My Favorite Martian

All I remember about the show, "My Favorite Martian," which starred Ray Walston and the late Bill Bixby, was that it served as a lead-in for the "Ed Sullivan Show" when Old Stoneface would feature the latest British rock bands. These days, that’s reason enough for Hollywood to crank out a movie.

Yet audiences now have to sit through what has to be the most obnoxious, insufferable, and unfunny "comedy" to hit the screen in many a year. The movie My Favorite Martian couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn as far as registering even one laugh from the audience. I’m talking bad here, as in "Ed Wood bad."

A Martian (Christopher Lloyd) in a flying saucer crash lands on Earth. He takes refuge with a reporter named Tim O’Hara (Jeff Daniels), living together in a garage apartment owned by the meddling Mrs. Brown.

That premise alone kept the half hour show on the air for three seasons. The movie adds a cute animatronic space suit named "Zoot" along with an imbecilic plot to dredge this thing out for 92 minutes. Lloyd is far too weird to be Uncle Martin, and Daniels seems forever stuck in his Dumb and Dumber shtick. What are such nice girls like Elizabeth Hurley and Daryl Hannah doing in this rot?

Even Ray Walston, the original Uncle Martin, makes a curtain call. I liked him so much better as the cantankerous judge on "Picket Fences."

Open letter to Disney, the maker of this film: Enough, already!