Dan Aykroyd And Kim Basinger's '80s Sci-Fi Comedy Was An Epic Box Office Bomb

Even in the 1980s (a decade that produced so many iconic sci-fi movies), when well-known, beloved actors were still major draws for moviegoers, it didn't always do the trick. Sometimes, a poor script or terrible direction simply couldn't be saved by popular household names no matter how talented or dedicated they were to make a movie work. One example is Richard Benjamin's 1988 sci-fi comedy, "My Stepmother is an Alien," which, despite starring big hitters like Dan Aykroyd and Kim Basinger and introducing young talents like Juliette Lewis and Alyson Hannigan, was a massive commercial and critical flop.

Its plot follows Stephen Mills (Aykroyd), a scientist and widower, who's raising her teen daughter Jessie (Hannigan) by himself after losing his wife five years prior. At work, Mills sends out different radio waves to establish potential contact with extraterrestrials in deep space, one of which accidentally disrupts the gravity of a planet called Cosine N to the 8^th, where Celeste (Basinger) and her species have been living in peace. Then she's sent to Earth to investigate, along with an alien device disguised as a woman's purse, where she incidentally falls in love with Mills during her mission. But because Jessie suspects something is off about her father's new lover, she keeps a close eye on Celeste and her weird behavior, and soon realizes she's an alien. But making her love-stricken father know and understand that proves more difficult than she thought, and things begin to spiral out of control in a weird but comical way.

Benjamin's movie was essentially a screwball comedy tinged with an unusual sci-fi angle, but the cocktail it offered barely impressed anybody at the time of its release. Although Basinger was generally praised for her comic chops and vivacious performance, critics bashed the picture as a totally inept attempt at marrying silly comedy with science fiction. Roger Ebert gave it two stars and called it a "great idea for a movie that seems to have stalled at the idea stage," in his review. Other critics were even less generous, given that "My Stepmother is an Alien" currently holds a low 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, along with a 31% audience score.

Some of those unfavorable assessments certainly showed in the movie's box office performance back in '88, as the feature couldn't even make back its $20 million budget, bombing pretty hard and only grossing $13,8 million worldwide. Apparently, that blow was somewhat softened when the feature hit the video rental market, but it didn't stop "My Stepmother is an Alien" from becoming ingrained in pop culture as an epic fail over the decades that followed. That said, it may make for interesting '80s trivia to revisit today, but it's best to keep your expectations low if you decide to watch it.