Nukie

Both of these twins grew up to be crack dealers. Some blame society. I blame "Nukie."We then cut to the Space Foundation at 2:30 AM. Two scientists, Pamela Carter and Jim Connolly, have an utterly pointless conversation about absolutely nothing. This scene is the biggest waste of time since the Great Time Waste of 1949. Then, once again, we head back to Central Africa. The camera angle is slightly crooked. This bears mentioning because is it essentially the one and only shot in the entire movie that is not shot from the same straight-on angle. Tiko and Toki, two young twin brothers in loincloths, wander on camera. Luckily, like aliens, lions, and baboons (but not those damn giraffes or rhinos), the twins speak perfect English. Nukie approaches them and explains that he comes from the stars. The twins run the hell away from him, securing their place as the most intelligent characters in the film. Nukie bitches and moans about being tired or being drunk or bloated or whatever is the current flavor of the hour. Back at the Space Foundation, Dr. Glynn dukes it out with the other scientists for the bad acting heavyweight title. He wins. By a lot. The competition is crushed by his nonsensical blathering over the fact that Miko is "dreaming about zebras."

Nukie combines two of his biggest crowd-pleasers and bitches and moans about being tired and about it being too bright... at the same time! The action just doesn't slow down with "Nukie!" Being the horrible space creature of action that he is, Nukie decides to go to sleep. As soon as he passes out, his body glows and then becomes invisible for no explicable reason. Unfortunately he becomes visible again a few seconds later, dashing my hopes for a Nukie-free "Nukie." He wakes up and is so overjoyed that his "lightbeam transformer" is working again that he immediately turns into a spastic ball of light and zips around, shouting about how amazing it is to be flying a couple feet off the ground. I don't know how exhilarating it could really be considering that at the start of the movie he was flying through outer space. He then discovers water, which he clearly identified in the first six seconds of the movie, but now he doesn't know what it is. And what do we do when we don't know what something is, kids? Be like Nukie, and put it in your mouth!

Sister Ann's like the Penguin from "Blues Brothers," only without being even remotely amusing.

In the village of Urapi, Sister Ann, the most evil missionary in the world, chats as slowly as humanly possible with someone random over the radio. We learn throughout the course of the movie that whenever someone turns on a radio, they are automatically connected to some mystery voice that offers absolutely no relevant information but is quite happy to talk. In other words, any scene with a radio is automatically crap, as opposed to the rest of the scenes in the movie, which are.... okay, the whole thing's crap. Sister Ann inquires about Eric Harvey, the scientist who might come to Urapi if he manages to trim his search down to that one specific village out of all of Central Africa. Out in the wilderness, Nukie passes out and we then cut to a scene of Miko screaming for Nukie. Miko is being pumped full of tranquilizers and Nukie sleeps two to three hundred more times. But wait! Nukie's back! He bursts out of the cardboard earth, which I guess he somehow got sucked underneath. In doing so, he causes a hurricane and an earthquake that rip through Urapi, scaring the villagers. The twins run for their lives and for fear that someone will notice their hair is significantly longer than it was in a scene that supposedly took place earlier that same day. As the villagers huddle in the mission, praying to God for salvation, Sister Ann gives them words of encouragement, i.e., "you are dead!" Later, a pair of Urapi hunters find Nukie and the little revolting alien paralyzes one of them. We jump back to the village, where Dr. Eric Harvey arrives via helicopter. Sister Ann greets him warmly by telling him to get the hell out of Urapi. Just then, one of the hunters runs into the village carrying his paralyzed companion. Sangoma, the Urapi witch doctor, declares this new development (as well as the earthquake) to be the work of a "very bad god." Yes, very bad indeed.

"Yarr! I be unspeakable!"

One rule of moviemaking is that people love monkeys. No matter how unnecessary it is to the storyline, a monkey will always have a place in any movie and in our hearts. Like all rules, though, this one has an exception: we call that exception "Charlie," the talking monkey (cousin to the baboon king, remember?). Charlie's sole purpose, as far as I can tell, is to say totally irrelevant, unfunny lines at the same time that the human characters are discussing key plot points in the hope that the added audio will drown them out. To emphasize Charlie's role and also Sias Odendal's pact with Satan, Charlie's lines are much, much louder than the ones he speaks over. 

To compound this idiocy, he has a voice that would make Gilbert Gottfried vomit urine. Nukie stumbles across him in the general store which is run by "the Corporal." The Corporal is the other token white person in Urapi, and he also has the distinction of being the ugliest human being in the world. At least when you look at Nukie, you can tell yourself it's just a movie. The Corporal actually has to look like that in real life. God, he's like a warthog that collapsed in on itself. Charlie encourages Nukie to come inside so they can talk, and Nukie complies by knocking down a wall for no reason. Charlie offers him some candy, so Nukie destroys a stack of cans for, once again, no reason. Bear in mind though, that Charlie is somehow still the annoying one in this scene. Frightened yet? The Corporal intrudes on their conversation and Nukie runs away shouting "Cha-lie! Cha-lie!" because he has a retarded speech impediment. As he makes his escape into the wild, Nukie comes across the twins, who are staring down a horribly bluescreened lioness. Nukie saves their lives by pissing off the lioness until it makes horrible squealing noises and passes out. He then screams in tongues at the twins, who tell him they'll help him find America if he'll tell Sangoma he's not a bad god, probably because if he doesn't stop screaming at them, they'll have to make horrible squealing noises and pass out.

