Well, I hesitate to call this speculative fiction, as The Coneheads has always been more comedy than it has been speculative. In case you are not familiar with The Coneheads, it was originally a sketch from Saturday Night Live.

I have seen a few of The Coneheads sketches from the 1970’s, and they are pretty funny. The premise was that two aliens, Beldar (Dan Aykroyd) and Prymatt (Jane Curtain) that have somehow blended landed on Earth and settled there. The joke was that these aliens could blend into American suburbia, in spite of their enlarged craniums. Yes, the Coneheads do a terrible job of acting like humans, and it is interesting how people just sort of tolerate them.

Now, any time a Saturday Night Live sketch is turned into a movie, the results are mixed. I consider The Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World triumphs of film, and something tells me that the success of the latter led to the greenlight of The Coneheads. Sadly, the film ends up being more Superstar and Night at the Roxbury, which are sucky films based on famous Saturday Night Live sketches.

It is interesting to see the full backstory of how the Coneheads came to Earth, settle down, and even start a family. This was something that I’m not certain if the original Saturday Night Live sketches did, and I suppose that this could make an interesting movie that would be part speculative and part comedy. These have mixed well before, such as the famed Ghostbusters.

Ghostbusters wasn’t based on a Saturday Night Live sketch, but it was written by Dan Aykroyd and the late Harold Ramis. Aykroyd also co-wrote The Coneheads, which is a real shame, as he is one of Hollywood’s best writers. Not only did he write Ghostbusters, but The Blues Brothers, and these comedies are almost genres in and of themselves. He feels wasted in The Coneheads, but you did need him to play the title character from his old SNL days.

There are other SNL alumni in this film that also feel wasted. There’s the late Phil Hartman, Adam Sandler, David Spade, Kevin Nealon, Jan Hooks, Julia Sweeney, Garrett Morris, as well as Laraine Newman and Jane Curtain (also SNL Coneheads alumni).

The Coneheads movie has the typical plot of an alien-who-comes-to-Earth film. That is, at first they hide, then some agency comes after them, blah-blah-blah. Normally, films like this take the E.T. route as the alien makes a successful trip home, but there is actually a half-hour left when The Coneheads when that happens.

This is where the film gets…stupid. The race of the Coneheads punish Beldar for settling on Earth, so they put him in an arena with a monster. The monster looks so fake, as it is done with stop motion. This film came out at the same time as Jurassic Park, but the effects of The Coneheads just plain suck. Then again, it is a comedy, but how Beldar overcomes the monster is not funny whatsoever.

I do admire that Beldar is willing to give up his position in the big alien alliance for his family, but this theme feels tacked on. I’m not really certain what could be done with this film, which makes me wonder why it was made other than the fact that it could be.