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Voyage of the Rock Aliens
USA 1984
produced by Micheline H. Keller, Brian Russell, Tino Barzie (executive), Mike Curb (executive), Max A. Keller (executive) for Interplanetary-Curb Communications
directed by James Fargo
starring Pia Zadora, Craig Sheffer, Tom Nolan, Ruth Gordon, Michael Berryman, Alison La Placa, Rhema (= Gregory Bond, Craig Quiter, Patrick Byrnes, Marc Jackson, Jeffrey Casey), Jimmy & the Mustangs (= Jimmy Haddox, Marshall Rohner, Jeffrey Cranford, Troy Mack), Peter Stelzer, Wallace Merck, Spyder Mittleman, G.Kelly Moore, Pete Munro, Madonna Christian, Rudy Goldschmidt, Ken Taylor, Jermaine Jackson (archive footage)
written by Edward Gold, James Guidotti, Charles Hairston, music by Jack White, songs performed by Pia Zadora, Jermaine Jackson, Rhema, Real Life, Jimmy & the Mustangs, Mark Spiro, special visual effects by Peter Chesney/Image Engineering, miniatures by Anthony Tremblay
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Aliens from outer space (Tom Nolan as alien leader Absid and the new
wave band Rhema) come to earth to look for rock music and somehow get
mixed up with Frankie (Craig Sheffer) and his gang (rockabilly band Jimmy
& the Hurricanes). Frankie is the macho rocker kind who won't let his
girlfriend Dee Dee (Pia Zadora) do anything, least of all sing in his
band, and she has had it up to here ... until she meets Absid, who might
act a bit odd (and why wouldn't he, he's from outer space), but he's kind
of cute - and he lets her sing in his band. She soon falls for him, and he
for her as well. Frankie of course doesn't like this one bit, and the
whole situation culminates in a singing duel between him and her at their
highschool dance - at the end of which Dee Dee runs off with Absid, who
takes her to his spaceship. In the meantime, two psychopaths (Michael
Berryman, Wallace Merck) have escaped the local asylum and have come join
the highschool dance to kill a few people, but when a giant octopus
attacks the location, they put their weapons to good use taking the beast
apart. On Absid's spaceship, Dee Dee learns there is no love on Absid's
planet, so she leaves again and returns to Frankie, whom she has loved all
along, and who has been changed by Dee Dee's leaving him. But even Absid
has learned from the experience, and has turned into a whole cooler
spaceship captain ... Veteran Ruth Gordon plays the local sheriff, who
has no idea what's going on through the entire picture. The
prologue of this film - the music video of Jermaine Jackson and Pia
Zadora's When the Rain Begins to Fall (probably the funniest bad
video of its era) in almost its entirety - sets the tone: This is
essentially a musical, celebrating then popular synthie pop music. And
indeed, the characters break out in music every now and again (as in very
often), no matter whether or not there's a narrative cause for this -
and this totally hurts the film, as it prevents its story to ever really
come into swing, let alone give its characters room to develop. That's a
shame, too, because beneath the surface, there are some fun hommages to
teen drive-in fare from the 1950's and 60's, and some (isolated) jokes
(like Alison La Placa in prom dress fixing Michael Berryman's chainsaw)
are genuinely funny - it shouldn't come as a surprise then that Voyage
of the Rock Aliens wasn't actually intended as a musical but a parody
picture, and as such, it could have been a pretty entertaining movie. As
it is, it's still entertaining, but for all the wrong reasons: The silly
1980's fashion, Pia Zadora's hair and rather forgettable
middle-of-the-road synthie pop, stupid clichés from a bygone era, and so
on and so forth. You'll probably feel obliged to hate this film, and with
good reason. But probably you also won't be able to stop watching it.
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