Liquid Sky
Directed by Slava Tsukerman
(Z/Cinevista Films)
Cafe Flesh
Directed by Rinse Dream
(Caribbean Films)
Joe (TV Eye) Fernbacher, Creem, 6/84
Here we have two films dealing with pop sexuality as it seemingly is and might just possibly be in the not so distant future. Both are nervelessly idiosyncratic, maniacal, unerringly precise, desperate, passionless and occasionally sidesplittingly hilarious visions that hardly bode well for the combined futures of romance and sexual madness a.k.a. “serious” fucking.
Exploring the ever-shifting mythologies of heroin; the mixed-up vagaries of pre-nuclear war androgyny; the self-righteous, self-proclaimed decadence of new wave/punk fashionability; the admittedly hellish foulness of in-the-gutter street life and the giddy nostalgia of such late night excursions into the non-linear and utterly fantastic as Invasion Of The Saucer Men, Roger Corman’s It Conquered The World, and Invaders From Mars is the visually beefy and disturbingly odd little film, Liquid Sky.
Borrowing its title from one of the many street names for heroin, director Slava Tsukerman’s tantalizing mixture of understated nihilism and overly stated camp smirkingly bivouacs itself somewhere between the filmic dullathons of Andy Warhol, pop-artist Roy Liechtenstein’s lumpish cartoon-visions of a failed technocracy gone madly awry, MTV as seen through the glazed-over eyes of the severely drugged, and soft-core porn.
It’s an impish grotesquerie capable of impressing the viewer on many levels at once. Visually, it hearkens back to a time of psychedelic lightshows, both mechanically and chemically inspired. Plotwise, it’s an amazing sci-fi mishmash of E.T., Wilhelm Reich and the numerous, cheapo sci-fi epics of the mid- to late-50s.
The movie concerns an LSD-inspired looking alien buzzing the polluted skies of New York City in search of a few earthly kicks. At first it gloms on the gloomy wackiness of heroinizers at work and play. Eventually getting bored with their feeble attempts at chemically induced energy, it wanders off to newer, greener pastures. After a brief search, it alights atop Anne Carlisle’s seedy apartment building. Carlisle’s character, a sad-eyed mixture of Edie Sedgewick, Nico, Cyndi Lauper and Nina Blackwood, naturally attracts the hovering alien’s attention and affection--hell, who knows what evil lurks in the Zpyzxdelists of aliens?
As poor Anne, who also plays a slightly confused punk boy in search of a constant fix, goes through all of her punky traumas--all she really wants is some attention, some lovin’ and a few decent orgasms--a kinky symbiotic relationship, unbeknownst to Anne until it’s way too late, begins to develop between her and the alien. As she encounters abusive sexual partners, the nosy alien scans her activities and realizes the power of the orgasm is much more desirable and fun than the power of the drug--y’know, it comes to the very earthly realization that Love is indeed the drug.
Unfortunately for Anne, this does little to help her achieve sexual bliss--because the alien zaps her somewhat surprised partners into the cosmic ether, leaving Anne high, “dry” and obviously frustrated. Eventually she gets hipped to the alien’s activities. But not being able to get off, she begins to yearn for a little galactic sex. She gets what she’s after.
There is a lot of humor in Liquid Sky, some of it reminiscent of Ernie Kovacs. The scene where Anne Carlisle--playing her punk boy/punk girl personas--gets assaulted by her own male self in the usual grimy hallway is one of the most ready-witted metaphors for masturbation this viewer’s ever witnessed. Couple this with the incredible “Me And My Rhythm Box” scene, which left me literally rolling in the aisles, and you’ve got the spectrum of this film’s humor.
All in all, Liquid Sky is a jewel of absurdity, surrealism, deadpan humor, and quite incidentally entertaining. I liked it too!!!
Equally deadpan, yet erotically surreal, is director Rinse Dream’s Cafe Flesh, a vision of post-nuclear war sexuality that’d be fine fodder for the Playboy Channel were it not for its uninspired hardcore sex scenes. It’s kind of like The Day After with cum shots. It’s also one of the current underground midnight hits in L.A., and is fast becoming an underground midnight hit throughout the country.
Plot: the bomb, yes, THE bomb has been dropped. SPLAT BUZZZZ ’n’ LET’S GLOW IN THE DARK--OK. It’s the day after the day after, and the surviving members of humanity are all punkers who’ve been sexually divided into sex “positives” and sex “negatives.” The positives can still fuck and enjoy it, and the negatives--who still want to fuck and enjoy it but when they try to do it end up puking--can’t. About the only thing the twitchy negatives can do is watch and remember as the all too obliging positives get it on for them.
Adding a bit of texturing to this somewhat skimpy plot is the fact that the heroine of the film, Pia Snow, is a borderline “positive” with a “negative” boyfriend, played with a dullard’s speed by Paul McGibboney.
So each night this John and Yoko of the rad-set saunter through the radioactive winds down to Cafe Flesh, the corner bodega that presents a floor show of the “positives” stroking the mystery. Let in by the slimy Mr. Joy, they’re presented with a series of bizarre “fuck” vignettes hosted by Max (played to the max by Andrew Nichols), who does pull off a good impression of the Big Bopper and Marlon Brando in-between sets, as well as a not so great imitation of a nuked-out Dave Letterman type host. Max knows but he can’t do anything about it either because he too is “negative” and slavishly obedient to the owner of Cafe Flesh--the unctuous “Moms,” a mean combination of Vanessa Del Rio and Eddie the Egg Lady.
Soundtracking all these goings on is what director Dream calls “the sound of the 90s,” a sound that meshes the thumpings of stamping plants, the screeks of air raid sirens and the moans of the technologically insane into a sonic-glogg that’s at once scary and soothing. Incidentally, the soundtrack for this movie is slowly beginning to find its way onto the airwaves via some of the hipper new music radio stations through the teenage lands of waste.
Cafe Flesh isn’t good porn, but it is an interesting look into a possible nuclear what if. See it, you’ll like it. Take a friend, you just might get lucky. You gotta be positive about these things, ya know?
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