Isabel Alamin as Francesca in The Becomers (Courtesy of Dark Star Pictures)

Squish. Squish. A couple embraces, their fingers carefully caressing two fleshy gashes in the shape of a carved X. Located on their respective torso flanks, these slashes pucker like keloid scars around a wet red opening as if David Cronenberg designed Jesus’s yoni-ish crucifixion wound. Squick. Squick. The couple’s middle two fingers enter each other’s burst side snatches, sliding in and out of the crossed hole. SPLURK. Oozing pink and blue liquid leaks, then gushes, from their slashes in a continual gloopy flow. I guess they’re both squirters!

Watching this bizarro muffin top-genitalia sex scene in Zach Clark’s new zany low-budget sci-fi flick The Becomers, even I, notoriously unflappable, felt sick, squinting my eyes, squirming in my seat. My response was in part due to the auditorially abusive sound effects—all that squishing! Hrrrrk! Yet, I can’t dismiss the existential horror of finger fucking a side hole. Brrrr! But hey—nobody said extraterrestrial coitus was going to be pretty! Other than the sheer joy of making an audience writhe in awkward agony, this interplanetary probing is actually quite a sweet scene in the film, marking a moment of intimacy when two alien soulmates, now inhabiting human bodies like parasites, find each other on Earth, reunited after separating when abandoning their dying home planet.

With alien invaders taking over human hosts, it would be all too easy to label The Becomers a romantic comedy version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That oversimplification misses the fact that the 1978 film is already a romance. The emotional core is not those nasty flower pods spewing out hairy copies of humans (or Jeff Goldblum’s twinned nosebleed), but the chemistry between Donald Sutherland’s Matthew and Brooke Adams’s Elizabeth as they wage their battle for control of San Francisco. A more accurate description of The Becomers might be if Invasion of the Body Snatchers instead focused on the feelings of those little glops of see-through amoebas that rain down on our unsuspecting planet at the beginning of the film. Who knows—maybe they endured some heartbreak on the long journey too!

Carol (Molly Plunk) and Gordon (Mike Lopez) embrace in The Becomers (Courtesy of Dark Star Pictures)

The Becomers opens similarly to this classic film with the invading aliens winging their way down to Earth. But instead of ominous unknown and unknowable entities, viewers are treated to insight into one alien’s psyche courtesy of a monotone voiceover by Sparks brother Russell Mael, a delightful casting choice that is as much of a surprise as it makes sense (“The Girl Is Crying in her Latte” seems like a song written by aliens studying Starbucks). “I met my lover on a blind date,” the voiceover begins, “I remember how pretty and pale they looked in the sulfur rain.” Mael’s voiceover traverses the film, appearing in pauses between the action to detail the background of this whacked-out interstellar love story from the good times like cooking grass stew to the bad such as guzzling too much black drink and panic-buying on rock bread during the coming apocalypse. This reoccurring voiceover risks getting old quickly, but it’s saved by being reliably funny, particularly when the fantastical and the mundanely Earth-bound relatable collide: going to “grad school for vacuum studies,” “I didn’t like my job at the Gamma Center. Pulse colliders bored me but I made due,” “My lover was a somewhat well-known ceramics artist.” Wonder what these ceramics from galaxies far, far away looked like?!

As silly as the voiceover can be, it pales in comparison to the berserk shit show the aliens find themselves plunged into once they hit Earth, or more specifically, COVID-era Chicago. After crashlanding in a billowing burst of pink smoke in the forest like a gender reveal party gone horribly wrong (as many of them do), the central protagonist alien, identifiable only by their glowing blue B-movie neon eyes, takes over an increasingly problematic series of Americans, the most normal likely being the middle-aged hunter who witnesses their smoldering space ship in the woods. That body was unfortunately quickly tossed out in favor of a woman giving birth in the backseat of her car. After discarding the transformational evidence, including dumping the newborn baby, umbilical cord and all, into a flaming trash can, the alien does what all Americans on the lam do: books a week in a dumpy roadside motel. Naturally, Gene (Frank V Ross), the lonely-hearted dweeb of a motel manager, isn’t skeeved out at all by this alien now known as Francesca (Isabel Alamin). When you’re frequently surrounded by “a parade of weirdos,” as he terms it, only knowing a select few words, wearing sunglasses around the clock (until she covers her electric eyes with colored contact lenses), and lurking around calling into the night for her fellow alien lover like a Yeti don’t seem quite so odd.

