Director/Producer – Jim Sharman, Screenplay – Helmut Bakaitis & Jim Sharman, Photography (b&w + colour) – David Sanderson, Music – Ralph Tyrell, Art Direction – Brian Thomson. Production Company – Kolossal Pictures.
Cast
Jane Harders (Shirley Thompson), Marion Johns (Rita Thompson), John Llewellyn (Reg Thompson), June Collis (Dr Leslie Smith), Tim Eliott (Dr George Smith), Helmut Bakaitis (Harold), John Ivkovitch (Bruce), Marie Nicholas (Narelle Thompson), Bruce Gould (Blake), Ron Haddrick (Replica Prince Phillip)
Plot
Sydney, Australia, 1956. Shirley Thompson is placed in a psychiatric institution. There she tells her story to the doctors. She was living at home with her parents who decided it was time that she married. Shirley became upset when they announced her engagement to a local boy in the papers without even asking her first. While out at the Luna Park amusement park with a group of friends, Shirley wandered into an attraction where she was contacted by aliens who told her that they wanted her to spread their message to the world. In addition, the aliens animated a statue of Prince Phillip to go out and speak to the masses on their behalf.
Jim Sharman will always have to his name the credit of being the director of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Sharman also made the Rocky Horror sequel Shock Treatment (1981), whose place in the pantheon is still heatedly debated by fans of the original. (I admit to liking it). Sharman has done surprisingly little else on film and nothing else that has had anything other than a limited profile. His other films include Shirley Thompson Versus the Aliens; the mad scientist film Summer of Secrets (1976); and the non-genre suburban black comedy The Night, The Prowler (1978). Outside of his films, Sharman has had a substantial body of work as an Australian stage director with a career ranging between the early 1960s and the 2000s.
Shirley Thompson Versus the Aliens was Jim Sharman’s first film. It has always been a work that sounded fascinating for the outlandishness of its premise – “A group of aliens plans to invade Australia as a means of taking over the Earth. In order to communicate with the people of Earth, they bring a statue of the long-dead Duke of Edinburgh to life.”
Seen after many years of intrigue about it, Shirley Thompson Versus the Aliens invariably ends up disappointing. The Duke of Edinburgh statue aspect is blown out of proportion and only consists of one scene. In fact, we never actually meet the aliens – some reviewers have gone so far as to offer the interpretation that the entire film is an hallucination being had by Shirley. All that we get of them are some alien point-of-view shots and a tracking scanner being operated from orbit. Although it seems that the more likely explanation for the lack of any aliens is due to the film’s miniscule budgetary resources.
It is important when it comes to look at Shirley Thompson Versus the Aliens to consider it as part of Jim Sharman’s career a whole rather than as “one of the other oddities from the director of Rocky Horror.” Sharman started as a theatre director in his early twenties and conducted several avant garde and surrealist plays, including the original theatrical production of The Rocky Horror Show (1973), which he staged the year after making Shirley Thompson. Shirley Thompson Versus the Aliens was made with Sharman’s own money and contains some of the collaborators who would go on to appear in Rocky Horror – Jane Harders who plays Shirley was the original stage Janet, for instance.
Jane Harders as Shirley Thompson
From the opening scene, you are left wondering what on Earth it is that you have sat down to watch, The opening six minutes take place around what looks like a party at a pool, which is peopled by dwarves, guests in masks or people who have grotesque grins on their faces as they approach the camera. In addition, the screen flickers every time we meet someone, while all of this is accompanied by a weird, atonal score. And the entire scene is shot in black-and-white tinted a bottle green, which it remains through the majority of the film, although there are also some sections that burst into colour. It looks for all the world like an experimental film.
Outside of Rocky Horror, Jim Sharman has directed little else on film. Based on a watching of Shirley Thompson Versus the Aliens and The Night, The Prowler, you can kind of see why as his approach is almost the antithesis of commercial sensibilities. In these films, Sharman likes to observe the banality of average middle-class Australian suburbia. There is an oblique sense of humour to these scenes where is digging in and making fun of certain caricatures – certainly, Marion Johns as Shirley’s mother gives a sharp and on the ball performance, although Jane Harders’ Shirley seems over-acted. But it is the sort of humour where you are not sure whether you are just watching a domestic situation and at what point you should consider everything a satiric exaggeration.
There is no particular plot to the film. We have the framing device of Shirley telling her story to the doctors in the asylum. These take her back first to scenes in her home where she seems to be rebelling against her parents’ idea that she should become engaged. This is followed by the scenes where she, boyfriend and friends get on their motorcycles and go to an amusement park. In the middle of one of the attractions, she is contacted by the aliens who get her to spread the message about their existence. At this point, things start to fragment – even though it is what the film is about, Shirley never actually does much in the way of proselytising the alien message, while there is the one scene where the statue come to life and makes an announcement at an event. The film then wanders off where there is a brief unsatisfactory wrap-up where Shirley tells of having settled down into regular married life. It is hard to tell if what you are watching is an experimental film, a failed gonzo comedy or just amateurism. It is hard to even really tell what the point of the film was.
(A thank you to Kerrin Jones for tracking down a copy of the film for me)
