Original title: Chissà perché… capitano tutte a me

This quicky sequel to Uno sceriffo extraterrestre… poco extra e molto Terrestre/The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid (1979) is pretty much more of the same – if you liked the combination of sentimentality, science fiction and charm from the first film, you’ll find something to enjoy here.

Sheriff Hall (Bud Spencer) and H7-25 (Cary Guffey), now using the name Charlie Warren, have left Newnan and are on the road, trying to stay one step ahead of the military who are still keen to get their hands of Charlie. But Charlie can’t keep out of trouble and repeatedly shows off his alien powers forcing them to constantly keep moving and necessitating the intervention of his increasingly annoyed – and still unseen – biological father (the last time the alien dad visited Earth it was aboard stock footage culled from Gerry Anderson’s Space: 1999 (1975-1977) – this time he turns up aboard one of the eponymous craft from Anderson’s UFO (1970-1973)). They eventually find their way to the crime-ridden town of Munroe whose previous sheriff has fled in fear of his life. Charlie persuades a reluctant Hall to become the town’s new lawman and, helped by the town’s mayor/radio DJ Howard (Ferruccio Amendola) starts to clean the place up. But while he’s doing that, Charlie has been targeted by a race of aliens who are planning to enslave the human race using hypnotic devices and an army of androids. Eventually, Hall has to join forces with a trio of cowboys, an eccentric biker gang and the people of Munroe to not only keep Charlie safe but save the whole human race.

What little mileage there was left in the idea of an over-sized sheriff caring for a diminutive alien child had pretty much been exhausted in the first film and for the first half hour or so, this second run through just goes over the same old ground. There’s still some charm about the unlikely relationship between Spencer and Guffey but it slowly starts getting very odd indeed, though not necessarily in a good way.

The main addition is the race of stereotypical aliens planning to invade the Earth. They’re pasty-faced lot who seem to have been left over from am invasion in a low budget American science fiction film from the 1960s – they’re not dissimilar to the artificial humans in Wesley Barry’s The Creation of the Humanoids (1962). More interesting is the addition of a distant echo of the kind of western that Spencer made his name in opposite partner in comedy Terence Hill in the 70s. Sheriff Hall wanders into a lawless town, gets into a fight with some local thugs and sets out to re-establish law and order and there are references to High Noon (1952) and a trio of dynamite tossing cowboys turn up along the way. It’s all very odd as the young target audience were very unlikely to be familiar with the kind of films that Why Did You Pick on Me? was referencing.

The first film had anticipated Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-terrestrial (1982) while also looking sideways at the Disney films Escape to Witch Mountain (1975) and Return from Witch Mountain (1978). Here director Michele Lupo pulls off the same trick, the scene in which Charlie uses his supernatural powers to win a basketball game looking forward to Teen Wolf (1985) and glancing at some of the Disney Medfield College films, most notably The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969) in which Kurt Russell used his powers to win a televised quiz tournament.

It’s a lot weirder than its predecessor, with a very odd gang of bikers (complete with dogs in sunglasses) and Spencer driving a car into outer space. A fight in a Chinese laundry is so peculiar it borders on the surreal and Spencer’s Sheriff Hall seems even more invincible and otherworldly than ever. In many ways, he’s a cartoon character come tom life and almost more alien than his diminutive ward.

The irritating disco song that stalked the first film like some sort of sonic weapon is thankfully gone, but it’s replaced by an equally annoying country and western ditty, Mr Nothingoesright, again written by Guido and Maurizio de Angelis. It’s about the only think that improves on the first film but that’s scant reward for sitting through the rest of this very silly and unrewarding nonsense. Even the kids might find this one a bit of a chore and it’s not even remotely surprising that it marked the end of the road for the sheriff and the satellite kid…

In the States the film was promoted under the titles Why Did You Pick on Me? or Everything Happens to Me and had 16 minutes of footage cut from the longer Italian cut. Curiously the cut footage isn’t particularly objectionable – the comic book violence was all left intact – but short scenes minor edits that were possibly done to bring the 99 minutes down to a more double-bill friendly length.