The Late in the Game Coneheads Movie is WAY Better and Deeper Than Its Reputation Would Suggest

So it turns out I REALLY like the Coneheads movie. Whoda thunk it?

It’s easy to see why the 1993 Coneheads movie bombed. Saturday Night Live movies are all about timing and heat. The whole point is to crank out a movie while the characters are still fresh in the public imagination. 

When Coneheads was released early in the Clinton presidency, the Coneheads hadn’t been the hot new thing in a decade and a half. That is several lifetimes in pop culture time. 

The iconic characters were older than much of the audience they were trying to reach. Children and teenagers had, at best, a vague sense that the jargon-spouting aliens were part of an early incarnation of Saturday Night Live that couldn’t possibly be as brilliant and funny and subversive as conventional wisdom angrily insisted. 

Adults, meanwhile, had ample time to forget the characters during the endless stretch between the final Coneheads sketch and the feature film adaptation. 

Critics were conditioned to enthusiastically pan movies based on Saturday Night Live sketches. That was doubly true of new movies about characters that hadn’t been fresh since the Jimmy Carter administration. A massive advertising blitz centered on a ubiquitous Subway promotion only seemed to irritate and alienate filmgoers. 

Star and co-screenwriter Aykroyd and director Steve Barron (Electric Dreams, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) set out to capitalize on the public’s affection for one of Aykroyd’s most beloved and iconic characters. 

Unfortunately Beldar Conehead and his funny-talking family had not been popular for well over a decade when Coneheads failed to repeat the box-office success of Wayne’s World. 

The filmmakers set out to make a fun, adventurous science-fiction comedies for kids that adults could also enjoy. Instead they ended up making a movie for no one. 

That’s a shame because I was very pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying a movie that previously left me cold.

As with The Blues Brothers, Coneheads boasts a level of ambition that separates it from the rest of Saturday Night Live big screen adaptations. Aykroyd set out to make a real movie with visual flair, surprising metaphorical depth and even a smattering of genuine emotion. 

It didn’t matter. No one cared. Nobody was waiting for a Coneheads movie in 1993 and damn near no one showed up when the film played largely empty theaters before going on to not attract a loyal, devoted cult on television or home video. 

Coneheads opens with Beldar and his wife Prymaat’s (Jane Curtin) vessel crashing into earth. The stranded aliens seek lodging at a motel where Michael Richards works as a clerk. 

This introduces what is more or less the movie’s one joke, or at least its primary gag: the Coneheads do almost nothing to hide the fact that they are space aliens whose ways are bizarre and inexplicable but no one seems to notice or care. 

The humor in the scene consequently comes from Richards’ deadpan under-reaction to seeing something of historic importance in the arrival on earth of a genuine visitor from another planet.

It’s a simple gag but one with infinite clever variations. Later in the film, for example, Beldar visits a dentist played by Jon Lovitz to get his razor-sharp teeth capped so he can look more human.

Beldar’s mouth contains rows of teeth. His face is like something out of a Cronenbergian nightmare. Lovitz is a little troubled by his new patient’s mouth looking like no mouth in the history of the universe. He should recoil in horror. He’s not dealing with a typical patient: he’s dealing with a monster from beyond our collective imagination. But instead of freaking out and running away in terror the dentist instead has a look of mild surprise and concern more appropriate for discovering that a patient has an unusual amount of plaque. 

Coneheads is an unusually blunt and direct metaphor for immigration, particularly illegal immigration. What are the Coneheads if not illegal aliens in the most literal possible sense? 

A baby-faced Adam Sandler is both adorable and hilarious as a fast-talking flim-flam man peddling bogus social security cards, bogus social security numbers and a brand spanking new identity for Beldar. 

Sandler got three minutes to do his thing alongside pretty much everyone from the show. That’s all it took to make an impression. Sandler’s castmates David Spade and Chris Farley have roles that are small but play beautifully to their personas and gifts. 

Spade’s supporting turn here fits snugly into his wheelhouse of playing obnoxious little shits you just want to punch in their smug mouths. He’s oily sycophancy in sentient form as a pragmatic sidekick to an evil immigrations agent played by Michael McKean but when he has the opportunity to change sides and kiss the ass of an alien leader he leaps at. 

