Liquid Sky

LIQUID SKY
(R, Cinevista, 112 mins., U.S. theatrical release date: April 15, 1983)

It's a rare but welcome surprise when a cult film manages to trip you up. Midnight movie masses tend to flock towards the most inept, most earnestly dreadful movies ever brought to fruition, so the discovery of one which actually is novel and assured rather than derivative and amateurish is something I celebrate. James Nguyen is a hero to the Rifftrax audience, and Tommy Wiseau has his own Ed Wood treatment thanks to James Franco. But I was burnt out with both Birdemic and The Room instantly because they don't reward ritualistic viewing thanks to being both hopelessly shoddy and thematically sloppy. They exist purely for ironic pleasure, and this is one of the biggest turn-offs I have developed in response to a world of online criticism where arch glad-handing has allowed mediocrity to thrive in the places where genuinely great films deserve to occupy.

Liquid Sky is a deathlessly kinky anomaly in a cult movie pantheon that often requires neon signs advertising a film's ineptitude to get recognized. It's safe to say Liquid Sky has osmosed itself into fringe appreciation, especially when you ponder the inspiration for such musical provocateurs as Peaches and Lady Gaga. But I have the hardest time trying to explain Liquid Sky categorically. Is it a new wave Ms. 45 via Paul Morrissey and David Cronenberg? What do I make of a glamorous lead actress who plays a supporting role in male drag? Are the performance art take-offs embellished satire or another stretch at anthropological authenticity? How do I deal with the micro-plots involving a deadbeat junkie husband and a Jewish TV producer seducing a German astrophysicist? Are the heat vision visual effects transcendent of their shoestring appearance?

When a movie raises that many questions, my instinct is to watch it over and over looking for my own answers. And Liquid Sky hit me with that laser beam, in 1980s parlance, relaxing me with its deadpan charms enough to let the film's casual cruelty and "fashionable" desperation swirl around in my mind instead of slapping me upside the head. Conceived by Russian émigrés in tandem with an American performance artist, Liquid Sky is at once inside and outside the nihilistic DayGlo pageantry of the post-punk club scene. There is heroin, rape, catfighting, necrophilia, and enough free-floating hostility to make George Carlin seem like a pussycat. It's also visually and aurally sumptuous.

Liquid Sky takes place in the span of one day, and Slava Tsukerman labors to preserve a more unique portrait of New York than usual when compared to its seedier contemporaries. The Empire State Building is viewed as a shrine in the glow of golden hour cinematography. Not content with mere aerial shots, Tsukerman manages fresh footage of an airplane landing and makes the most of the window and rooftop motifs. The city streets are reassuringly heavy with traffic during lunchtime, and there is a dazzling make-up session conducted under black light that epitomizes the richness of the primary colors. There is also a nightclub sequence near the end which is rendered more extraterrestrial than the requisite UFO, which is no larger than a dinner plate and inconspicuously settles atop an apartment building cluttered with empty bottles and crates.

The alien craft is drawn to the penthouse suite occupied by model Margaret (Anne Carlisle: Desperately Seeking Susan, Crocodile Dundee) and dealer Adrian (Paula E. Sheppard: Alice, Sweet Alice) on the promise of heroin, which upon injection stimulates a chemical reaction in the brain which the aliens harvest for sustenance. Or at least so until now, as West Berlin scientist Johann Hoffman (Otto von Wernherr) has gone from noticing the bizarre pattern of deaths in drug-abusing punk circles to finding a connection involving sexual intercourse, particularly the rush of endorphins at the orgasm stage. The defiantly androgynous Margaret proves useful in the alien's mission as she is exploited by predatory soap stars, professors and failed artists, all of whom wind up with glass arrows lodged in their heads and/or vanish completely post-coitus.

Margaret was once of "Mayflower stock" before moving from Connecticut to Manhattan to pursue indoctrinated ideals of fortune, going from the notion of marrying a lawyer ("And on the weekends, we'd barbecue...") to waiting tables and wishing upon an acting agent instead. These modes of subservience and blind luck are shattered completely by the realization of her newfound power of sexual agency, which isn't limited to men. With her already outré face paint and hairdos, Margaret reaches the depths of her alienation even before she is emboldened to snatch a naive mate off the Danceteria floor ("Be nice to your audience") and send him off to a euphoric oblivion.

