One of the pleasures of Real Men is that it leaves one no idea where it is going to from one minute to the next. One of the funniest scenes in the film is the one where James Belushi shows Ritter a pen he claims was given to him by the aliens, which has the inscription “To Nick from your friends far away”; Ritter remains wholly unimpressed but then Belushi hammers it through a baseball and we watch as it sprouts antennae, rotates with coloured lights and then zips off to the stars. It’s a very funny scene where the joke is one us for disbelieving Belushi’s patently absurd story about aliens and preposterously obvious attempts to con Ritter. And right throughout writer/director Dennis Feldman delights in pulling the expectation out from under an audience – we are still not even certain up until the end whether or not the aliens are real. One minute Belushi can convince Ritter he is a Russian sleeper, the next throw it away and say he was only trying to build up his confidence. In one scene a person we are told is Belushi’s aunt (played by no less Dyanne Thorne of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS (1974) and sequels fame) comes onto Ritter only to then be revealed to be Belushi’s father after a sex change. The humour comes full of amusing surreal non-sequitirs – “I don’t smoke that much,” says Belushi. “Only after sex. I’m trying to give it up – I’m down to a packet a day.” In another scene they are able to make an escape during a shootout simply because the Russians take a lunchbreak. It’s a very silly film in many places, but not unappealingly so.