Alonzo Johnson and the Sky Menace

"Alonzo" Lives in, and Mocks, the Past

By Robert Gillian, Variety

September 8, 2023

Writer-director Aaron Scott-Keith, best known for creating the "Michael & Maddie" series for ABS, has gone on a nostalgia kick with his new Cinema Demand film "Alonzo Johnson and the Sky Menace," which begins streaming this weekend. A broad satire of the genre films Scott-Keith grew up watching in the 1980s and 1990s, the film is certainly not great, but it's entertaining enough.

The film starts off in the summer of 1979, with the famous landing of debris from NASA's Skylab upon the city of Esperance in Western Australia. Unbeknownst to the locals Down Under, a malevolent group of miniature, grotesque-looking aliens have burrowed themselves onto Skylab-and now that they're on Earth, they plan to seize control of the planet's resources, using unwitting humans as their vessels.

One such unwitting human is an aspiring Aussie model named Elizabeth Kerrigan (Penny Byrne), who comes across the space debris near her home and cuts her hand while touching it; one of the tiny aliens slips into her bloodstream through the small wound, and soon Elizabeth's personality undergoes subtle, strange changes.

Visiting New York for her first major modeling gig, Elizabeth hands her fellow models a pill she calls Magix, which she says will give them the unlimited energy they need to endure long hours and endless travel. Elizabeth's colleagues don't realize that Magix is a drug developed by the aliens to dull the senses of Earthlings, making them as gullible and compliant as possible so that they won't notice the theft of the planet's resources (mainly clean water) by the evil extraterrestrials.

One of Elizabeth's modeling colleagues is Veronica Johnson (Sheila-Marie Scott), the cousin of Brooklyn graffiti artist and DJ Alonzo Johnson (comedian Harry Nelson, himself the cousin of "Michael & Maddie's" Morris Nelson). When Alonzo notices that his previously neurotic cousin now seems to be in a permanent blissed-out state, he decides to find out why-and uncovers a conspiracy from another planet.

Byrne-best known for playing sex-obsessed surfer Sunny Monroe on the Australian soap opera "The Ones Next Door"-is a hilarious hoot as the alien-possessed Elizabeth. Bewitching men and women with her long, dirty-blonde hair, bright green eyes and curvy figure, Byrne is so charismatic that she could even convince me to try Magix. Scott-Keith clearly sees Byrne as one of his Aussie fantasy women (not unlike "Maddie's" Robyn McNamee); why else would he include so many shots of her in tight black leather domination gear, or work in a scene where Elizabeth slowly strips off in front of a mirror to seduce Alonzo?

Speaking of which, Nelson is just as funny as the Adidas-tracksuit-wearing Brooklynite, who tries desperately to reveal the alien conspiracy before it's too late-and tries desperately to resist Elizabeth's erotic entreaties (something Nelson has been unable to do in real life with Byrne, if the tabloids are to be believed). Nelson is terrific as a man who runs into frustration after frustration trying to convince skeptical friends that the gorgeous Elizabeth is actually a threat to the human race. It's a breakout comic performance reminiscent of Eddie Murphy in "48 Hrs." and Chris Tucker in "Rush Hour"; Nelson may well replace his cousin as America's funniest comedian.

If there's one flaw in "Alonzo Johnson and the Sky Menace," it's that Scott-Keith seems to have crammed every '80s and '90s movie trope he could think of into this film, and it ultimately becomes too much. It's one thing for the relationship between Alonzo and Elizabeth to be a riff on that era's erotic thrillers, but Scott-Keith takes things even further. Alonzo tries to travel back in time to 1973 to (unsuccessfully) stop Skylab from being launched in the first place. Elizabeth and another model switch bodies. Alonzo teams up with a middle-aged white cop (Bob Paccini) to track down the other alien-possessed humans involved in the distribution of Magix. It's surprising that Scott-Keith didn't try to work in nuclear war, Vietnam veterans and dinosaurs, too.

Obviously Scott-Keith is confident that this will be a hit; at the end of this throwback fiesta, the director throws in a teaser for a possible sequel, the strangely named "Alonzo Johnson and the Golden Darkness." Of course, this could be a mockery of the endless sequels of the movie era Scott-Keith is parodying. Hopefully, if there is an actual sequel, Scott-Keith won't try to ram every callback he can think of into the proceedings. The 1980s and 1990s were defined by "high concept" films, so called because storylines could be described in a simple sentence. Maybe that's what Scott-Keith needs to do next time: keep it simple.