My Favorite Martian

Bomb Rating: 

Hollywood obviously has gas.

Hollywood obviously has gas. It keeps farting out these movies based on old television series, which always seem to stink and always seem to wither at the box office, resulting in dazed moviegoers walking out of the theaters afterwards and hurling themselves under moving vehicles. That's how we lost grandpa Cranky.

Aside from this movie simply being a piece of crap, I happened to watch David Leno or Jay Letterman (or whoever) when Daryl Hannah was on recently, and she explained how she lives in a teepee. So every single time Lizzie (Hannah) was onscreen, whether she was kissing Tim (Jeff Daniels) or discovering Uncle Martin (Christopher Lloyd) was really from Mars, I was actually listening to the following phrase, repeated ad nauseum as though I had a little arena of drunken hockey fans chanting inside my head: "Daryl lives in a teepee. Daryl lives in a teepee. Daryl lives in a teepee." The woman is a first-class whack job.

Obviously, director Donald ("Grumpy Old Men") Petrie has nothing going for him in this film, except possibly a lead on becoming director of "My Favorite Martian 2," so he relies heavily on special effects. Uncle Martin's suit, called Zoot, is actually given a credit right after Ray Walston, and ahead of God knows how many struggling actors who've been deemed less valuable to the film than this cheesy computer effect. Ray Walston, along with Wallace Shawn, plays an agent who is tracking Martin.

If ever the look on somebody's face said "No, I'm not dead," it's Ray Walston's. After this fiasco, he no doubt wishes he were.