Her roommate Adrian is made of harder stuff, "concrete mazes, stone and glass." Confrontational and vulgar, this child of a hospitalized mother who once baptized a fancy restaurant with her urine is more of an outspoken nihilist than Margaret, who still retains tokens of gentle femininity (even when she turns primal, she's essentially Fay Wray as King Kong). Though she talks about relocating to Berlin, the European hub of glam culture and creative freedom, nothing becomes Adrian so much as her decadent New York environment. Whether reciting a ferocious poem devoted to her rhythm box ("It is preprogrammed/So what?/Who of your friends is not?") or writhing sensually atop the corpse of Margaret's acting teacher Owen (casting director Bob Brady), Adrian takes to being one of the damned with sardonic, sickening relish.

Trafficking in smack, Adrian's most pathetic client is Margaret's boyish opposite number, Jimmy. He latches onto Margaret at the start just so he can raid her apartment looking for the fix he can't afford, and proceeds to act even nastier to her as they share photo shoots. Anne Carlisle gender bends in the grand tradition of David Bowie by playing both these rival models, with trick photography and seamless doubles allowing them to be within striking distance of each other. As Jimmy, Carlisle flashes a 1000 watt sneer and takes cues from the Bowie/Ferry image of the debutante, slicked blonde hair and dapper tuxedo. The heated confrontation near the end between Margaret and Jimmy, where she is goaded into performing oral sex on the spiteful Jimmy, has to be seen to be believed.

The interactions between Margaret, Jimmy, Adrian, and the overbearing types courting them (from cocaine-huffing designers and their catty underlings to snooty reporters) are highly vitriolic comedy. Jimmy mocks Margaret by referring to her as an "ugly chicken" and steps on her toes, and her sadomasochistic response is to flatter his enabled ego as "the most beautiful boy in the world." Margaret is constantly defensive of her colorful style, as when Owen chastises her for looking like a hooker despite his history of wearing blue jeans as his own form of theatrical rebellion ("You thought your jeans stood for love, freedom and sexual equality while we at least know we're in costume"). Adrian's eulogy for the horny professor is delightfully profane and bitter ("You dropped dead fucking! It suits you well..."). And when Margaret is assaulted for the first time by soap opera hunk Vincent (Jack Adalist), who forces Quaaludes down her throat to render her docile, she resists with dry gusto. Incidentally, I didn't realize until a second viewing that Vincent would return later in the movie when Margaret accepts that there is one more score to settle.

Luckily, not all the humor is that black. Otto von Wernherr is endearingly straight as Dr. Hoffman, who asks his colleague Owen "How can I study the behavior of this creature if it's on private property?" His failed attempt to warn the defensive Adrian of the alien invasion is misinterpreted as a narco threat. And when he finds suitable space to conduct his studies, it's with Jimmy's mother Sylvia (Susan Doukas), the aforementioned Semite who works in television and throws herself at the duty-minded Donald Sutherland analog with an arsenal of playful bon mots ("You have protection from aliens? You have a laser gun in your pants?"). These lighter touches are effective counterpoints to the vagina dentata exhortations of Margaret, whose sci-fi venereal disease may arouse connotations with the then-nameless AIDS epidemic which was claiming hundreds of lives as early as 1982.

Credit joint screenwriters Slava Tsukerman, Nina Kerova (Tsukerman's longstanding wife) and Ms. Carlisle herself that Liquid Sky, while unavoidably rough due to a filming budget of less than $500,000, is never stilted or cloddish. Even as Tsukerman and DP Yuri Neyman seek to dazzle you with their ace location photography and vivid lighting, the characters in Liquid Sky possess inner lives and aggressive personalities. Margaret, jaded as she is, is played by Anne Carlisle with a voice as enthralling as her appearance. Paula E. Sheppard finds the sexiness in Adrian's hippie-gone-hostile patois. And the snide monotone Carlisle adopts for Jimmy is its own comic reward: when Sylvia tries to offer him a ride uptown, he matter-of-factly states "No, I'm going down."

