Hear me out: why Coneheads isn't a bad movie | Comedy films

Things didn’t quite work out that way for the film adaptation of SNL’s pointy-headed aliens. The reviews compiled by Rotten Tomatoes summed up the screen version of these charming intergalactic creatures as “listless, crude and uninspired”. Roger Ebert went in a more alliterative direction, calling it “dismal, dreary and desperate”.
Small wonder Coneheads lost money in the US and wasn’t even released internationally in its day. That’s a baffling response considering the depth of the film’s themes, the variety of its subtexts and, crucially, the laugh-out-loud hilarity of its script. Far from a stretched-out exploitation of a TV bit, or an air-headed comedy, Coneheads had a socio-political resonance and a verbal inventiveness that, apparently, sailed right over the heads of what its title characters would call “the blunt skulls” (ie human beings). True, Coneheads was a harder sell than either Wayne’s World or The Blues Brothers. Both earlier films sent up character types we all know well – the suburban stoner teenagers in Wayne and the soul-music-loving baby boomers in The Blues Brothers. Coneheads asked more, challenging a host of our most basic assumptions, including our notions of beauty, our approach to “otherness”, our attachment to the American dream, as well as our most common expressions of prejudice.

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