Aliens Gets A Sitcom Parody That Is Chestbursting With Laughter
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I’ll be honest with you here. I don’t even feel like writing about the video seen above because I just want to put it back on and watch it again, this time getting a slightly less intense feeling of discomfort giving way to unbound smiles. When you see a video called Aliens: The Sitcom, even when you know it’s just going to be a parody of some kind, not a lot of good thoughts float through the old brain. Hosts is thankfully far more hilarious than I ever could have imagined by being worse than any other sitcom that every aired in the 1980s while simultaneously being almost better than James Cameron‘s original film. Sure, I’m kidding when I say that, aren’t I?
Created as a partnership between the Dorks of Yore and Escapist Magazine, Hosts plays on the idea that someone watched Aliens and decided it needed to be made into a sitcom. This kind of thing still happens today, and now I want to watch these guys transition a whole slew of classic films to this format. While using the corny state of 1980s entertainment is a fairly overused trope, setting the show in the Aliens’ nest with cocooned and stationary characters is a ridiculously inspired choice. It turns a sentence like “Welcome home, honey,” into something completely surreal; the same for the neighbor who just “shows up” with a pair of Earth jeans.
The woman playing the son is pretty incredible, turning relatively stupid lines like, “What sucks, Dad?” and “I’m gonna terraform your face!” into comedy gold. When the body is completely covered in intentionally terrible set design, it helps to have a really expressive face and killer delivery. “Let’s roooooock!”
In all of this, my favorite parts are of course the darkest. The juxtaposition between the hammy dialogue and the eventual “Kill me,” pre-chestburster imperatives is downright disturbing both times it happens. Not because of the laughably awesome effects or anything, but just that out-of-place doomy tone. The same goes for having a happy scene take place right after the mom died, while her body is still just hanging there. Do you guys remember that episode of Perfect Strangers when Balki’s cousin came over and died in the living room and Balki and Larry continued to have hilarious trouble moving a couch into the apartment? Well, that never happened.
While a series like this would probably find a better place on Adult Swim, I would love to live in a world where Hosts was a primetime network sitcom. And you know what they say about primetime series. They mostly come on at night. Mostly. But pretty much always.
Here’s another Alien-themed video from Dorks of Yore, though it’s far less hilarious, as it features a psychologist talking about the ways in which Sigourney Weaver‘s Ripley wasn’t able to fully cope with her alien rape in the first film. Pretty heady stuff.
