Project ALF

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This was the worst movie we’ve seen in a long time.

I admit that I’ve never watched the original series that aired in the 80s and 90s. Partly because it was dubbed in an ethnic language and I had to bust out a radio to listen to the unsynchronized English audio and partly because I didn’t get the comedy.

The plot is pretty simple. There is ALF the alien, for some reason the military has him and there are these two officers that, for no reason, want to bust him out and set him free. After he is free, he is in some government protection. He eats a lot, is juvenile, fucking obnoxious and bloody annoying.

There is no character development in the movie. All of them are on a single track. The bad guy does bad guy things. The good girl does good girl things. ALF eats and cracks jokes. Good guy does good guy things. 95 minutes of this felt like four hours.

Why was this made? Was the world screaming for a movie when they normally watched the TV series? Let us look at the franchise. The series ran from 1986 to 1990. It was 4 seasons and 26 episodes each with each episode having a run time of 22 minutes. Then there was a TV movie in 1987 that doesn’t have much information about it. Then this movie in 1996. Six years after the last episode. The movie didn’t have any of the old cast except the voice actor and the ALF puppet. According to IMDB, the end of the TV show is about ALF leaving earth to go back to his planet and it ended on a cliffhanger where the audience didn’t know the fate of ALF. This movie sounds like it trivially resolves it with ‘the military caught him, and lawyers freed him’. No one felt like he was in any danger anyways. But was the fan base that influential? Six years is a long time. They probably all forgot about it by now. And the puppeteers also hated ALF by now because they hated the fact that a puppet is more famous than them. I guess we’ll never know why it was made. I don’t buy it that the fans demanded closure.

This show sucks. Avoid it.