Tsukerman also helped out on the film's eccentric score, composed on a Fairlight CMI handily available for public access at a library. This pricey synthesizer, which was big among experimental musicians for its ability to program natural sounds as musical notes (think Peter Gabriel's fourth album and Kate Bush on The Dreaming), allowed for variations on new and existing melodies, sometimes coming across as harsh (in that traditionally fast, processed "new wave" style) and other times gentle (bell-like and carnivalesque at a stately pace). He even feeds spoken dialogue into the keyboard for added disorientation, particularly the point where Margaret is taunted by all sides, especially from Jimmy, at her last modeling gig.

Liquid Sky has been a hard movie to come by, but Vinegar Syndrome offered a limited edition BD/DVD combo package (3000 units total) which sold out fast over the 2017 Black Friday shopping weekend. Restored from 35mm elements and remastered in 4k resolution, Liquid Sky is a revelation even if you only check out some of the screen caps posted at the AV Club. Slava Tsukerman and Anne Carlisle discuss the film in brand new interviews as well as an Alamo Drafthouse Q&A session (co-composer Clive Smith is also in attendance), although their commentary track is disappointing; recorded in what appears to be another apartment room, there are stretches of awkward silence which last for minutes where it would've been better to revert back to the soundtrack proper. The best option of all these bonuses is the 50-minute Liquid Sky Revisited, which boasts a wider array of participants (Kerova, Neyman, Doukas, and many more) as well as the chance to see Carlisle revisit shooting locations. The nightclub no longer stands, but I smiled knowing that a Petco has taken its place.

Liquid Sky has fast become one of my favorite movies of the 1980s. Here's hoping this alien artifact touches down again in a reissue format.

Remote Control (1988)

REMOTE CONTROL
(R, New Century/Vista Film Company, 88 mins., theatrical release date: April 7, 1988)

In 1977, writer/director Jeff Lieberman made Blue Sunshine, a cult classic in which a group of domesticated, distraught ex-hippies who dropped the titular strain of acid a decade earlier lost their hair and their marbles simultaneously. It was made back in the amber-colored days when soft-core writer Zalman King was just another fledgling B-actor, and Lieberman, having previously directed Squirm, was establishing himself as a quirky genre hero on par with Larry Cohen despite a stunning lack of prolificacy.

Ten years later, Lieberman cloned that film's concept of homicidal mass hypnosis as well as its Hitchcock-style "wrong man" thriller elements for the VHS era with Remote Control. This is most certainly not a feature film version of the MTV-produced couch potato trivia show, but another trendy homage to the science-fiction cheapies of yesteryear. Lieberman didn't exactly conjure up by lightning twice, as after Remote Control was consigned to cable-channel obscurity, his already sporadic film credits proved fewer and further between; there was a co-writing claim on The Never Ending Story III here, the swan song-seeming Satan's Little Helper from 2004 there. His career squittered to a halt, and with the advent of digital home video, Remote Control was officially branded his "lost" film.

I actually found a VHS copy at a garage sale pitched by the I Can Smell Your Brains podcast team. Two years after that acquisition, Lieberman secured the rights to self-distribute the film on limited-edition DVD and Blu-Ray himself, complete with a fresh 2k transfer and feature-length commentary track from the filmmaker. One can only hope that the film gains enough momentum for a wider release via Shout! Factory, who recently re-issued Squirm. But I did revisit Remote Control when the news of its re-emergence broke, and as a card-carrying fan of its 1986 contemporary TerrorVision, I was eager to receive whatever it was transmitting.

Remote Control and TerrorVision have quite a few things in common, starting with the requisite joke at the expense of inept wannabe swingers living in their thoroughly-modernized (read: blindingly 1980s) pleasuredome. The husband in this case, bemoaning the lack of anything good on TV, had sent his wife out to rent a videocassette called "S&M Made Fun." As she suits up in her New Wave dominatrix costume, loverboy puts on another rental to pass the time, an obscure chestnut from 1957 called "Remote Control." The movie begins with another jaded couple, Milo and Eva, finding the same relief in modern technology that the present day lovers do, complete with an early form of VHS called "View-o-Vision" that Eva uses to play her own copy of a film titled "Remote Control." Alas, Eva is literally under remote control, as subliminal messages overpower her mind and she mutilates Milo with her knitting machine. But things sometimes have a way of bleeding out into the real world.

