‘The Borrower’ (R)

John McNaughton, director of the grisly "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer," never met a head he couldn't lop off. In "The Borrower," decapitation is, again, the order of the day. But this time it's funny.

An insect-looking alien has been an exceptionally bad extraterrestrial. For his punishment, he's devolved into human form and banished to earth. (He must have done something truly awful.) He has another problem. Whenever he suffers damage to the body, he mutates so violently his (human) head explodes. He has to find an immediate replacement. And this is one accident-prone alien.

Low-life deer hunter Tom Towles gets the dubious first honors. The rejuvenated alien (now played by Towles) stumbles into town, trying to imitate earthlings. He never quite gets it right. He's befriended by homeless Antonio Fargas in a back alley. When a street punk's flying bottle hits Towles, that friendship's gotta go. Now Fargas's head sits atop the alien. And so on and so on. Meanwhile, detective Rae Dawn Chong and veteran partner Don Gordon pursue a growing pile of headless bodies and eyewitness reports of a squid-like killer.

The story's as mundane as an alien-on-earth tale can be. It's loaded with familiar utterances such as "If it's not human, what is it?" It's also abundant with incongruities. When Towles's white head is swapped for Fargas's black one, it's obvious the new alien has Fargas's arms -- not to mention body. If the alien takes the whole thing, why tear the head off? When Chong fires a gun through her bedclothes at a late-night assailant, why are there no holes in the quilt? But who cares in a movie like this? This is a midnight kinda film. It's for yukking up, hollering at and having a good time.

McNaughton also has a super gross-out scene. No one watching it will ever forget it. And guess what: I feel like telling you about it. When Towles-the-alien is slurping soup at the mission, some wag drops a dead rat into his bowl. Towles, unaware that rodents are a major gastronomical problem, slips that bad boy right into his mouth. He keeps chewing too, the tail dangling from his mouth.

Pockmarked, craggy Towles has quite a B-movie career going. He played the title killer's friend in McNaughton's "Henry." He was a chomp victim in the recent remake of "Night of the Living Dead." He's perfect for this. When he straps on a set of shades, the satiric jibe at Arnold the Terminator is deliciously amusing. It's also great to see blaxploitation-movie veteran Antonio Fargas at work. As for Chong, let this be the last time her name and the word "acting" appear in the same sentence. The woman can't even scream convincingly. But again, in this kind of movie, she's more than suitable.