Earth Girls Are Easy

Some months back, I mentioned picking up a DVD box set of cheap horror movies, having watched Blood Diner off of it. I had really picked up the set for what's almost certainly the best-known movie in the set, Earth Girls Are Easy, and recently watched that one.

A prologue has three aliens with colorful hair -- one blue, one yellow, and one red -- in a spaceship somewhere in outer space. They complain about not having had love, what with being out in space and all that. But they pick up some TV broadcasts from Earth that have women doing aerobics and other stuff. These women are shapely, and just as interesting to the aliens, relatively hairless. They locate the source of the broadcasts, and set out.

On Earth, Valerie (Geena Davis) is a manicurist at a salon in the Los Angeles suburbs where she works with Candy Pink (Julie Brown). She's engaged to Dr. Ted (Charles Rocket), but their sex life needs some spicing up, she thinks. So she decides she's going to do that spicing by not going to the convention she said she'd be attending, but instead surprising Ted when he gets home from work. What she doesn't realize is that he's been doing some spicing up of his own by seeing another woman. When she does find out, she kicks Ted out.

Thankfully, she's about to get some more spice in her life. Those aliens crash-land in her swimming pool (apparently the aliens have technology that makes the spaceship much bigger on the inside than the outside). The three aliens are blue Mac (Jeff Goldblum), yellow Zeebo (Jim Carrey) and red Wiploc (Damon Wayans). Both sides have the understandable apprehension about meeting their first live humanoid of another species. But the aliens, being intelligent enough to get to Earth, are also smart enough that they pick up the langauge relatively quickly through television. (Of course, they can't pick up everything that quickly, which will lead to the film's many humorous situations.)

Valerie realizes that Ted will probably sic the authorities on the three aliens if he meets them, so she takes them to the salon, where she has Candy do a makeover on them, revealing their very human-looking forms, and humorously turning Zeebo into a surfer dude. She then takes them out for a night on the town, where all the women love them even if they do cause a bit of havoc. Along the way, Valerie and Mac find themselves falling in love with each other, which is a problem in that Valerie is still engaged while Mac is going to have to go back to his home world.

Earth Girls is a really fun movie, largely because it knows that it's just silly little entertainment and doesn't take itself seriously, mostly being in on the joke. It's also a great time capsule of the late 1980s, at least as southern California likely saw itself. There's nothing particularly noteworthy about the performances other than to see a very young Jim Carrey; it's the comic material that raises everything. The movie effortlessly bounces from one comic scene to the next, with a couple of musical numbers thrown in that don't even really take away from the proceedings the way they do in a lot of musical movies.

If you want a fun, quirky little comedy that won't tax your brain but leave you smiling, I can absolutely recommend Earth Girls Are Easy.