Meanwhile, a rundown movie theatre has been renovated into Village Video, where our hero Cosmo DiClemente has a job at. Kevin Dillon plays Cosmo, a couple of decades before his Victory on HBO's Entourage but in the nostalgic wake of breakthrough roles in the likes of Heaven Help Us and Platoon. His boss, Georgie (Christopher Wynne), has received a new promotional display for "Remote Control," and a dozen copies for inventory. Cosmo, however, is more interested in French films, or at least the woman who wishes to rent them, beautiful Belinda Watson (Deborah Goodrich). Belinda is seeking a copy of Truffaut's Stolen Kisses because, like Cosmo, she is a hopeless romantic, her current boyfriend being a possessive douchebag named Victor (Frank Beddor). Georgie is also pining for dizzy brunette Allegra James, played by fellow celebrity sibling Jennifer Tilly.

Victor and Allegra argue over a copy of "Remote Control," and Georgie tips the scales in her favor. He also agrees to hold a copy of War of the Worlds for her, but is so lovestruck that he and Cosmo decide to drop off the tape in person at Allegra's house. They aren't alone, as Victor has become so butt-hurt by the snub, he tracks down Allegra as she is watching "Remote Control." Cosmo and Georgie are chased off by a neighbor, but Victor stays to strangle Allegra and subsequently murder her returning parents.

Policemen Artie (Mike Pniewski) and Pete (John Lafayette) arrive at Village Video the next day to arrest Cosmo and Georgie based on the eyewitness' testimony. Cosmo pleads to Artie to let him try to find the "invisible evidence" that proves Victor was the culprit, believing that the murder was recorded on camera, but the "Remote Control" tape plays as normal until Artie becomes brainwashed and turns his gun on Cosmo, killing his partner and eventually getting shot in self-defense by Cosmo.

Now fugitives, Cosmo and Georgie kidnap Belinda in an attempt to convince her of Victor's guilt, but that necessitates playing the damn movie again. Belinda picks up a hammer and lunges at Cosmo, but the hand-cuffed Georgie manages to stop the tape and break the spell. With Cosmo finally hitting upon the truth, the three of them make an effort to destroy all copies of "Remote Control," eventually leading them to the headquarters of distributors Polaris Video in typical invasion movie fashion. And sure enough, Bert Remsen, the grandpa from TerrorVision, plays a low-level baddie who is easily disposed of in a fit of conflicting emotions.

TerrorVision wasn't just a movie about aliens, it was alien in every aspect of its execution, from the screenplay to the performances to the set design. It was chock full of cheap stereotypes and low-hanging satire, but it was consistent and vicariously weird enough to stand out amongst Charles Band's endless B-movie Empire in the same way Stuart Gordon did with his Lovecraft spin-offs. Remote Control doesn't feel as loose and lawless as that Ted Nicolaou film, as Lieberman is going for a more self-aware, meta tone in which the fictional plot of "Remote Control" is re-enacted in contemporary Los Angeles. The movie plays itself incredibly straight once the mystery is unraveled, yet it doesn't quite work as a direct thriller because it is so unassuming and clearly meant as a pastiche.

The character motivations are confusing even without the mind-control shenanigans. Victor, for instance, is a such a psychotic goon that you keep expecting him to be some kind of a mole, or a clearly-defined satire of 1980s arrogance, but it doesn't shine through in Lieberman's script. He's just a bland nuisance and obvious straw villain who lacks the charisma to even convince Belinda that his actions are innocent, when he comes off as such a robotic creep from scene one. As a result, it also impairs the credibility of the damsels in distress, be they Allegra, who is distressingly unperturbed by his intrusion into her house, or Belinda, whose naivety doesn't change an ounce in the face of clear and present danger.

Deborah Goodrich, coming off a spunky, sexy performance in April Fool's Day, is let down by the material. Ditto Jennifer Tilly, who would go on to riff on her buxom bimbo image with more wit and invention than her minor role here affords her. Leading man Kevin Dillon, though, is convincingly tough and tender, navigating the peril with workaday integrity.

Lieberman is a talented writer who is not below crafting smart dialogue or displaying sardonic wit, but aside from simply rehashing his previous Blue Sunshine or leaning on the DayGlo chintz as a means of poking fun at the concept of futurism, Lieberman lets the playful tone of the first half peter out. A scene where an entire nightclub falls prey to the cathode craze doesn't make particularly memorable use of the indelible image of Eva's demented stare watching over a crowded dance floor, and is staged rather poorly until the pyrotechnics kick in. The conflict involving Victor is perfunctory enough that the showdown has no convincing stakes, and it has no real bearing on the conspiracy plot.

