The new movie Alien Trespass, which opens this weekend after a happy tour of the festival circuit, has been getting a fair amount of attention for its affectionate, deadpan simulation of a '50s aliens-attack sci-fi movie. We have been down this path before, of course, and there just might have been more of a point to it the first time. In 1983, director Michael Laughlin got his mock-'50s B-movie groove on with Strange Invaders, an unholy brew of campy nostalgia and sci-fi satire starring Paul Le Mat as a college professor whose ex-wife (Diana Scarwid) disappears after returning to her home town--Centerville, Illinois--for a funeral. After getting the brush-off from a government agency headed by Nurse Ratched herself, Louise Fletcher, Le Mat visits Centerville, which turns out to be a creepy little burg that exists in a time warp: in terms of fashion and other surface appearances, the 1950s are still going strong there. It turns out that the town, which is officially listed as having been wiped off the map by a tornado in 1958, was actually colonized by extraterrestrials, including Scarwid. The aliens, who are preparing to leave--and who intend to take Le Mat and Scarwid's small daughter with them--are ugly fuckers who go about their daily routine disguised in latex masks; when they rip them off, what's underneath looks like the faces of the white trash relatives who E.T. didn't talk about. (The movie, which came out a year after E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, includes a throwaway joke when Le Mat flips through a sheaf of photos of possible aliens, one of whom is Steven Spielberg.)

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It's been reported that Eddie Murphy is prepared to waive his usual fee for the chance to play Richard Pryor in Is It Something I Said?, a biopic of the late comic that's being planned by Bill Condon; Condon's last movie, Dreamgirls, earned Murphy the first Oscar nomination of his 25-year-old movie career. It's not the first time that Pryor and Murphy's names have been uttered in the same breath. In the early 1980s, when both men were at the height of their box office appeal, the freshly hatched Murphy was featured on the cover of People magazine alongside Pryor and often described as his comedic heir, and in 1989, the two co-starred in Harlem Nights, the only movie that Murphy has ever directed. Pryor himself took directing credits on two features: his final stand-up performance feature, the 1983 Here and Now, and the autobiographical Jo Jo Dancer...Your Life Is Calling, in which Pryor played a comedian who rises from being the son of a Peoria, Illinois prostitute to a rich and beloved celebrity entertainer who can't manage his love life or his taste for addictive substances. A shapeless mess that restages, to diminishing returns, many scenes from Pryor's life that he had already turned into comic gold in his stand-up act, the movie is perhaps most notable for portraying the calamitous 1980 event when Pryor suffered life-threatening over more than half his body, as a suicide attempt, with Pryor's character lighting himself on fire after dousing his clothes with rum. Pryor's injuries had been officially reported as having been the result of a freebasing accident, but some ten years after Jo Jo came out, Pryor, in a book and in interviews, would describe it in much the same way it was shown in the movie. By that time, the comic had been physically waylaid by multiple sclerosis.

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