by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Hannah Lynch, Yvette Parsons, Arlo Green, Jackie van Beek
Intro:
… there’s fun to be had here …
Unwanted or unintended pregnancies have been grist for the comedy mill for a long time now. Flicks like Juno (2007), Knocked Up (2007), Obvious Child (2014) and even Australia’s own Stan series Bump (2021-2025) have all dealt with the thorny topic to varying levels of chuckles and/or pathos. However, none of these flicks and televisual offerings have ever dealt with the problem quite like Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant, a New Zealand sci-fi/comedy from the directing team of Sean Wallace and Jordan Mark Windsor, who go by the name THUNDERLIPS.
And friends, it’s a bloody odd one.
Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant tells the tale of millennial no-hoper, Mary (Hannah Lynch). Ol’ mate Mary is in her 30s, lives with her overbearing mother Cynthia (Yvette Parsons) and spends all day doing bugger all apart from whinging and briskly masturbating to animated tentacle porn. It’s a full life. One day in her building’s laundry room, Mary runs into Boo (Arlo Green), a new neighbour who Cynthia’s gossip says has a deformed penis of some kind. Listless and a bit toey, Mary asks Boo to see the unique member and he obliges: showing off a flange-and-tentacle combination that is clearly of extra-terrestrial origin. The pair decide to have a cheeky mutual wank fest but at the moment of completion, Boo’s acidic jizz, burns through Mary’s trackies and crawls inside her. Despite immediately necking two morning-after pills, the truth is soon clear: she’s up the duff with an alien bub!
Other than the very funny title, Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant has a few elements working for it. There’s the cast who are uniformly good, particularly Yvette Parsons who comes off as a total nightmare, and the always welcome Jackie van Beek (What We Do in the Shadows) as Boo’s long-suffering mum, Ann. There are also a few sequences of such jaw-dropping grotesquery that you can’t help but admire the total lack of restraint that THUNDERLIPS embrace, hurling mucus, feces and semen at the screen with ecstatic glee. The problem, however, is that the film is 95 minutes long and suffers from a script that feels either non-existent or heavily improvised, leading to a lot of repetitive moments where the characters run over the same ground that has already been well trodden. Yes, pregnancy is uncomfortable and gross. Sure, Boo is a massive wet blanket. Uh-huh, Cynthia sure is a lot, hey.
Now, don’t get us wrong, there’s fun to be had here in fits and starts but the film never really grows much past its first trimester. Still and all, Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant is the perfect sort of movie to see with a festival crowd, where audience members plied with overpriced plonk can enjoy the shared experience of watching a tentacular mangina shoot caustic baby gravy at a greasy underachiever – now that’s cinema, folks!
