I Come in Peace

  

I Come in Peace (aka Dark Angel)
1990
Craig R. Baxley

I just want to say that I Come in Peace is a fantastic title. There is never a real reason for the being in question to say it, but it works as a threat and a punchline and is easily the best thing about this film.

By 1990, our buddy cop action movie technology was very well developed. I Come in Peace serves as an example of just about every trope you’d ever expect to see in this kind of film. A partner getting killed early on? Check. A loose cannon cop who doesn’t play by the rules? Check. A new partner who’s by the book? Check. Top that off with a mild science-fiction element and we have an unoriginal but still entertaining action movie.

Detective Jack Caine (Dolph Lundgren) is a wise talking cop who loses his partner while investigating a local heroin ring. His new partner is a straight arrow Federal agent (Brian Benben). The two find a strange disc weapon at a crime scene. Elsewhere in the city an 8ft tall humanoid (Matthias Hues) is stealing heroin for its own needs while a space cop (Jay Bilas) arrives to take it down. Eventually these various people cross paths in shootout after shootout, in what amounts to a movie you’ve probably seen a dozen times in other forms.

"Excuse me, I have to go take my estrogen."

 

Despite being rote, the movie is still engaging thanks to some great looking action scenes. The aliens are the twist in the formula and to make their focus extraterrestrial drug dealing is a decent twist, but in function there’s really nothing that separates these aliens from human drug dealers in any other movie. It does add in fun weapons and these lumbering giant people making weird faces while talking.

Dolph Lundgren plays a very typical cop character for the era, nothing seems to get to him, the death of his partner and the realization that aliens exist end up happening within hours of each other and he just keeps on wisecracking. This is definitely a holdover from the 1980s, on the other hand, there is an undeniable charm to his performance and it is a fun if paper thin character.  His chemistry with Brian Benben’s Agent Smith is another trope, but it works in that capacity. Both Matthias Tuttle and Jay Bilas put some very idiosyncratic performances as our alien opponents. They are both a mass of weird twitches and expressions. It’s a very simple approach but it works well to communicate that these are not humans merely, but trying to imitate them.

"Dolph, can you get me in an Expendables movie or something?"

 

I Come in Peace is not a great film, it’s derivative and repetitive, but I still found myself enjoying it. Yes it trash, but it’s comfortable trash from the end of particular era of film when something like this would get a theatrical release. If want a far better version of this movie go and watch The Hidden (1987), but if you are up for some silly action, with silly characters and a really carefree attitude, I Come Peace does just fine.
 

Fried Barry

Fried Barry
2020
Ryan Kruger

Fried Barry does not have much of a plot. Much like Barry himself it lurches from moment to moment seemingly without reason, only to have previous experiences slowly build and connect into a story. This is not without purpose. The film is here to put us in the mindset of an alien and an alien often on drugs to boot. A loose story like that with an unreliable and not entirely human narrator could easily fall into chaos, but Fried Barry is guided by a surprising core of kindness underneath all the flash and bodily fluids.

Barry (Gary Green) is a heroin addicted mess of a human being. When he’s not shooting up, he’s yelling at his wife or looking for somewhere to shoot up. Luckily for everyone, Barry is abducted and probed by aliens, who decide to take his body for a ride. This new and improved Barry is silent, somehow irresistibly attractive to women, and unendingly sweet in his own distant way. Barry crosses paths with gangsters, lonely women, drug dealers, and even a child abductor, all without having a clue about what he’s really doing. In that respect Barry is more human than we expect.

Our hero.

Fried Barry is an assault on the senses moving from the run down and dingy confines of a heron den, to the flashing lights and heavy bass of an alien space craft, the film tonally and visually changes at any given moment. For a film about heavy drug use, featuring puking, a giant boner, and a chainsaw fight, Fried Barry is often silly and occasionally even charming. Among the grime of the city there are flashes of brilliant neon and strobing lights. The entire alien abduction sequence is slick looking and gorgeous, a reminder that every moment of this film is considered and crafted to a fine point.

The score of Fried Barry by composer and performer Haezer is as much of a character as Barry himself. Like the narrative, it shifts from subtle tonal ambience to heavy techno beats. Like the imagery, the score is masterful in the way it controls the energy from scene to scene only to explode in a frenzy of noise. With a lesser score this film would be no where nearly as dynamic.

Laser hair removal really stings.

The most shocking thing about Fried Barry at how sweet it is at the core. The opening scenes prepared me for something dour and a little mean. Barry is not a good person, the people he associates are not good people, and the place he exists is unpleasant. Post abduction, Barry is a blank slate. He spends most of his time gawping at things and wandering around, but when he acts, it is to try and help someone or make things around him a little better.  The being inhabiting Barry is alien and unknowable except for the fact that it is kind. 

