Well, let’s get one thing out of the way before anything else. Earth Girls are Easy was indeed made by Kestrel Films, Tony Garnett’s production company that was behind a whole cavalcade of gloomy social issue dramas and documentaries, most notably much of Ken Loach’s oeuvre from the 1970s, including Kes (1970) and Family Life (1971). If the BFI’s database is to be believed, then this was the first film to bear the Kestrel name since 1983’s Handgun, a film that frankly should be a classic of British(-ish) cinema but instead has been largely buried. They do not have much in common.

Taking a bafflingly long time to get made, Earth Girls are Easy is, after a fashion, a vehicle for Julie Brown. I suppose that makes it sound like she’s the lead, but, no, she’s the best friend character in this tale of slutty aliens lookin’ to get it on with slutty earthlings. Is that the plot? Eh, kind of. The film concerns Valerie (Geena Davis) who’s on the rebound following her discovery of her fiancé’s (Charles Rocket) philanderin’s. Elsewhere, by which I mean ‘in space’, some passing aliens are horny as hell, and while looking for local smut on the comms device they end up crashing on Earth, right into Val’s swimming pool. While the ship’s out of commish, they’re going to have to stay at her place. Oh, the high-jinks! Disguised by her and her friend Candy (Brown, as I say) as humans, the leader of the group, Mac (Jeff Goldblum) hits it off with Valerie, and for the others there’s only one thing to do, and that’s hunt for Earth fanny!

This film is a PG. 

No, I’m not exaggerating to make it sound dirtier than it is. This whole thing is surprisingly blunt about the fact that just about everything the characters say is about sex.

But, no, anyway, Brown is a comedian and singer-songwriter, with very much an overlap between the two, who had a spell of seemingly looking like she was going to be a big thing for a bit in the latter half of the ‘80s, and so here we are, a musical comedy that she co-wrote, in which she co-stars, featuring songs by her. Apparently, it was originally commissioned as a starring vehicle for her too, but as part of the thing’s tortured production process, the studio backing at that point changed their mind later and wanted someone starrier. You notice the “at that point”? Yeah, this thing did the rounds a bit; the studio in question was Warner, who, funnily enough, were, as far as I can tell, also the aforementioned ones who commissioned the thing as Brown was signed to one of the record labels under their banner. They eventually dropped the whole thing when Garnett wouldn’t back down on hiring Julien Temple, fresh from the Absolute Beginners debacle of ‘86. Eventually, with budget cuts, it went to the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group and Columbia in different territories, then during production DEG went under and put their stake up for grabs, and Columbia evidently got cold feet and decided to sell up too.† The former’s stake went to Vestron, the latter’s to Odyssey, and they had some notes on the by then complete-ish film too. So, yeah… this was a mess. The eventual film had a lot of stuff cut in post, including at least one production number. Frankly, you can rather tell. There are spots in the middle of the film that are a continuity disaster.

It's one of those weird films where it’s perhaps difficult to ascertain who exactly it’s for. I guess it makes more sense as a product, commercial or otherwise, than Billy the Kid & the Green Baize Vampire, though I’d be lying if I said the result was up to that bizarre thing’s quality. Regardless, B-movie pastiche musicals weren’t exactly new ground at this point; Little Shop of Horrors (1986), the film of the musical of the film, was a couple of years old by this point; nor for that matter B-movie pastiche musicals which are bluntly about sexuality; The Rocky Horror Show was first staged in ’73, and Earth Girls is quite a bit tamer than that. Those, of course, are just the obvious two. I can’t be bothered with going into, I don’t know, Phantom of the Paradise (1974) or The Return of Captain Invincible (1983) or whatever, not least because I haven’t actually seen the latter, so what’d be the point of that, eh? I do kind of love Phantom of the Paradise though… I should watch it again so I can write about it in a proper fashion. Compared to Rocky Horror or Little Shop (but like Phantom of the Paradise), Earth Girls are Easy is in many ways a lot more of its time in its aesthetic, with an array of luminous candy colours and synth heavy pop tunes. This serves as contrast with the retro ‘50s B-movie influence running throughout its core premise of aliens want our wimmins! It’s very cheerful and silly and quite wilfully kitsch, and all obviously by design. At the same time, it’s all occasionally a bit more aware than one might expect. Oh, lord, I’m going to have to talk about an actually respected film now… The Shape of Water (2017); in a massive upset, it won Best Picture at the Oscars, don’t you know? It’s about a woman who falls in love with the (off-brand) Gill-Man from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and also there’s a villain in the form of the archetypal red-blooded all-American male who spunks toxic masculinity all over the place. The creature is a potential metaphor for all kinds othered groups. Obviously, this isn’t a stretch; that the Gill-Man is a stand-in for some outsider (read ‘not white and/or American’) is pretty much baked into the original Creature of the Black Lagoon and indeed vast swathes of ‘50s genre films. It feels that Earth Girls are Easy, while so much breezier than Shape of Water (and, you know, not as good), had some of the same take away from the films that it’s referencing. This is laid out barest in an extended dream sequence, wherein Valerie sees everyone around her as aliens just going around living their mundane lives. They’re just people, damn it.

The dialogue and songs are often witty, even as the plot follows rather predictable beats and goes utterly off the rails in the last act, which when combined with the stuff bubbling away under the surface makes for a film that is perhaps better than it should be. There is a fairly obvious problem, aside from the aforementioned continuity weirdness that presumably arose from the tortuous production, that is; for a film that’s touted as a musical, there actually aren’t that many numbers. The ones that are there are fun and well-constructed, a good display of Temple’s abilities, but the film ultimately only has about three. Still nonetheless, while the film is very lightweight (if not quite as much as it may appear), it’s still a fun spoof on the Mars Needs Women type films of yore that knows what it wants to do and, for the most part, does it quite well.

† This might be a half truth. While Columbia have seemingly never distributed the film either theatrically or on video, the Sony Pictures logo is still appended to TV airings and Amazon Prime lists them as the streaming rights holder, so presumably they hung on to the TV distribution rights.