Farley, meanwhile, is lovable as Ronnie, the blue collar, rough around the edges mechanic boyfriend of the Coneheads daughter Connie (Michelle Burke). 

In classic immigrant form, Beldar holds down the jobs that many Americans do not want, like driving a cab or fixing electronic devices. He does his job exceptionally and with richly merited pride. 

Because he is very good at what he does and does not complain or express any discernible emotion Beldar’s bosses love him. There’s something sweet and optimistic about the notion that Americans would look at creatures as bizarre, inhuman and off-putting as the Coneheads and accept them instantly and unconditionally. 

In the film’s first half the Coneheads are childless outsiders trying to assimilate into a culture and a society that is utterly foreign to them. In the second half the couple has a teenaged daughter and have successfully assimilated without really changing anything about themselves. 

I initially didn’t understand why the film needed a Bratz: The Movie-style time jump halfway through. Why not just begin with Connie as part of the family? 

Then I realized that from a metaphorical and allegorical perspective we need to be able to be able to feel the passage of time and the changes that come with being a parent.

That’s what parents do: they put down roots for the sake of their children. They assimilate. They try to blend in. They sacrifice so that their children might lead better, brighter and more successful lives than their own. 

When Connie is a teenager Beldar has evolved or de-evolved into a dorky, proud suburban dad. One of my favorite details is Beldar dressing in a cardigan and tie in the second half like some manner of sitcom dad. 

One of the many things I liked about Coneheads is that it pretty much stars EVERYONE who has ever been on Saturday Night Live. Well, not everyone, technically, just Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Michael McKean, David Spade, Chris Farley, Phil Hartman, Adam Sandler, Laraine Newman, Kevin Nealon, Jan Hooks, Tim Meadows, Tom Davis, PETER Aykroyd and Jon Lovitz.

Coneheads would be worth watching for the nostalgia factor alone but in its third act it doubles down on the science fiction aspect by having Beldar return to his niftily designed home planet to battle a gnarly creature known as a Gathok that was lovingly created by special effects legend Phil Tippett and brought to glorious life through the magic of stop motion animation. 

If Coneheads was a flop that was largely because it was considerably more expensive, involved and special effects-intensive than every other Saturday Night Live movie except for The Blues Brothers. So a gross of a little over twenty million dollars was an unmistakable disappointment.

Coneheads ends with Connie going to prom with her blue collar beau and Beldar offering to lend his daughter’s date his car on account of it being “far superior to that broken down, rusted out shit box of yours.” 

It is the first time in the movie that Beldar has used a crude colloquialism rather than overly formal, technical language. 

Beldar takes a picture of Connie and Ronnie in their prom clothes and as the picture develops an uncharacteristically emotional Beldar enthuses, “Ah, memories!”, to which his wife responds happily,  “We will enjoy them.”

The Coneheads may be robotic space aliens who talk in a nasal monotone and never seem to figure out earth customs but that does not keep them from having an emotional arc. 

Coneheads works as a metaphor for immigration but it works on another metaphorical level as well. In the 1980s Aykroyd discovered that he had what was then known as Asperger’s Syndrome but that is called Autism today. 

I have Autism on my mind because both of my sons are autistic and I am getting tested in December to determine whether I have Autism as well. 

Coneheads is, intentionally or otherwise, a poignant allegory about how people with Autism are different in the way they think and act and how they see the world and use “masking” to try to hide their symptoms and appear neurotypical. 

In Coneheads, the titular family has to hide their true identity and their true selves in order to fit in and not be hunted by the government. Even though they are largely defined by their inability to fit in and look and act like everyone else that does not keep them from trying to pass themselves off as being just like everyone else. 

Coneheads might seem like a cynical cash grab from the outside but it’s genuinely funny, surprisingly deep and weirdly touching. 

With The Blues Brothers and Coneheads Dan Aykroyd co-wrote and starred in two of the funniest Saturday Night Live-derived movies. 

As for Blues Brothers 2000, let’s just say that two out of three ain’t bad. 

Up next: I dunno. It’s Pat, maybe?