UNCLE DON’S VIEWS OF NIL REPUTE:

I see in the news that the Brits found a 2,000-year-old brain, fairly well-preserved. No doubt it was much fresher than the barker I suffered through Friday.

Some eerie music, the moon rises, my interest falls. On a snow-covered mountain appears the mountaineer. For what is he searching? The summit? The meaning of life? A way out of the movie? Or maybe nothing more than to leave that which Frank Zappa warned us about.

Tell ya what he finds, though/Starry starry night/His fingers turning blue and gray/Freezing his butt but what the hey/With eyes that know he’s soon to be toast/Disco ball in them hills/Phony as hell, just CGI swill/Catch some air, the avalanche kills/Does it or does in alien laps he land.

(Sorry, Don McLean.)

Gotta read through the clues: It’s 1928. A big mountain. Lots of snow. A mountaineer or two who disappear. Need more?

“Because it’s there.” A great reason to climb a mountain. A horrible reason to remake a movie. Particularly a remake of one that is alleged to be some sort of classic.

So now we’re in the present. Down, like bird droppings, returns this disco ball and a plethora (the big word of the week, look it up), of mini disco balls. Out steps a blubber-encrusted E.T. Is he our returning mountaineer? He’s greeted by earthlings, slower moving than a government program. Mr. E.T. is first reached by an earthling just slightly faster afoot than a corpse and then met by a somewhat faster bullet. Oops. Popping up is the Tin Woodsman on steroids. He is tweaked. Out comes Mr. Death Ray.

A team of experts led by Jennifer Connelly is kidnapped by the government to figure out answers to these anomalous aliens, so that the answers can be ignored for the sole purpose of stringing out the movie. She’s an expert on the only known form of life that can live in sulfuric acid. No, not editors, but some sort of bacteria with lots of letters in its name. What this has to do with smog-shrouded disco balls, big honkin’ robots, and fat aliens is beyond me.

Accompanied by goofballs in Glad Bag-inspired anti- contamination suits, the alien is whisked off to hospital. Shades of that great TV show “Alien Autopsy.” Shades of “Dirty Jobs” too, as disgusting layer after disgusting layer is peeled off of the expiring alien like one of them Russian Matryoshka dolls. At the center of this is Keanu Reeves. Like a cheap TV preacher, he can raise the dead, cure the hurt and incessantly moralize. One thing he can’t or won’t do is act.

Meanwhile, evacuating from the mouths of Keanu and Connelly are flatulent pearls of wisdom such:

“We can change.”

“Are you a friend to us?”

“I’m a friend to the earth.”

You two ain’t no friends to moviegoers.

Intelligence does briefly rear its ugly head with an aside about the law of the conservation of energy. Other than those few unfortunate moments, it’s drooler time for the rest of this flick.

Remember them cheesy-looking spirits in “Ghost?” Check it out when the Tin Woodsman decides to dissolve and send evil, nasty little nano-critters out to eat the Earth.

But ol’ Keanu, protected by his polyester leisure suit, ventures into a storm of these suckers, who can dissolve sports arenas in seconds, but apparently not Keanu, in minutes. Reaching the mother disco ball in Central Park, mind changed, he decides the earth is worth saving. Well, I hope so. Otherwise there’d be no one to watch the movie.

Raising his arm dramatically, light enveloping him, he reaches to the ball. First his face, then the rest of him crumbles like The Old Man of the Mountain. As in the original version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” does he belch out that infamous, ludicrously overrated, perpetually repeated phrase “Klaatu barada nikto?” I always wondered what it meant. Probably nothing deeper than “Me want cookie.”

UNCLE DON reviews B-rated movies and cheesy musical acts for the Daily Pilot. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].