In the end a heroin addicted alien sex fiend is the most human character of all. I love it. An amazing film and film and one of my favorites of 2021.

Liquid Sky

Liquid Sky
1982
Slava Tsukerman

Margaret (Anne Carlisle) is a drug-addicted model who finds a rival in Jimmy (also Anne Carlise). Some aliens in a small flying saucer land on a nearby building to observe Margaret. They have the nasty habit of killing anyone she has sex with in order to harvest their endorphins.

Liquid Sky is a great antidote to the saturation of retro 1980s imagery. It has sound and imagery that would become more commercialized in the coming years, but here the synth sounds are sharp and angular, the looks are tribal and aggressively androgynous. This isn’t the user-friendly nostalgic 1980s, this is something much more raw. It’s easy in the twenty-first century to look at the early 1980s, New Wave, and the fashions of this era and wonder how this was ever edgy or daring, but Liquid Sky shows you exactly how that could be true.

SAUCERS SEEN OVER NEW YORK (looking for drugs.)

At nearly two hours long, it can seem like a slog if you are expecting a traditionally structured film. This is not a plot-driven movie, it is an exploration of people who are alien to themselves being observed by beings human and otherwise. It occupies the space between a genre film and an art film. The science-fiction elements mostly occur at the edges of the narrative until they provide the means for a psychedelic finale. The real draw of Liquid Sky is in its uneasy and often sinister atmosphere, this is a film where you don’t just watch, you also bathe in its radiation.

Anne Carlisle is amazing in her dual role as Margaret and Jimmy, two characters who loathe one another yet seem unable to escape each other’s orbit. It is through this dual role that the film also explores some distinctly queer territory with bisexuality and androgyny. Bob Brady as Owen the sketchy drama teacher and Otto von Wernherr as the scientist Johann Hoffman both provide some interesting moments as characters who exist outside the drug/art circle of Margret and treat it like some alien biosphere. There is a recursion of outside observers here Margaret > Aliens > Hoffman > The Audience. Once Margaret becomes aware of her position, she and the film cease to exist. The nihilism at the core of Liquid Sky is exposed.

Artists Only

A major element of Liquid Sky is its sound. The music alternates between a raw analog synthesizer and carefully laid atonal drones. The end result is a sound that drives home the strange plastic existence of these characters, it underscores their distance from themselves and each other, but at the same time, there is something angry underneath trying to burst through the heroin and cynicism.

Liquid Sky is a stunning work of art/cult/SF film and I think it is essential viewing for not only grasping the alienation taking hold in popular culture during the 1980s but also as a solid piece of midnight cinema. There is nothing quite like it, and although it is hackneyed to say something is an ‘experience’, Liquid Sky is just that, a unique experience worth having.

Girl Gang

Girl Gang
1954
Robert C. Dertano

Juvenile Delinquency/Drug Scare films are interesting in that on the surface they have an agenda to frighten viewers straight. Nominally they exist as morality tales about indulging in vices and the inescapable doom that awaits anyone who even takes a single puff of weed or considers having sex outside of marriage. Often these films use that veneer of social responsibility to engage in some delightful sleaze that they almost certainly would not have gotten away with had they not used that cover of respectability.

Joe (Timothy Farrell) is a pusher who commands a gang of young girls to steal cars and corrupt the youth of America. Joe’s girlfriend June (Joanne Arnold) gives heroin a try and apparently likes it. She also manages to bring in two fresh-faced kids, Bill (Ray Morton) and Wanda (Mary Lou O’Connor) to try some reefer. Soon everyone is doing drugs, having sex, and starting to attract the attention of the police.

"Gosh, I sure do like drugs."

Girl Gang promises a band of young women in angora sweaters and bobby socks pistol-whipping middle-aged men and stealing their woodies. For the first few minutes, the movie provides exactly that, but before too long, the gang leaves and we are stuck with Joe. Joe has to be the most upfront pusher and pimp of all time, he more or less tells every teenager that wanders into his den that they are going to like reefer so much they are going to try heroin and get hooked. The film also serves as step-by-step instructions on how to shoot up heroin, which probably wasn’t the goal of the filmmakers, but I can’t say that for sure.

Girl Gang chugs along with a virtually plotless series of people getting high, making out, and more people getting high and making out. There are some charmingly silly moments; initiation into the gang requires a prospective member to have sex with five men in a room (not all at the same time, it's not quite that sleazy) which comes equipped with a flashing light bulb above to door to let everyone know what is happening in there. There are also some tortuous moments such as an endless jazz piano scene that signals the film is beginning to run out steam completely. The climax of the film involves an overly complicated gas station robbery that feels legitimate because it is exactly the kind of unworkable plan that a bunch of really high people might think was brilliant. I suppose putting on masks and pointing a gun at the attendant was too simple.