Yuck! Abandoned body goo in The Becomers (Courtesy of Dark Star Pictures)

Although the motel manager’s willingness to overlook Francesca’s baby barbecue for a little relief from his own alienation is amusing, the film doesn’t really hit its stride until Francesca meets orange-haired Carol (the ingenious Molly Plunk who, with her former appearance in Little Sister, seems to have a particular knack for playing unlikely terrorists in Zach Clark films) in a hardware store parking lot. Looking to hitch a ride (and possibly a new form), Francesca is still a little naïve about the spiraling country she now inhabits. Case in point: a housewife hoisting a giant plastic drum into her car as if she’s planning on dissolving bodies with Walter White is…um…the definition of suspicious as hell. Soon-to-be-ex Francesca doesn’t know this though. When she host-leaps into Carol, dissolving her flesh and blood into a nauseating soup of blood, bile, and other colorful goop in the bathtub drain, she only expects to enjoy the pleasures of Carol’s idyllic suburban life: a big house, Alexa, and a fridge full of her favorite jars of pickles and marmalade. She does get that, sure, but it also comes with membership in a tin-foil hat conspiracy death cult! Welcome to America! This cult fixates on ridding the country of a secretive cabal of devil-worshiping pedos in the U.S. government through (SPOILERS!) kidnapping an elected official and tying him up in the basement of that very same idyllic suburban home. Unfortunately by the time the full scope of Carol’s homicidal batshittery is revealed, she’s roped her now-returned alien lover into the mix who abandoned their previous host—the lovely bus driver Debbie (Jacquelyn Haas)—to become Carol’s husband and partner-in-crime, Gordon (the wonderfully flat-faced Mike Lopez).

Part an Eyes Wide Shut red-cloak-and-mask-wearing costume party, part Q Anon paranoia, and part the real-life goofy plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Witmer with, in a very Clarkian detail, a PT Cruiser, The Becomers’ deeply satisfying and hilarious cult plot twist reveals just how much Clark excels when satirizing our uniquely peculiar contemporary American condition. Namely, that everyone is fucking nuts and that every American is one bad day away from committing federal crimes. So much so that even the aliens are terrified and they occasionally projectile-vomit vibrant technicolor gak.

Molly Plunk as Carol and Jacquelyn Haas as Debbie in Zach Clark’s The Becomers (Courtesy of Dark Star Pictures)

There is a connection here to Clark’s previous film, 2016’s Little Sister, in which a former-goth-girl-turned-nun returns home to visit her physically and emotionally scarred Iraq War veteran brother who spends the day pounding on his drums with the lights out, along with their loopy parents, including Ally Sheedy as looney bipolar stoner mama. Little Sister takes the temperature of Obama America, when the Shepard Fairey-branded HOPE sales pitch collided with the drone-bombed, cheap human life reality of the continued War on Terror. Similarly, The Becomers tackles COVID America—yet another risky move for Clark as I think most of us, me included, would like to forget that those years even happened. Of course, that’s impossible. Thankfully rather than relitigate lockdowns like many of the still-COVID obsessed, Clark takes on some of the most lunatic behavior in those years as represented by the pitch-perfect slow reveal of Carol and Gordon’s crackpot break with reality, from the tense visit with their concerned Bloody Mary-toting lesbian neighbors worried about the couple’s frightening Facebook posts to the slapstick of a frustrated, off-the-rails production of a beheading video.

As in most good sci-fi films, The Becomers has more to say about us than it does the extraterrestrial newbies. In fact, unlike other body-snatching films like David Cronenberg’s wormy-driven sex fiends in Shivers, we, the un-possessed Americans, are the unpredictable, unraveling others juxtaposed with the love and care shown between the two aliens, believably played host to by all the different actors of varying ages, genders, and races. Like Little Sister, which despite all the kooky behavior, showcases both pain and acceptance within a family, The Becomers holds unlikely but heartfelt romance at its center—and with the final unsettling yet somehow sentimental scene, just maybe family too. Much more well-adjusted in comparison, Americans should probably welcome these invaders with open arms.