Liquid Sky

When I was in high school, this movie put the zap on my head but good.

Ah, yes, New York City in the 80s. The downtown Scene of Liquid Sky, with its strangely unmelodic music, unwearable outfits and motionless dancing does indeed seem like Bohemia as imagined by an alien or emigre (or a suburban teen). And, of course, there's models, neon, Eurotrash, drugs, parties, fashion, philosophy, soap opera actors, performance art and multiple wardrobe changes. And, yeah, aliens.

 

"Delicious, delicious, oh, how boring."

So, our heroine is Margaret, is the classic pretty girl from a good suburban family who has turned into into a warpainted, substance-huffing scenster fashionista/victim. Or, as her girlfriend, Adrian the midget performance artist calls her, "an uptight WASP cunt from Connecticut." Margaret has no comment on being called this. Margaret has no comment on anything: She hasn't given a fuck in so long she's forgotten what giving a fuck even feels like.

 The ladies reside in a neon-bedecked apartment with a view of the Empire State Building. Back when you could afford that sort of thing on a petty drug dealer's salary. Now you'd have to be a real lowlife criminal to pay that kind of rent. Like a stockbroker or something.

 

We also meet some of the rest of our cast, classic New York characters all. The junkie artist who talks about Cocteau while he shoots up and sponges off of his girlfriend. The trust fund brat aka that "guy on the dance floor who's offering all the chicks cocaine." The professor who uses pretentiousness as both lure and repellant. The woman who has seen every scam and still falls in blind love with her eyes open. The nasty fashionista who says shit like "Frankly, this bird-of-paradise routine is done every day in Vegas--and better." The slumming Upper East Side matron who is tolerated for her wallet. The drug-huffing ambiguously gendered pretty boy...

Douse his hair in Clairol blue-black #124 and he's about half the guys i dated in my twenties. And, well, if it was an actual male, of course. For the hook here is that Anne Carlisle plays both Margaret and her nemesis, Jimmy, the male model.

Carlisle is slightly reminiscent of a wooden Tilda Swinton. After this, she went on to flounce through a bit as a transsexual in Crocodile Dundee and a five-minute guest spot on Miami Vice as a stewardess girlfriend of Don Johnson who dies when one of the coke-filled-condoms she's drug-muling ruptures. And a rather odd Liquid Sky-themed Playboy shoot.

So the upshot is that aliens land on the roof of Margaret and Lesbian Midget Performance Artist's apartment. Somehow the aliens feed off of some chemical produced in people's brains when they have orgasms (or get high). Now, consider that Margaret is frigid, but everyone wants to bang her. You can see the passive-very aggressive direction this is going...

Aside from the fiercest warpaint since Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains (okay, that was after, but whatever), Liquid Sky is also distinguished by its relentless whistle-screech-ring Fairlight synth soundtrack.The music was composed by director Slava Tsukerman, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Carlisle (And you thought multi-tasking was a millennial thing. You wanna see a holocracy, go to the set of an indie film in the 80s or 90s where everybody just fucking did everything. You'd haul half your apartment to some set somewhere and wind up cooking a mess of beans and rice for two dozen people. You'd rewrite your dialogue and then carry light kits up from the basement in three-inch heels and sequins.)

Liquid Sky remains an incredible time capsule of New York City and the East Village when it was full of intellectuals and artists and punks and weirdos and every now and then a Ukranian granny. Sure, the story is daft, but the plot is really just an excuse for wild outfits, weird dialogue and scenes that trap this moment in time and this particular species of urban hispter on video like prehistoric fossils in amber. Take the climactic photo shoot...

 

This, of course, culminates in the scene in which Jimmy and Margaret taunt each other before the crowd of giggling, shade-throwing voyeurs. He sneers at her for being "old" and "ugly," while she somehow manages to be more insulting in calling him "the most beautiful boy in the world."

One, they're the same person, so ugly and beautiful are illogical. Two, Margaret making "beautiful"--a word that everyone else throws at her--into an insult says something about how powerless being admired for surface can  make one feel. And, three, is #2 why she wins this? Well, that and she blows him--and you know what happens when someone gets off around Margaret, who has finally realized that having everyone you fuck dematerialize is kind of an impressive power to have. Also, another fine example of the "go fuck yourself" via drag, as also seen in Female Trouble.

