This one used to be locked away in the “too scandalous to see when it came out” files, a dark little corner of naughty 80s cinema that also includes “Howard the Duck,” “Porky’s,” “Valmont,” and anything featuring dark splashes of blood and clown/hockey masks. Sure, my parents rented “The Elephant Man” when I was pre-verbal, cementing a lifelong disgust toward David Lynch, whose films I find just as incomprehensible in my 30s as I did when I was a tot — but theirs was a household where “The Simpsons” was banned for its edgy dysfunction. “Easy” was not something to discuss, much less celebrate.

Then, one day, a vicious and wonderful and hilarious song came on by a Van Nuys native named Julie Brown, called “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun.” I discovered that Brown, parody songwriter extraordinaire, skewering the Valley as she celebrated it, had inspired “Earth Girls Are Easy” (1988, rated PG) with a song off a 1984 EP, and I finally, like, got the joke.

After opening on a shot of three furry, lonely, rather ugly Seuss-ian aliens peering in on Earth, we meet Valerie (Geena Davis), who does nails at “Curl Up and Dye.” There, worried that her doctor fiancé seems bored with her, she submits to a makeover by Candy Pink (Brown), who, with a hilariously dated computer style-suggestion program — and one of several yes, musical numbers, declaring “You’re cute and fresh and wholesome, but science has a cure!” — turns her pal into a mix of Lady Gaga and the Sears catalog bra section: platinum hair, blue eyes, white lingerie and impractical heels. The audience has already seen her cad of a husband covering a hickie with concealer in his first scene, so even if we’re rooting for Valerie’s new sexy look (complete with light bulb perfume-dabbing, which results in a minor fire extinguished with a handy can of whipped cream), we know it can’t have any effect on Dr. Jerk, who soon walks in with some naughty night nurse, expecting Valerie to be gone. Kicking him out, Valerie embarks on a splendid montage of revenge: pushing a cigar box into the VCR, microwaving a football, rolling a bowling ball into his Commodore, destroying one boring symbol of suburban money after the next.

Then the primary-colored aliens (Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans, all incredibly young and talented) crash into the pool of our almost too-accommodating hostess. To conceal them, she realizes she’d need “about a thousand gallons of Nair.” Or access to a salon, where Candy Pink remarks, “Well, I see split ends are universal.” Once emerged, the three quickly pick up local culture through repetition, take the girls out for a night of bubbly fun (partially shot at famed Griffith Observatory, as some kind of hilltop nightclub), and Valerie discovers you don’t have to be human to be a good man — and that being a naive doormat for a meanie with an M.D. is a worse attribute than being “easy.”

Part of me loves “Earth Girls Are Easy” because it’s a ridiculous, knowing caper featuring an intelligent, talented and flat-out enjoyable cast while, at least for its 100-minute run-time, deflating any negative, cast-your-eyes-down in shame emotions attached to that damned word, “easy.” Another part, however, is how it takes the cliché image of the San Fernando Valley circa Moon Unit Zappa’s 1982 track, “Valley Girl,” and says to the world, “yeah, we KNOW what you think of us.” As fellow secret Valley genius Sandra Tsing Loh, author of the most hilarious NPR essay you will ever listen to says in the intro to her book “Depth Takes a Holiday,” “being from this hinterland of the proudly uninformed is considered an attribute too lurid for polite company. Let’s face it. Los Angeles is the nation’s cultural scapegoat. The rest of you always want — need — to pawn off on us things like David Hasselhoff. I sympathize, but I have news. His would not be a number-one show if only L.A. watched it.” America, I saw you in the 80s — and you weren’t nestled up with a chessboard and “The Gulag Archipelago.” You wanted big hair and bad nails and aerosol cheese and the home-shopping network and Jeff Goldblum in a fuzzy blue suit and a spaceship in your backyard pool too. Take a chill pill and just enjoy it.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.