"I'll trade you those stockings for this heroin."

Girl Gang’s biggest issue is the fact that most of the characters are flat and uninteresting. June is a dud, Wanda is introduced late and virtually does nothing the entire film. Girl Gang just feels like an unfocused parade of drugs and a little bit of sex. Perhaps that is the point, what we have here is a primitive attempt to show the aimless life of people caught in a web of crime and bad habits that only serves to drive them to their own deaths or into the hands of a cruel legal system.

I suppose it depends on what you’ve been smoking.

31 Days of Halloween 2016 - Day 8

Blue Sunshine
1978
Jeff Lieberman

Jerry Zipkin (Zalmon King) is attending a swinging 1970s party. A man who's been singing for the party-goers accidentally gets his hairpiece removed. He's completely bald underneath,  and a moment later starts tearing through the crowd murdering everyone. Jerry is the only survivor thanks to a well-timed semi. The authorities blame him for the deaths, and he goes on the run to uncover a conspiracy involving a strain of LSD called Blue Sunshine and an up and coming politician. All over the country seemingly normal people are becoming hairless psychopaths, and it a seems to tie in with something that happened ten years prior.

Blue Sunshine has a lot of potential with its body horror, conspiracy, and hyper-violence, but it is never able to rise above feeling like a TV movie. Much of that has to do with the flat inexpensive way it’s shot, but just as much blame lies on the weird overwrought performance of Zalmon King. It feels like he should be strutting around a soap opera set rather than a weirdo drug horror movie. Still, the horror of inevitably succumbing to a youthful indiscretion is potent and it is almost strong enough to carry the entire movie by itself. There’s also a note of satire as these products of the idealistic 1960s are transformed into marauding psychopaths in the disillusioned 1970s. There’s something really interesting and compelling at the core of Blue Sunshine, but it requires the viewer to be very forgiving of its faults, and do a lot of digging beneath the surface.

Today's Really Quite Tasty Trip:
Blue Sunshine Nachos

VHS Summer Week #9

How the Sky Will Melt

2015
Matthew Wade

Often when a modern film invokes a retro aesthetic, there is a tendency to overstate the look of the past. Sometimes this is intentional and used satirically, and sometimes it’s simply all of the most recognizable elements of an era being thrown onto the screen at once. The trick is, that a time period with a pronounced look doesn’t feel unusual at the time, it’s just part of the milieu of then modern sensibilities. I find it a more interesting use of retro styling when it is used to create a sense of timelessness. The film may have a particularly dated look, but there are anachronisms that create a sense of distance and unfamiliarity. The strange mix of technology in It Follows (2014) is an excellent example. How the Sky will Melt uses the low resolution flavor of the late 1970s/early 1980s to place an ambiguous story in an equally ambiguous time and place.

Brought to you in Squarevision™

Gwen (Sara Lynch) has returned to hometown following the death of a bandmate. Her band is popular enough that she finds herself avoiding any publicity while encountering a few jealous friends that she had left behind. In a malaise she finds herself aimless as she pilfers the hills near the beach for strange colorful eggs that have hallucinogenic qualities. As Gwen’s paranoia begins into to grow, her friend, London (Scott Alonzo) watches a figure fall to earth. The being, which is neither alive nor dead is seemingly inert, but soon it awakens, straining Gwen’s already fragile reality.

Shot on Super 8 and released on VHS, How the Sky Will Melt evokes the soft dream like nature of catching something on late night television while half-asleep. The look of it evokes the techno doom of Idaho Transfer (1973), or Where Have All the People Gone? (1974). At same time there is an early New Wave vibe that feels akin to Liquid Sky (1982). That is not to say How the Sky Will Melt is a simple pastiche, it is very much interested in telling its own wandering nightmare of a story.

"What? Do I have something on my face?"

The narrative of the film is very reluctant to straight out explain anything, it forces the viewer to try and pry each moment open and see what’s lurking between the sparse dialogue. Thankfully, the movie also plays fair, it does answer most of the questions it raises. The things it leaves open are even stranger and more terrifying because of it. I did not expect the movie to dip into horror the way it does, but it works very well as the growing knot of tension at the heart of everything.

The acting is often amateurish, but the strange line deliveries often help the weird aura of the film rather than harm it. Occasionally the low tech production is a little too rough with muddy dark scenes and strange edits, but these are small flaws in a really engrossing larger work.

Aesthetically, and narratively strange, How the Sky Will Melt is a fascinatingly odd experience and one I would definitely recommend both as a standalone film and an example of how the medium of VHS can have merit in and of itself.