And, well, i'll always have a soft spot for Liquid Sky for its influence upon me. You think i'm kidding? Fine. Here's "Margaret" in New York City circa 1982..

And me, in Poughkeepsie, circa 1986...

Tokyo Gore Police

You know how the Double Down has those edited videos that blend anime porn, foreign sexploitation, horror trailers, underground cartoons and old commercials? Well, Moss can save himself some work for the next round and just throw on a copy of Tokyo Gore Police, which has most of those ingredients chopped up and ready to serve.

Chopped up indeed. Tokyo Gore Police takes blood-spewing, limb-severing grossness and slams it to the nth level. If it wasn't so ridiculous, it'd be upsetting -- ridiculous not only in the sense of a nonsensical plot, but it's also a movie that knows when you need to see that the exploding head is almost laughably (and entirely laughably, if you've had a few beers) fake. Also because sometimes they just say "Fuck it," point a hose full of red tempera paint at the camera and let 'er rip.

Tokyo Gore Police is set in a dystopian future (Is there any other kind?) where there's lots of violence and crime and it's always night. The Tokyo Police Corporation are locked in perpetual battle with "the Engineers," a mutant race of criminals that sprout weapons from their wounds. So, if you cut an engineer's hand off, it may grow a chainsaw. Hack a leg off, it might turn into a sword... and other bizarre and brutal transformations.

As you can see, the cops need a little help and that help comes in the form of Ruka, miniskirted master warrior, daughter of an assassinated police captain. Her entrance has distinct echoes of Maggie Cheung in The Heroic Trio, except the cutting part is a little more like a Lifetime movie. There's also a bit of noir in the sets and styling, but the excess of red throws it off a little...

Another feature of Tokyo Gore Police is the use of "commercials" for things like cartoon character wrist-cutter knives or PSAs against committing hara-kiri over your job, as well as "news reports" on the latest grotesque crime. It also has a very cool sort of Shonen Knife/5678s/Stereo Total Japanese garage rock soundtrack.

We've also got a brothel scene that is a triple-X mutant Mos Eisley horrorshow -- it makes the gay bar in Dinah East look like a Mormon Tupperware party and the eyeballs in the nipples bit from Gothic like something from Forest Gump.

Oh, and there's a lot of gimps in this movie. Lotta gimps. Variations on a gimp suit you never thought of before -- actually you get to see nice closeups of a number of sex toys. I'd suggest that the various Adult Emporiums and Love Stores put it on screen to encourage sales, except you know, the violence. And the blood. And the vagina dentata...

As Ruka, Eihi Shiina is blank-faced and emotionally distant but, well, that does make her a welcome bit of solidity in a film of whirling excess, as well as an example of the troubled-child-grows-up-into-implacable-killing-machine hero meme familiar from so many action flicks. And, as you can tell from these stills, the lady knows how to create a picture on screen.

Know what happens when you grab my ass on the subway?
My samurai sword makes a Bellagio fountain out of your grimy mitts.

There's some excess plot about an engineer called the Keymaker who is out to get our heroine (But why?), who is also out to get whoever killed her father (But who?) Tokyo Gore Police runs a little long and they could have done without some of the storyline. Heaven knows they weren't going to cut any of the effects. If sometimes the movie seems to stop entirely to flaunt some particularly visceral and horrible bit of construction, bear in mind that the director, Yoshihira Nishimura, is best known for his work on special effects makeup and he let himself go a bit nuts on sort of David Cronenberg/Tetsuo: The Iron Man hybrids...

 Why, yes, Todd Akin, a woman's body does "have a way of shutting that down."
Wanna see it?

Tokyo Gore Police is not everyone's cup of tea. In fact, i am pretty sure it is a cup of tea that will cause most people to make a distressed noise and immediately rush to pour it out in the sink. (And even if you're inured to fake blood and body parts, they swing around and get you with someone eating bugs on the subway.) But, if you like the gross and the black humor and the hallucinatory-level weird -- or just dig special-effects makeup --it's worth a look, although you probably will also be spending some of the running time looking away...

Jesus Christ, i thought BatRatSpiderCrab was horrible....

The Angry Red Planet

... also known as the movie with the BatRatSpiderCrab. You know the BatRatSpiderCrab? From the cover of Walk Among Us? The Misfits album? The best Misfits album?

