Dr. Alien

My review was written in February 1989 after watching the movie on Paramount/Phantom video cassette.

Sci-fi meets teen sex comedy in "Dr. Alien", a campy direct-to-video film. It was more colorfully (and accurately) titled "I Was a Teenage Sex Mutant" when pre-sold by Charles Band's organization years ago.

Tone recalls the Scott Baio-starrer "Zapped", and the new pic is likely to establish its own healthy following in ancillary media. Billy Jacoby is a nerdish college freshman selected by new biology teacher Judy Landers for an experiment. She's an alien from planet Altaria, who's killed biology prof Troy Donahue and is testing a formula on Jacoby in support of repopulating her world, whose males are dying out.

Filmmaker David DeCoteau juggles numerous staples of the various teen genres:Jacoby is converted into a hip dude after the first injection (and sexual initiation) by Landers; he joins rock band The Sex Mutants, and his best pal Stuart Fratkin ogles the girls' gym class for voyeur action. Girls can't resist Jacoby, including zoftig Julie Gray, girlfriend of school bully Scott Morris.

Harmless fun is easy to take, the excellent makeup effects by John Vulich include a tentacle growing out of the top of Jacoby's head and a huge blue head for Landers' real self that allows the comedienne to inject her own personality into her monster-masked scenes. Landers is quite funny, ably matched by Jacoby.

Dr. Aliens (1989) is a movie I recently watched on Tubi. The storyline follows a substitute science teacher who tests a new formula on one of her students that turns him into a chick magnet. As he becomes an over sexed young man he will need to figure out what's behind the concoction leading to all his success. He might not like what he finds...or he might...

This movie is directed by David DeCoteau (Puppetmasters III) and stars Billy Jayne (Cujo), Judy Landers (Armed and Dangerous), Olivia Barash (The Doors), Stuart Fratkin (FRIENDS), Raymond O'Connor (The Rock), Linnea Quigley (Night of the Demons) and Troy Donahue (The Godfather Part II).

This definitely should have been called "Teenage Sex Mutants" which was the background song most scenes and the song played at the concert (the band was actually pretty good at the concert too). The dream sequences were funny and the alien special effects were hilarious. The cast is way better than you'd expect, as was the casting of the female companions. The storyline was one long soft porn video till the aliens revealed themselves.

This is great for what it was but bad overall. I would score this a 5/10 and only recommend seeing it with the appropriate expectations.

I haven't seen everything DeCoteau has directed, but yes I have suffered through most of his work -- even those cursed puppets. I don't really know why I put myself through this, but sometimes you get rewarded, and this is one of them.

Prior to seeing this film, my favourite was The Brotherhood (2001). But this one is just a bit better. It's got everything great about the 80s. Lots of naked boobies for those who are into that. Shirtless Billy Jayne and his painted-on jeans for me. Good music, pop-culture references (without going overboard like the Scream franchise), a plot, halfway-decent dialogue, and even effects that didn't look completely like leftovers from another film's trash. Most importantly, no minutes-long sequences of people walking down corridors in slow motion. We can all celebrate that, can't we?

This film doesn't deserve the horrible score it has received. It's not Shawshank, but it's certainly worth 6/10.

A witless teen sex comedy that typifies everything that went wrong with genre films in the late 1980s. Troy Donahue grabs a quick paycheck for his cameo as a college professor who gets injured in a car crash caused by a UFO. His replacement is statuesque blonde Judy Landers, who's really an alien doing fertility experiments on Earth to help cure the sterile population of her home planet. She injects some green stuff into a straight-laced, unpopular, necktie-wearing nerd, causing him to grow a tentacle/antenna thing that occasionally pops up from the top of his head and instantly hypnotizes women into wanting to have sex with him. Supposed hilarity ensues. You can tell it's supposed to be funny but there isn't anything clever about it. The nerd learns to loosen up and be himself, leading to a muddled moral message for teens, which naturally is the old "believe in yourself and you can do anything" bromide. Since the kid only became popular after developing an impossible new body part that automatically hypnotizes people, the message feels as ill-fitting as it is trite. The pleasant surprise is the makeup. When Landers pulls off her human face to reveal the bulbous-headed, pointy-eared, bug-eyed alien form underneath, the special effects are so good that it's amazing to see them in a movie this cheap and lowbrow. Greg Cannom provided the alien effects, and his makeup work is really terrific. It's a great looking alien that deserved to be in a better film. The same director made (among tons of other undistinguished junk) CREEPAZOIDS, referenced several times here, once as the name on a prop breakfast cereal box and again when one character is shown watching it on TV. Linnea Quigley and Michelle Bauer appear briefly as tramps. For some reason, promotional art for DR. ALIEN used an altered photo that crudely replaced Landers' hypo with an awkwardly positioned test tube. Somebody must have worried that a photo of a woman holding a syringe full of bright green fluid would be interpreted as an endorsement of heroin use. Only in America. This was announced as I WAS A TEENAGE SEX MUTANT, and a very 80's-sounding song by that title is heard on the soundtrack.

This movie is just plain great, It's a funny, campy, B-grade Pseudo-Sci-fi T & A flick that is just one of the most entertaining films I've ever seen. What's strange is that this film hits on the topic of teenage sexuality pretty well, if you ask me, (or as well as this sort of film could.) Not to mention that there are many topless scenes, which is always a plus. Also, the concert scene was just so out there... I wish I could go to a concert like that, Man, It's just so great, see for yourself. I give this film a 9. If you like fun sexploitation flicks, this is about as much fun as you can have.