Liquid Sky (1982)

"I was told to be fashionable was to be androgynous. And I am androgynous no less than David Bowie himself. and I kill with my cunt. Isn't that fashionable?"

Liquid Sky is a 1982 film that played for time out of mind on the midnight movie circuit, attaining a kind of cult status film mystique. It ostensibly concerns a flying saucer (a small one) landing on top of a skyscraper in Manhattan, and the lives of strange punky club kids that spend their time dancing to robotic synth music and shooting "liquid sky"; heroin.

Ann Carlisle plays a dual role, both as Jimmy, a transsexual, and Margaret, a club kid, model, and part-time prostitute with platinum blonde hair, face paint, and. like, totally wild eighties fashions. She lives with her girlfriend or roommate Adrian (Paula E. Sheppard) a singer at the club. Everyone in this picture seems cynical, tough, and unfriendly.

Margaret is seduced by the rather less-than-appealing Owen (Bob Brady) her acting teacher, who promptly dies. She and Adrian hide the body, while Paul (Stanley Knap), who is a heroin addict across town or something, explains to his girlfriend Katherine (Elaine C. Grove) that shooting smack is a time-honored ancient ritual tradition, and then attempts at one point, to rape Margaret. And then dies.

The alien in the miniature saucer watches all of this in psychedelic, sort of "heat-seeking missile" colors, and explodes occasionally into lightning or something from his face. There is a representation of a plaster face at the beginning of the film, a piece of art set in the middle of a colored, abstract, even Cubist dare I say, canvas, with neon tubing (which is ubiquitous to the film) surrounding it. Curious but arresting image, to begin with. Perhaps the film is really about "false faces", the masks we wear in society.)

Jimmy treats Margaret (remember, the same actress) like shit in front of her friends at the photo shoot (in which there is "plenty of cocaine" available), taunting her mercilessly until she agrees to fuck him. He dies.

A German UFO expert, Johann, (Otto von Wernherr) is seduced by a Jewish lady who is Margaret's mom ("Sylvia", played by Susan Doukas) who lives across the street and watches things out of a huge telescope. He gets stabbed by Margaret. Everybody dies. But, before he dies, he eats with and is nearly seduced by Margaret's crazy mom, who really, really likes her Chinese take-out to have lots of tasty shrimp in it.

At the end...but, I swore never to reveal the ending of a movie AGAIN. It's bad luck, karma, mojo, whatever. And it irritates the HELL out of film geeks. Or "just plain folks" that want to watch the movie as if THEY DIDN'T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT.

There is a choppy sort of edited-together feel about the film, so you have trouble orienting yourself to these characters, who are all a bunch of tough New York kids, except for the German, who is not tough but does chase flying saucers (maybe he heard about Hitler's secret UFO bases in the antarctic). The look and sound of Liquid Sky are pretty cool; colorful, New Wave, and seriously and laughably outdated, but, still, it will take you back to an era of MTV, Cyndi Lauper haircuts, and Madonna fandom. (Or maybe that all came about a few years later, I'm not sure.)

There is an uncomfortably weird, almost homophobic undercurrent here; obviously "killing someone with sex", and the aforementioned androgyny of some of the characters lends itself to an interpretation that they are really talking about the then-emerging AIDS epidemic, which disproportionately afflicted young gay men. Paul attempts to rape Margaret after a homophobic rant. Homophobia was of course NOT the intention of the filmmakers (the film was directed by Slava Tsukerman and written by Ann Carlisle and Nina V. Kerova), who were mostly just playing off of societal fears of tabloid headlines, and the prevailing Reagen era conservative bigotry. But, if satire was their intention (the alien watching our follies and tragedies from atop the tallest building on the horizon), it is very subtle and understated; even a bit inscrutable.

I must confess though that, overall, it is not a film I like. Liquid Sky may make you fly, but, as for me, it left me in a bit of a puddle. So maybe that strange title is significant, after all.