Avant-garde,
oddball, bizarre. Those were the first
three words I wrote down to describe Liquid Sky. Even after writing that sentence, I’m having
trouble to find the words to do this movie justice, but I’ll try.
Aliens
looking for heroin land their ship (it’s the size of a dinner plate) on top of
an apartment building in New York. They
observe a gaggle of weirdo performance art types doing drugs and having
sex. They soon determine the combination
of sex and drugs adds to the high and wait till the punks, artsy-fartsy people,
and hooligans are in the throes of passion to strike. Meanwhile a scientist from Germany
investigates the aliens and spies on the punks fornicating.
Anne
Carlisle stars in the dual role of Margaret and Jimmy. In the film’s most memorable scene, she gives
herself (himself?) a blowjob in front of a bunch of partygoers. It’s moments like this that keep you glued to
Liquid Sky. Even though you’re forced to
wade through a LOT of crude, weird, and confounding stuff, there are just
enough rewarding bits here to justify its cult status.
I
guess one of the things that irks me about Liquid Sky is that it was consciously
made to be a midnight movie. It’s like
the filmmakers looked at all the other cult films at the time and tried to make
their own version of it. There’s
obviously John Waters, Andy Warhol, and Rocky Horror influences running throughout
the picture, along with a punk rock type of attitude towards androgyny, rape,
and necrophilia, but it never quite works.
With its garish lighting, colorful costumes, and purposefully absurd
line readings of trashy dialogue like “I kill with my cunt!”, it’s easy to see
why some cult film fanatics would take to it.
Liquid
Sky doesn’t endear itself to the audience by making most of the characters
drug-addicted loonies. The disjointed
editing is also really distracting, and the irritating and repetitive score
gets on your nerves as well. I think I may
have been able to handle all of that, warts and all, but the sheer oppressive
length (112 minutes) ultimately sinks it.
It’s
certainly visually appealing. Some of
the colorful, neon-bathed shots are trippy, but the infrared POV shots of the
aliens are random and annoying. It’s hard to take your eyes off it, even if it is way too long, aggressively weird,
and sometimes dumb.
As
a lover of cult films in general, Liquid Sky has been on my radar for a long
time. Now that I’ve finally seen it, I
have to say I’m glad I saw it, and I probably don’t ever have to see it again.
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