Better to appreciate Remote Control for its minor virtues, mainly digressions such as an offbeat fight between Cosmo and the manager of a competitor store as well as Kevin Dillon's affably heroic presence, especially when the film intercuts his forklift-piloting derring-do with the similar antics in the 1950s film. Moments like these give Remote Control its forgotten glory as a reliable schedule-filler on old school USA Network and Sci-Fi Channel listings. It's entertaining enough that it kind of blends in with its real environment, not so much videocassette as it is the Saturday Night Movie, where real "remote control" is wielded like Excalibur.

Coneheads

CONEHEADS
(PG, Paramount Pictures, 88 minutes, theatrical release date: July 23, 1993)

"Mibs!"

The moment Prymaat Clorhone implores her "genetomate" Beldar, puffing an entire pack of cigarettes with an exaggeratedly nervous pacing, to "phone home" to their home planet of Remulak, you could easily be forgiven that you stumbled into F.T. the Franco-Terrestrials. It's such a random, slight pop culture nod that only emphasizes how far removed the Coneheads are from their late-1970s popularity on Saturday Night Live in the post-Wayne's World assembly line of Lorne Michaels-produced spin-off movies. In 1983, there were plans for a Rankin-Bass cartoon series based on Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin's pyramid-shaped…I mean, flindar-resembling exiles which ultimately fell by the wayside, leaving Aykroyd to make his bones in blockbusters like Trading Places and Ghostbusters as well as unexpected dramatic turns in Driving Miss Daisy and My Girl, occasionally stumbling into the occasional flop, such as the buddy cop pic Loose Cannons and his fatally grotesque directorial debut Nothing But Trouble.

Coneheads did not do much to reverse Aykroyd's fortunes, being a critical and commercial borp mip despite many commercial tie-ins, namely through Subway, and a soundtrack album which spawned a hit pleasure tone spewer in the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Soul to Squeeze," which led to Dan and Jane becoming guest video jockeys on MTV for a programming block (alas, I don't believe they played the 1981 Frank Zappa song "Coneheads"). And since Coneheads was the only feature spawned from the vintage SNL years, the world was spared the sight of Eddie Murphy returning to his Buh-Weet persona to sing "Bwane Eat on da Wane" or the reunion of those pre-Roxbury "wild and crazy guys" themselves, The Brothers Festrunk. The world may never know.

Both the characters and the movie come off in retrospect exactly like the flyover, fish-out-of-water types seen in the opening credits. The McGuire Air Force Base locate an unidentified aircraft, its occupants of course being Beldar and Prymaat, and duly open fire, causing it to plunge into the Hudson River. They gather themselves up by lodging at a nearby motel, with Beldar proposing that they assimilate into their peculiar unfamiliar environment while they await a rescue vessel to arrive in, oh…seven zerls, approximately 16 Earth years. Turns out an entire roll of toilet paper constitutes cerebellum-stimulating congestibles for our hyper-logical Remulakian overlord.

Also not helping the movie's timeliness was the fact that by 1993, we already had both Matt Groening's The Simpsons and Barry Sonnenfeld's adaptation of The Addams Family, with its sequel arriving the same year as Coneheads. Watching these pointy-domed if all-American totems show up the square life of the modern family was not exactly fertile ground for brilliant satire. If Coneheads could be said to bring anything new to the table, it would be a purely analytical subtext equating the Coneheads' gradually upward suburban mobilization to the typical immigrant experience.

It took a whole lot trying just to get up that hill.

Indeed, the antagonists are not your usual black-suited Central Intelligence authorities but the INS branch of governmental affairs, led by the dementedly dogged Gorman Seedling (Michael McKean, joyously deadpan). And even he is just a lackey seeking to climb the bureaucratic ladder to Washington, where he would be promoted Assistant Deputy Commissioner were it not for a nagging loose end involving one Donnie DiCicco, the black-market identity purchased for Beldar by initial employer Otto (Sinbad), owner of an appliance repair shop. Aiding Mr. Seedling in this deportation case is Eli Turnbull, which is most certainly not Steve Martin reprising his taxman role from the 1970s skits but a smarmy brownnose played by David Spade, one of a dozen SNL stars from the past and then-present (Adam Sandler, Phil Hartman, Jon Lovitz, the original Connie Conehead performer Laraine Newman) given bit parts throughout the film.

