My Campy Slumber Party: Aliens, Acrylics, and Alchemy in ‘EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY’

My Campy Slumber Party is a column that celebrates nostalgic and underappreciated sleepover movies in all their unpretentious glory. Grab your comfiest clothes and greasiest snacks. 

Everyone loves a good sleepover movie. The very term can conjure up an image of being young and planted in front of a TV set with your friends and a big bowl of popcorn. Or maybe you’re reminded fondly of the physical act of movie-renting or rifling through your VHS collection until you found the right one. Whatever memories you associate with these films, you’d be lying if you said they weren’t at least a little gushy. 

While they subscribe to no particular genre and can thereby avoid heavy-handed expectations, sleepover movies are understood to signify comfort and some sort of escape. They prioritize laughs over technical perfection, warmth over jarring plot twists, and exuberance over heavy themes. Sleepover movies are less about how they look or sound and more about how they make you feel; it’s this psychological form they subsume that makes them just as deserving of praise as complex indies or gripping blockbusters. 

But before there was Mean Girls, Clueless, and Superbad to quench that need for juvenile hilarity, there were a number of extravagant now-forgotten movies that still deserve to be celebrated. They may not always be as palatable or witty as what has come to be known as the 21st-century comedy, but they’re just so much fun. From kitschy B-movies to box office catastrophes, these saturated and inconceivable worlds make the perfect sleepover movie lineup.  

THE KITSCH IN QUESTION

We’ll be kicking off this column with my personal favourite slumber party watch: Earth Girls Are Easy, a film that dances on the line between ambitious storytelling and absolute trash. A hybrid sci-fi-rom-com-musical that only made back a third of its budget at the box office, Earth Girls Are Easy is truly unforgettable. The film follows a Californian manicurist, Valerie Gail (Geena Davis), who has grown dissatisfied with her apathetic sex life and scummy fiancé and is in desperate need of some excitement.  

Her life is soon after upended when three aliens donning head to toe multi-colored fur crash their spaceship into her pool (the first of many innuendos to come). The aliens (Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey, and Damon Wayans) then befriend Valerie who, after a few minutes of screaming and flailing, quickly adjusts to her insane situation and welcomes them into her home. After a trip to the salon leaves them looking human and handsome, they dive headfirst into West Coast culture with the help of Valerie’s co-worker, Candy Pink (Julie Brown, who most Gen-Z viewers will immediately recognize as the counsellor from Camp Rock.) 

There’s so much to unpack but right off the bat, the cast is — quite literally — otherworldly. Davis exudes effortless valley-girl energy that is played up when it needs to be, while the cosmic trio is such a treat; Goldblum’s charisma, Carrey’s physical humour, and Wayans’ comedic timing work so well in tandem and if nothing else, they’ll elicit a laugh or two by their uncanny likeness to any three confused frat guys at a party. 

FROM HOUND DOG TO LOVE TRAIN  

To me, what makes Earth Girls Are Easy so memorable is that it was a true product of its time; its soundtrack is peppered with Hall & Oates, The B-52’s, and Depeche Mode and its glamorization of the beauty salon feels reminiscent of films like Golden Eighties and Shampoo. But 80s pop culture iconography is not just an accessory or gimmick here, rather, it’s the tool that instructs the aliens on how to better communicate with humans. Their education takes on the form of channel-surfing, from brief static bouts of Reagan’s presidential address to classical Hollywood Westerns to trashy game shows and so on.

But alongside the hot pink set design littered with cans of spray cheese and giant decorative martini glasses, there lies a lot of imagery from prior decades: Elvis shampoo bottles, lava lamps, James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause monologue, et cetera. Earth Girls Are Easy manages to remain faithfully bound to the eighties aesthetic while also capturing a nostalgia for the fifties. So when revisiting the film now, thirty-two years after its release, viewers get to experience a kind of two-fold nostalgia for both eras.

THE GOOD, THE GREAT, THE LUSTY

Sex is intimately woven into the film’s fabric, most notably through the tension between Mac (Goldblum’s extraterrestrial tether) and Valerie. This tension simmers until its inevitable boiling point where the two find out that humans and aliens are conveniently anatomically compatible, resulting in a sex scene that affirms the film’s title. These sequences are given the 80s treatment with their low-humming sensual music and borderline Bollywood-level melodrama, reminding you just how gloriously trashy they are. 

At its most simplistic, Earth Girls Are Easy is a film about a sexually frustrated woman who manages to liberate herself from her presupposed valley-girl confines by having sex with an alien (ladies, we’ve all been there). It’d be far-fetched to call Earth Girls Are Easy a feminist work given the film’s characterization of dim-witted women, but its reflexivity coupled with that one musical number where Geena Davis smashes everything in sight with a golf club still keeps feminism in the realm of possibility. But even with compelling angles like sexual salvation and female rage, the film still flopped.  

“THEY DIDN’T UNDERSTAND IT”

Upon its release, the most common critique of Earth Girls Are Easy was its excessive frivolity and impermanence. Funnily enough, this was also the basis for nearly all of its praise; what makes the film so great is that it never takes itself seriously. It constantly draws attention to the artificiality of its characters and the world they inhabit but does very little to outwardly antagonize or critique any of it, allowing the viewer to either passively ignore its subtle jabs or to desperately search for meaning within them. (Hell, some may even start a column about it.) 

Though inconsequential in 1988, the film has since garnered a small cult following, of which I’m proudly a part. Earth Girls Are Easy manages to both subvert and give in to the conventions of its time, creating a work so singularly absurd and campy, you can’t not enjoy it. On its surface, it may be a flippant disco daydream but at its core, it’s euphoric and heartfelt. A true sleepover movie.

Have you seen Earth Girls Are Easy? Would you endeavour to watch it again? Let us know in the comments below!

Watch Earth Girls Are Easy