"20 Eyes?" "Astro Zombies?" Jeez... Anyway, that's not the only important thing about The Angry Red Planet. It's also been held up as a fine example of how low budgets and untested ideas can make films better rather than worse. The Angry Red Planet was made in 10 days for $200,000. This meant that, rather than buying the best fake monster 1959 had to offer, they designed this truly disconcerting animated creature. It also meant that, having no money for fancy locations or props, they had to use "Cinemagic" and thus wound up with the Mars scenes in a bizarre, red-tinted, semi-solarized effect.

Both things turned out to improve the film and make it unique. Other than that it's just another cheapo Cold War-era space flick with sets that look like old IBM offices (with semi-sized mainframes) and proof that wince-inducing chauvinism even applied to female astronauts.

"Hey, let's chow!"

"Coming up!" 

"You know, I can't say that I recommend spacesuits for beautiful young dolls. 

What happened to all your lovely curves?" 

The Angry Red Planet opens with a rocket crashing in the desert and accompanying extravaganza of stock footage. A bunch of guys in hazmat suits and fedoras (apparently a fedora also protects against radiation) find two dead guys, an unconscious guy with a bunch of spreading green slime on his arm and a catatonic redhead. (Must've been quite a party.) All the tapes have been erased, so no one knows what happened, what the slime is, why those guys are dead or how it all went wrong. The only way to illuminate this otherwise totally "boring, routine" trip to Mars  is to get redhead to snap out of it. And so the flashbacks begin...

So, here we have our crew: Bearded Science Guy, Blue-Collar Schlub, Dr. Redhead, and Colonel Rock Chesthair, whose spacesuits are unbuttoned halfway to the navel, the better to show off his manly pelt. Also: Behold, the slick technology of future space travel!

"Well? Shall we go out and claim the planet in the name of Brooklyn?"

And so the "rocket" lands on "Mars." Dr. Redhead sees a monster in the window and screams. The boys disregard her as a "hysterical female" and she agrees. We now are given to understand that, despite the blase attitude, it's the first trip to this unknown world. Regardless, mankind's first trip to Mars will entail less caution than used when camping in the backyard. Everyone goes outside to creepy red space landscape; Dr.  Redhead wanders off by herself and is almost immediately attacked by a giant monster space vagina. Fortunately, Col. Douche Manpelt comes to the rescue.

Yup, just walk right into the carnivorous plant. And, for an encore, take a machete to some 'tree" that turns out to be BatRatSpiderCrab legs. Because you didn't look up. Seriously, if this was the best NASA had to offer, it's a good thing we curtailed space travel. We're talking about a bunch of  "scientists" that make Shaggy from Scooby-Doo look like Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Ummm... no, but I can make a martini.

They manage to hold off the BatRatSpiderCrab with the help of Blue Collar Schlub's freeze ray. Then the Four Stooges (Fun fact: The only other use of "Cinemagic" was in The Three Stooges in Orbit.) flee through the hostile red atmosphere and manage not to get eaten on their way back to the ship. Once there, they discover that the kooky Martian atmosphere blocks radio waves and, thus, they have no way to contact Earth and a meteor that crossed their path earlier has damaged a number of instruments.

Regardless, Col. Butch Fuzzypecs ain't even thinking about turning back. They are staying the full five days, dammit! In fact, they're gonna get on a little rubber raft and make their way across a giant still lake to a hallucinatory city. Another brilliant damn decision. I mean, given how many times during this movie they've been attacked by giant monsters and barely survived... what could possibly go wrong?

As you can imagine, they run into more monsters and those monsters start kicking some serious human ass. Col. Macho Mann and Dr. Redhead manage to return home, but with a creeping green slime and carrying one of those ominous messages superior alien races like to lay on earthlings.

The Angry Red Planet is a little annoying with that ham-handed "Look, its that little woman thinkin' she's all science-y" stuff we saw in Queen of Outer Space. It think it's some kind of overcompensation for the idea of women doctors and scientists, even in a future fantasy world. (Archaic and antiquated i know, but also part of the 2014 Republican platform.) In other realistically-set movies of the era -- Butterfield 8, His Kind of Woman, to name two that will link you back to my site -- you don't hear the constant reminders that women are emotional and not good at thinking stuff.

Still, The Angry Red Planet has what you want in a 50's sci-fi flick: Cheesy "space" sets, wooden dialogue, a bachelor-pad soundtrack and, of course, monsters.

AHHHH!!! HAUNT MY NIGHTMARES FOREVER!!! AHHHH!!!