The brilliance of the film lies entirely in its framing device. An unnamed extraterrestrial narrator (voiced with brilliant, deadpan gravity by David Hyde Pierce) presents a lecture to his classroom on a distant planet. His subject: the baffling courtship rituals of the "Earthbound Human."
: Writer-director Jeff Abugov, whose background was in television sitcoms, conceived the idea for his feature film debut while watching a nature documentary. He wondered how a purely objective observer would interpret the strange rituals of human dating. The result blends romantic comedy, science fiction, and a sharp parody of educational programming. The Mating Habits Of The Earthbound Human -1999...
The cast delivers deliberate, slightly exaggerated performances to fit the documentary format. The brilliance of the film lies entirely in
The result is a film that flopped at the box office—earning a mere $4,634 in the United States—but found new life on late-night cable television and home video, amassing a dedicated cult following that continues to discover its strange charms decades later. He wondered how a purely objective observer would