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This movie I remember is about an alien monster that escaped from some sort of prison or insane asylum space ship (operated by extremely  human-looking aliens) and came to Southern California.  It would inhabit the bodies of humans to avoid detection.  The only survivor of the prision ship, who looked like a blonde human female, came after the monster and teamed up with a police detective (maybe a private eye) to find and destroy the thing.

The movie was made and set in the 1980s.

Some things I remember:

One of the inmates on the ship was biting off his fingers.  He slapped his hand against a window in his door to show off the five bloody stumps and said something like, "I'm in pain!  Gimme my pills!"

The alien woman learned English by watched soap operas, particularly Santa Barabar.  She pronounced Santa Barbara as "San-TA Bar-bar-A".  It was really annoying.

There was a scene, on Earth, where some guy in a labcoat was scribbling on a chalkboard.  A younger woman, also in a labcoat, came in, tried to talk about their relationship or some such, but all the older man would say was, "DO YOUR WORK".  Eventually, spines came out of his face and he made to attack the woman.  I guess he was possessed by the creature.

There was some pointless scene where a bimbo the blonde alien woman befriended grabbed her laser gun, thinking it was a cigarette lighter, and kept pulling the trigger to get a flame.  She gunned down a motorcycle cop and a couple of other people before the alien woman got the gun back from her.  This scene was played for laughs, if you can believe it.

There was a scene where the alien woman tracked the monster to a sewer but it used some kind of mental assault to render her helpless before she could laser it to death.  Humans were apparently immune, so the detective had to drive it off with this handgun, which had little effect on the monster aside from getting it to leave.

This may or may not have been a TV movie; I remember we watched it on TV and that it was not a rented tape.

Got it.  The movie was "Something is Out There".  According to the IMDB, it was a TV series pilot and the alien monster was never caught or destroyed.  Blah.  I'll have to try and see it, anyway.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096134/

Crazy coincidence, but within the last week I had read the entry in the Psychotronic Video Guide about this film and pegged it as one I want to see.  I knew it fit your description - then I saw that you already had the answer.