Chief among them is Spade's late cinematic foil Chris Farley as Ronnie, the flop-sweating mechanic who courts teenage daughter Connie (Michelle Burke) once the family settles for good in Paramus. Indeed, most of the rare positive raves concerning the film were directed towards Farley, who many saw as the second coming of John Belushi on either the big or small screens. Farley brings a nervous, wiry charm to his stock role which merits his promise despite his unfortunate passing in several years, whereas the beatific Burke gives younger viewers a more accessible adolescent perspective.

The brightest moments remain those between the impeccable team of Aykroyd and Curtin, each bringing warming, warped dimensions to their previously caricatured television personalities even as they dive back deeply into their familiar tics. Their meals consist as ever of mountainous "mass quantities" of bacon ("seared strips of swine flesh"), eggs ("flattened chicken embryos") and Eggo waffles ("gridlike breakfast slabs"), although their palates aren't too rejecting of window cleaner and dust bunnies. Their hyper-defined colloquialisms and mock-Klingon jargon allow for ample one-liners, such as when Beldar admits that his mission failure will surely not appease their Highmaster ("He will surely cut off my plarg and hand it to me") and also to scare off Ronnie after he exhibits the unwelcome behavior of a flandap, or "an uninvited grasper of cone," as Prymaat defines it.

A bizarre sweetness develops in the presence of the new-and-improved Mr. and Mrs. Conehead, which culminates in the familiar act of marriage-spicing shenanigans passed on to Prymaat through multiple women's magazine articles. Both Curtin's feral growl and Aykroyd's goofily lovestruck reaction to the Senso-Ring tossed atop his noggin are funny enough to invoke canker sores.

This sense of comedic goodwill goes into mentalion surge to compensate for the episodic and predictable nature of the plot, which eventually does involve a homecoming when the Coneheads return to Remulak and Beldar is sentenced to "narfle the Garthok" (challenge a carnivorous, tusked beast in a gladiatorial capacity) by the merciless Highmaster (Dave Thomas from SCTV) for his supposed treason. The Garthok itself is a refreshingly primitive stop-motion creation in a sea of computer-animated sub sandwiches and prosthetic buttocks, but for much of the film, director Steve Barron gets a surprising amount of mileage from two simple special-effects showcases: his leading actors.

The Dublin-born Barron, of course, began his directorial career through the early years of music video and is of great renown for directing handfuls of iconic early MTV staples ("Take on Me," "Money for Nothing," "Billie Jean," "She Blinded Me with Science," "Don't You Want Me," etc. etc.). Compared to Penelope Spheeris, who had enough credentials within the rock scene to bring a personality to her work on Wayne's World, Barron is of a more nostalgic science fiction mind, thus the distinctly Harryhausen appearance of the Garthok, the ironic use of a clip from Star Trek at the onset and all manner of playful camera angles and wide shots. The soundtrack itself is also part of this wistful fabric, with A-ha singer Morton Harket turning up to croon Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," the giddily-received appearance of Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" (see if you can recognize the actresses playing Connie's friends without reading the credits, and know they all went to high school together again) and, in a fun little touch, Paul Simon's 1973 hit "Kodachrome" scored against a montage condensing Super 8-shot home movies of Connie's childhood.

But the joke of the original SNL series remains refreshingly free from revision, that the Coneheads are all-consuming, all-American and, in spite of their eccentricities, all-too-human. They know heartbreak as the busting of their blood valve chambers, and come to grips with their endless "chromobonding" for each other with inhumanly verbal and emotional precision. They get along well with their blunt-skulled neighbors (played to perfection by Jason Alexander and Lisa Jane Persky), face temptation (one of Beldar's driving instruction students is a desperate debutante played by Jan Hooks) and socialize at both pep rallies and Halloween costume balls with bemused glee. They aren't as severely self-contained as either the Addams or the Simpsons, which gives Coneheads the advantage of a very, very strange nobility.

Greetings, Earth citizens. I will enjoy you.