Quirky Film Is Just the Ticket

South Wales Evening Post, 25 February 2008

Kenneth Branagh walking the red carpet and a blanket of camera flashes along a driveway of a terraced house in Gorseinon? It sounded like something from another planet. So it was perhaps fitting for a cinema which had captured the world's imagination that Danny Boyle's lost film about a bizarre love triangle between a scientist and two aliens was its swansong.

Filmed in 1998, "Alien Love Triangle" centred around a British scientist called Steven who, in a science lab filled with broken plates, manages to teleport objects.

He rushes home to break the news to his grumpy-looking wife Alice (Courtney Cox). But his euphoria is soured when Alice reveals she is leaving him - and not because of his late nights at the lab.

Alice is a male alien who has been living in a human female body for the past 10 years and has been trying to get home to the planet Nulark ever since. Phew.

Alice's alien wife Elizabeth, played by a bald and green-looking Heather Graham, has arrived in a spaceship and is ready to take her back. But when a problem grounds the craft, Steven and Elizabeth fall in love - with hilarious results.

"Alien Love Triangle" may sound far-fetched, bargain-bin material, but the interplay between the characters is well crafted. Branagh plays the role of a slightly quackers boffin brilliantly, and Cox's ballsy and angry delivery makes you wish Monica from 'Friends' was more butch and drank Jack Daniels.

A gruesome eye-poking session between Cox and Graham, as well as hilarious levitating love-scene to the tune of Golden Earring's Radar Love, were great reasons why "Alien Love Triangle" deserved a full feature-length version rather a short, which topped little more than 30 minutes.

And while the special effects aren't Hollywood standard and the storyline is not quite Shakespearean, "Alien Love Triangle" was small, quaint and quirky - much like La Charrette.


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