Smith’s last laugh
Anna Nicole Smith was never considered a serious actress, and she’s unlikely to win any posthumous film awards for her final role as a goofy, flatulent superhero who’s part of a trio of alien babes protecting Earth.
Yet the low-budget B-movie comedy “Illegal Aliens” does show an intriguing side of Smith, as a person aware of the silliness surrounding her persona and willing to go to extremes to make fun of it.
Early on in the straight-to-DVD movie – which comes out Tuesday, three months after her death – there’s a clip from Smith’s former reality-TV show, in which she devours a life-size cake made in her own image.
“Eating her own image, that’s what she does in the movie,” says David Giancola, director of “Illegal Aliens,” which had Smith as a producer and her late son, Daniel Smith, as associate producer.
“She really wanted people to laugh,” Giancola says. “Anna and Daniel wanted to make a movie that satirized Hollywood and ourselves to a great extent.”
Smith, whose movie credits include “Naked Gun 33 1/3” and “The Hudsucker Proxy,” plays Lucy, who teams with fellow aliens Cameron (Lenise Soren) and Drew (Gladise Jimenez) to battle an extraterrestrial madwoman (pro wrestler Joanie Laurer) bent on destroying Earth.
The movie is meant as a spoof of action flicks, with one of the gags being that the heroes are named after “Charlie’s Angels” stars Lucy Liu, Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore. (Smith’s character wakes from a nap and says she dreamed Cameron was dating Justin Timberlake – Diaz’s ex-boyfriend – and that Drew was running around screaming “E.T.! E.T.!,” a reference to Barrymore’s role in the 1982 sci-fi blockbuster.)
An opening scene shows the trio of shape-shifting visitors coming to Earth, with Soren and Jimenez’s characters as alien blobs and Smith’s shaped like a hog, accompanied by her little-girl voice squealing, “I’m a pig in space!”
In another, Smith’s character is scolded to put on more clothes – a reference to the revealing outfits for which the Playboy Playmate of the Year was known.
Smith plays Lucy as an extreme parody of her own ditzy-blonde image, providing the movie’s bumbling comic relief while Soren and Jimenez do the heavy lifting on the action scenes.
“She was always wanting to go the extra mile to do the spit-takes, do the falls, be silly,” says Soren. “She really let her child self out, that little kid in everyone. It gave us permission to have more fun and be silly, because the movie’s silly. …
“Even through all of her life’s ups and downs she experienced, she tended to keep this innocence and this big spirit. That’s part of who she was and what her charm was.”
Her grossest scene comes off-camera, when Lucy excuses herself while Cameron and Drew discuss their plan of action. The noises coming from the bathroom are so loud that the others have to raise their voices.
The unflattering depictions were not in the original script, Giancola says; Smith and her son added them to liven up the humor of her character.
“Nobody told her what to do, that’s for sure,” says co-star Jimenez. “Everything you see is her choice.”
Smith always came to the set focused and ready to work, her co-star adds.
“Based on her history that everyone knows, that is common knowledge, we weren’t sure what we were going to come across,” Jimenez says. “So we were very surprised in a nice way.”
Smith and her son were major investors in the movie, which cost a bit under $3 million to make, Giancola says. Plans to release the movie were delayed after Daniel Smith died from a drug overdose last year.
After Smith herself died in February, screenings of “Illegal Aliens” were canceled, but the filmmakers eventually went ahead with plans to release it through MTI Home Video.
Smith’s share of the profits will go to her infant daughter, Dannielynn.
“My intention was to distance the movie as much as possible from her death so people could laugh,” Giancola says. “That was her intention. That was Daniel’s intention. To get people to laugh.”