Three years after the release of Coneheads, screenwriters Bonnie & Terry Turner and star Jane Curtin revisited the premise of aliens arriving on Earth and assimilating into American society with the TV show 3rd Rock from the Sun, with Curtin instead playing a human character.
Plot
Upon discovering a UFO in American airspace, the National Guard sends fighter jets to investigate, who fire on the unresponsive craft and cause it to crash into the Atlantic Ocean, near Manhattan. The aliens from the planet Remulak aboard, Beldar and his wife Prymaat, survive. Assigned by Highmaster Mintot, Beldar was to conquer the earth for Planet Remulak. Beldar becomes an appliance repairman, and upon discovering his undocumented status, his boss Otto gets him a false identity from local gangsters, which quickly alerts the INS. Ambitious INS agent Gorman Seedling and his sycophantic assistant Eli Turnbull unsuccessfully attempt to capture the couple. Prymaat informs Beldar she is pregnant. The Coneheads are informed that a rescue ship will not be arriving for many years, and despite their odd appearance and metallic voices, attempt to blend in to human society.
After their daughter Connie's birth, they adopt the surname Conehead and buy a home and move to suburban Paramus, New Jersey, where Beldar opens a driving school. Meanwhile, Gorman terminates his pursuit of the Coneheads after getting a promotion, but a U.S. Senate inquiry, citing the heavy expense, demands the case be properly concluded.
The now-teenaged Connie, who has grown up among Earth's norms and culture, simply wants to fit in with her peers, though her father greatly objects, especially when she begins seeing auto mechanic Ronnie Bradford.
Gorman and Eli track the Coneheads to their home, posing as Jehovah's Witnesses to enter. During the conversation, Prymaat discovers their communication device to Remulak is beeping and notifies Beldar that 'the Big Phone' has contacted him, causing him to promptly eject the two. He is then notified of their approaching rescue vessel.
After Connie is told of their imminent rescue, she informs her parents she wants to stay on earth with Ronnie. The INS arrives to arrest the Coneheads. Ronnie helps stall the agents while the rescue vessel arrives just in time, and Gorman and Eli are taken aboard with the Coneheads.
On Remulak, Beldar is welcomed home, presenting the Highmaster with various Earthly 'gifts', including Gorman and Eli as slaves. Initially satisfied with Beldar's accomplishments, Mintot notices that Beldar's sharp teeth have been capped (something Otto had advised Beldar to do to blend in), accuses him of treason and sentences him to fight the ferocious Garthok, greatly distressing Prymaat.
After the Garthok easily and gruesomely kills other condemned criminals, Beldar uses his Earthly golfing skills to hit a rock into the Garthok's mouth, causing it to choke. The Highmaster pardons Beldar and honors Beldar's request to return to Earth and have Gorman as his slave. Eli stays behind and becomes Mintot's new flunky. Departing for Earth with Prymaat, Connie, and Gorman in tow, Beldar soon prioritizes Connie's feelings over planetary conquest by faking an Earth attack, ordering his invasion force to retreat and proceed to their secondary target in another part of the galaxy, while making it look like a superior weapon has destroyed his spaceship. For rescuing him, Gorman agrees to give the Coneheads Green Cards. The Conehead family settles down to a happy life on their adopted planet.
Cast
Dan Aykroyd as Beldar Clorhone (later Conehead) / Donald R. DeCicco
Jane Curtin as Prymaat Clorhone (later Conehead) / Mary Margaret Rowney
In addition to Jane Curtin appearing as a regular cast member, Jan Hooks, Phil Hartman, Julia Sweeney, Kevin Nealon, and Laraine Newman all appeared as guest stars on 3rd Rock from the Sun, which was created by Coneheads co-writers Bonnie and Terry Turner and featured a similar premise of aliens making efforts to assimilate into American society. Additionally, co-writer Terry Turner cameos in the film as the sketch artist that Seedling describes Beldar to.
Production
Tom Davis, who created the characters on Saturday Night Live, wrote the first version of the screenplay. He was unhappy with choices made by the producers, including setting the Remulak scenes in a gladiators' arena, rather than the suburban environment that he envisioned.[3]
While there are some differences, Coneheads mostly follows the same plot as in the animated special that was created ten years earlier. Similarities include the Coneheads being stranded on Earth, Beldar working as an appliance repair man, and Connie dating an earthling named Ronnie.
The film debuted at No. 6 on its opening weekend, while its domestic box office grossed $7,100,501.[4] By the end of its domestic theatrical run, the film had grossed $21,274,717.[2]
Coneheads received mostly negative reviews from critics. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a low score of 35%, based on 31 reviews with a consensus that reads, "Listless, crude, and overall uninspired, Coneheads offers further evidence that stretching an SNL sketch to feature length can be tougher than narfling a garthok."[5]Roger Ebert gave the film 1+1⁄2 stars out of 4, describing Coneheads as "dismal, dreary and fairly desperate" and the actors as unable to overcome an uninspired screenplay.[6]Janet Maslin of The New York Times said the film "has its dopey charms", and that it is suitable for people who found Wayne's World too demanding.[7]
The Los Angeles Times called it "an unusually companionable jape; in this world it makes perfect sense that the Coneheads' friends and neighbors never really register that there's anything terribly different about them. They're all-American eccentrics—even if they happen to come from the planet Remulak".[8]
Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of "B+" on scale of A+ to F.[9]
The film received some critical re-evaluation during the 2010s, with multiple writers noting its satirical take on an immigrant family experience and immigration enforcement (meant as an exaggeration of Reagan-era politics) became eerily politically relevant following the September 11 attacks.[10][11]
Soundtrack
Coneheads: Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack
^Davis, Tom (2010). Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who Was There. Grove Atlantic. p. 222. ISBN9781555849160.