Miko and EDDI - twice the stupid in half the time.

At the Space Foundation, Miko leaves his isolation chamber and takes a seat in the control room. That's right, he just walks out. Now that's security! EDDI spouts nonsense at him for a while, then decides to hypnotize him with flashing colors. Miko falls asleep and EDDI produces the single most malevolent laugh I have ever heard. Why the computer laughs, I'm not quite sure. Back in Urapi, the confusion continues to mount as Sister Ann leads Eric in prayer, then yells at him for not leading himself in prayer. She is clearly the worst goddamn nun in history. Just when things couldn't get any more baffling, Nukie returns to Urapi and spies Eric's helicopter. Mistaking it for a spaceship, he climbs in, takes off, and promptly crashes. The movie has not, nor will ever, explain why Nukie would possibly need a spaceship or even know what one is when he can simply turn into a flying ball of light capable of interstellar travel. I offer this theory: this movie sucks. My theory can be applied to all three of the conundrums presented in this paragraph. I expect the Nobel Prize committee to take notice. 

Back at the Space Foundation, Miko wakes up, still in the control room. Yep, EDDI successfully hypnotized him but failed to alert any of the security guards. Its protocol apparently consists of hypnotizing intruders, then waiting for them to wake up and making small talk. EDDI's a super-intelligent computer capable of subduing and conversing with anyone it chooses, yet it doesn't have any definition for "friend," "feel," "feeling," or "music," so Miko reprograms it for sentience by hitting a total of three keys. This scene overflows with stupidity in such a way that my primitive human brain cannot fully comprehend. However, it's absolutely nothing compared to what comes next. In an attempt to convince Sangoma that he's not a bad god, Nukie sneaks into Urapi and makes all the pots in the village explode for no reason. Sangoma declares war on Nukie, and the little bastard laughs as the villagers chase after him in fast motion. Then Eric fixes the crashed helicopter with a stick of gum. Legend has it that if you read this paragraph twice in a row, your brain implodes. I know mine did.

Sangoma makes the decision to send the twins out into the bush with no supplies in hopes that when one of them dies, the bad god will go away. Sister Ann whines about it, saying she thought she got rid off all that tribal religion "rubbish" when Sangoma was a little boy. Apparently Sister Ann was a missionary when she was six. She sends the drunken, angry Corporal out to find the twins, then insists to Eric that there is no alien in the area for the forty-ninth time. Expressing her concern for the twins, she knocks Dr. Glynn right out of the top spot for worst human acting in the movie by breaking her entire monologue into two word sentences.

Ann: "I'm afraid. (Pause) I'm going. (Pause) To lose. (Pause) Two of God's children. (Ludicrously long pause) The witchdoctor. (Pause) Has thrown. (Pause) The twins. (Pause)Toki and Tiko. (Pause)Out of the village. (Pause long enough to write all this down) Out there. (Pause) Into the bushveldt. (Pause) Alone. (Pause) Unprotected. (One really huge pause made of a million itty bitty pauses) A trial. (Pause) To see. (Pause) Which one will survive, and which one will die.

Speaking of the twins, Toki and Tiko walk through the plains in late afternoon. One remarks that it's getting dark, and then it cuts to the sky. It then cuts back to the twins a second later and it is mysteriously midnight. Shouldn't have said anything, Toki! Or Tiko. It doesn't matter, you're both dumb savages! Nukie appears in his lightball form, then unfortunately resumes his normal shape. If I were one of the twins, I would have speared Nukie through the brain right then and there. That's eighty pounds of delicious alien! Oddly enough, the twins are happy to see Nukie, even though he destroyed their village and got them cast out to die. That's what friends are for, I guess. They explain to Nukie that Sangoma spoke to their ancestors, who live among the stars, and they told him that one of the twins had to die. Always the tactician, Nukie ridicules away all of their beliefs by insisting that he's from the stars and their ancestors aren't there. Thanks a bunch, Nukie! He then shows the twins how children from his neck of the universe "discover sleep," and proceeds to put on a show that consists of a horrible combination of wretched synthesizers, shitty disco dancing, and off rhythm fireworks, which serve as a distraction for Nukie to blow some sort of date rape gas at the twins that makes them conk right out. Since it's a PG movie, Odendal chose not to show the anal rape of the unconscious young boys. Instead, he shows something far, far worse.