Well, maybe not exactly like bugs. There aren’t bugs that look like those aliens. The aliens more closely resemble mutated bugs. The pincers of one bug as the mouth of another bug. A slug with a giant vagina hole for a mouth. Things like that. They were clearly bugs, though bugs that were not of this Earth. Which made sense, since they were aliens.

The aliens in the Alien franchise were some sort of creature, too. They weren’t bugs. I’m not sure what to call them, aside from their name. They were Xenomorphs. The creature was some sort of H.R. Giger fever dream that I think Giger may have actually designed. There were two components to it. One of them was a more humanoid looking creature with a long head, a protruding mouth in its mouth, and a tail. The other was the face hugger, which was more like a slug that would latch onto someone’s face and inseminate them with an alien baby, which would then burst from a person’s chest. I’m not willing to call any of that truly humanoid, since they’re all so far away from humans.

When I thought of animalistic aliens, Attack the Block was one of the first movies to come to mind. The movie involved a bunch of teens in London fighting back against aliens. The aliens were pitch black, dog-like creatures stalking through the night. They were as far from humanoid as possible. Furry, not bipedal, and glowing teeth. There’s not too much more to say about the aliens in Attack of the Block. They just looked like animals and nothing like humans.

The final alien I want to mention is one that could easily be confused with hybrid, though it isn’t humanoid when in alien form. That’s the main reason that it falls into the animalistic category instead. The Thing was about an alien parasite that found a host in the humans living in Antarctica. There was no distinct shape to the parasite in The Thing. Nobody knew what it looked like. It was hiding within the bodies of the humans and, in fact, taking control of them. When it made itself known, it morphed into some crazily mutated version of people. Heads with legs, strange protrusions, things like that were all over the movie. It wasn’t humanoid in any way whatsoever, though it could hide itself within a human. It was more of a space parasite or creature.

I just want to go over a few other non-humanoid aliens in movies really quickly. The Blob featured a giant jelly-looking blob from space. Star Wars featured a few aliens like Jabba the Hutt that clearly were not humanoid. Venom was an alien symbiote, which was more of a sentient goop than any real creature. The Cloverfield movies featured alien creatures of all kinds and sizes. No humanoid creatures, though. And then there was Pixels, which featured alien video game characters like Pacman and Q*Bert.

Like I said at the beginning of the post, aliens have let people’s minds run wild. Movies are always finding new ways to design aliens. Their looks vary from movie to movie with some choosing to be more humanoid, some choosing to be more creature-like. Some aliens are just plain humans from another planet, while others disguise themselves as humans. They all have one thing in common, though. They come from some place beyond the confines of our atmosphere. They come from some place in what we call outer space. They are not of this Earth.

There are always major debates over whether there is life on another planet. It could be within our own solar system, though the chances of that seem slim. I do believe that somewhere, in some distant galaxy, there is another planet harboring life. It seems rather unlikely that Earth is the only planet in existence to have life. Thinking that we’re the only life could get lonely. Other people choose to think otherwise. The human mind works like that. We imagine different things. When it comes to extra-terrestrial life, our imaginations are what feeds the stories.

Now I’m going to feed you a few notes:

• I mentioned Mac and Me (week 125) and Pixels (week 407) in this post.
• The director of Morons from Outer Space was Mike Hodges, who also directed Flash Gordon (week 81).
• David Lewis popped up in Morons from Outer Space. He was previously seen in Ghost Storm (week 97), The Marine 4: Moving Target (week 154), and Halloween: Resurrection (week 413).
• The first three-timer of the week was Miriam Margolyes, who appeared in Chasing Liberty (week 155), The Apple (week 196), and Morons from Outer Space.
• Next up was Derek Lyons. He was in Flash Gordon (week 81), Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (week 403), and Morons from Outer Space.
• Tina Simmons was also in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (week 403) and Morons from Outer Space. Her third movie was Die Another Day (week 153).
• Two more actors from Flash Gordon (week 81) appeared in Morons from Outer Space. They were Sean Barry-Weske and Peter Ross-Murray.
• One more actor from Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (week 403) was in Morons from Outer Space. That actor was Kenneth Coombs.
• Fred Wood appeared in both Morons from Outer Space and Santa Claus: The Movie (week 56).
• Derek Deadman was in The Apple (week 196) and Morons from Outer Space.
• Soul Man (week 354) actor James Sikking was in Morons from Outer Space.
• Edward Wiley returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Morons from Outer Space, after appearing in Sniper (week 430).
• Finally, Guy Standeven was in Casino Royale (week 461) and Morons from Outer Space.
• Have you seen Morons from Outer Space? Did you realize it was morons (idiots) and not Mormons (religion)? What did you think of the movie, if you saw it? What are some of your favourite alien designs? Let me know on Twitter or in the comments.
• If you have any suggestions of movies I should include in Sunday “Bad” Movies, tell me about them. You can find me on Twitter. You can also tell me in the comments.
• Make sure to check out Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• There’s another movie coming up next week. It will involve pirates. It will involve music. It is from the 1980s. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ll tell you. Right now. I’m going to tell you what the movie is. I’ll be checking out The Pirate Movie. I know, right? That name isn’t original at all. It sounds like a Friedberg/Seltzer spoof. It’s not. It’s a pirate musical. You’ll read more about it next week. See you then!