“You didn’t take the umbilical cord out of the top of glopper’s head?!” Derek cried?
Betty gasped and said, “How do you know his name was Glopper?”
“No, it’s not! That’s the name of the sex ‘glop!'”
Betty whispered, “God must be here! It’s a perfect example of nominative determinism! He said his name was ‘Glop’!”
“No, glop is simply the third of our seven sexes.” Derek shrugged. “Our mating rituals have lots of drugs and handcuffs for all!”
“Shit!” Betty yelled. “You don’t have a chance with me, buster! Get out of here!”
“No, you don’t understand, Betty! Glops are at their most fecund when they’ve been skeletonized! …. Come back, Betty, come back!”
When the aliens furtively land on Earth in Teenagers From Outer Space (1959) they encounter a happy, yappy little dog before they can even use the spaceship exit. One of them takes afright, and, that’s right, zots the little fellow into a shiny, clean skelly. After all, they’re looking for a fecund little meadow in which to pasture their growing herd of their cow-equivalents, and they certainly can’t have pests harassing their meat on the hoof, or, to be more accurate, on arthropod limbs.
But, much like many human nations, their very insecurities have given birth to a self-righteous, brittle arrogance, and when another one, Derek (I kid you not), having read forbidden texts and deciding that the book’s contents must all be true because it’s forbidden – the forbidden is always right, you must see – he makes a run for it, looking for the owner of the yapper to warn them of his fellows.
But this laughable mess has some twists up its sleeve. (Aliens have sleeves?) Remember Derek? He sees a luscious human female or two, and, as the rules of fiction say he must fall in love, off Hormonal Cliff he goes. But it turns out he’s the unknowing son of the Supreme Leader, a fellow with a certain resemblance to Ming the Merciless, at least the one in Flash Gordon (1980), although it’s more a mien thing, I must admit. Squint a bit and you’ll see it.
Being Ming’s Supreme Leader’s son, he must be fetched back or an awful consequence will befall them. Thor, the psychotic dog-murderer, is dispatched on the task, and soon, bloodied but unbowed, he’s chasing all over town, threatening everyone in sight with his zappy gun. When he gets to use it the clean skeletons it produces, as my Arts Editor observed, come with the hook in the top of the skull unremoved.
I haven’t been able to find one of those in my skull, yet. My Arts Editor said she won’t look, it was too much like searching my scalp for lice. Squeamish, I’d say.
Anyways, after wiping out some of the most interesting characters and dealing with the alien, uh, cow, Derek finds a mildly clever way to stop the invading alien fleet, but at the cost of his life. The human female who was the apple of his eye then must be earnest and tragic, and nearly pulls it off.
Is this good? No.
But it is sort of halfway fun, if you can ignore the teeth marks in the scenery. There are many problems, but I did like the alien cow, the car rolling down the cliff and it’s remarkably graphic body flopping out at the end, and the lass who regards every new boy to walk into her life to be fresh meat worthy of sampling.
And that title? I suppose Derek and Thor could be teenagers. But it’s still mostly nonsensical.
