CONEHEADS

   Film (1993). Paramount. Dir Steve Barron, prod Lorne Michaels, starring Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman and Michael McKean. Screenplay Tom Davis \& Aykroyd and Bonnie Turner \& Terry Turner. 82 mins. Colour.

   This gentle and very lightweight SATIRE, an intermittently amusing comedy, is based on sketches first performed on the US tv show Saturday Night Live. Two aliens (Aykroyd and Curtin), humanoids with conical heads who are married to one another, crashland in New York when plans to spearhead an alien invasion of Earth go wrong. Since a rescue expedition will not pick them up for many years, they are compelled to live as humans. Upwardly socially mobile, the male begins working in a repair shop, then (dressed in a turban) drives a taxi, and eventually becomes a middle-class suburbanite, father of a typical American cone-headed teenage daughter (Newman), who excels at golf. Apart from an over-the-top performance by McKean, who plays the obsessive immigration officer determined to track them down for working as illegal immigrants, there is little pungency in either script or performances, and the film lacks the bite of the somewhat similar MEET THE APPLEGATES. The best running gag is the fact that almost nobody picks them as aliens, despite the giveaway huge heads.

   PN