Beep, boop, it’s Burl, here with a picture about an alien’s
visit to earth! Ha ha, no, it’s not our old friend E.T., but an alien who looks
more like a ball of pure light than a Raisinette under a magnifying glass!
Ha ha, he’s the Starman! And no, they
never have occasion to play the David Bowie song in the movie, but I’ll bet it was
tried at least briefly before being declared too on-the-nose!
There’s a Stones song prominently used however,
‘Satisfaction,’ and this is heard in the opening as we see the Voyager II
spacecraft drift past, its hand outstretched in greeting! Our lightball decides
to make the trek to Earth, but is shot down as soon as he enters the
atmosphere! He bips around Wisconsin a while until he finds the DNA of a dead
house painter in the lock of hair kept by his still-grieving widow, Karen
Allen, well-known from Animal House!
Well, after a little sequence of rubber alien babies growing
into adulthood, put together in separate stages by a superstar team of trick
effect artists, the alien takes on the aspect of Jeff Bridges, famed for his
great work in King Kong! Ms. Allen
can’t quite believe it, but soon the chase is on as the alien tries to make it
to the place he can meet up with his buddies before they all leg it back to
their own galaxy!
And it’s a Herbie Goes Bananas reunion as Charles Martin Smith and Richard Jaeckel play government
fellows with an interest in finding the alien! Smith is a kindly sort who wants
to make the alien welcome, while Jaeckel, whom we also know from The Dark and Grizzly, is a hard-nosed fellow who wants to capture and experiment
on him, or worse! Meanwhile there are many picaresque adventures, curious
culture clashes and wild animal reanimations as the Bridges-alien interacts with everyone from a nasty hunter played by Ted White (he
was Jason in Friday the 13th part 4, don’t you know) to, of course, George ‘Buck’ Flower from Teen Lust and Pumpkinhead, who turns up as an amiable chef! Ah, ‘Buck!’
And of course love comes to town, because even a glowing
ball of light, whose intellect is stratospherically above any concept of
physical attraction, recognizes that Karen Allen is pretty cute! Ha ha!
Everything follows pretty much the expected path, though in a generally
charming way! John Carpenter does a fine job with this uncharacteristic
material, and I think if almost anybody else had directed this, I’d just think
of it as a drippy rip-off of E.T.! But Carpenter pulls it off!
I’ve always paired this one with Christine in my mind because they were both made for the same
company, and came along during the Cundey Interregnum, when Donald M. Morgan
was shooting his films! (This is to be differentiated from the Cundey
Abrogation, when Cundey went on up to the Zemeckis / Spielberg leagues, and Gary
Kibbe took over the camera and lighting!) It’s as fluffy and studio as
Carpenter ever got, with the possible exception of Memoirs of an Invisible Man, but still a mildly engaging watch!
Bridges gives a goofily entertaining performance and does
solid work throughout! The trick effects are very good, though the weird
growing baby is in its own category; and it’s altogether a polished piece of
Hollywood craftwork, with a nicely efficient yet affecting ending! I give Starman two and a half exploding trees!
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