Pleasure Planet

A bit like if Pitch Black were filmed in the 80s, made no sense, was about a female rock band and rubbish.

Some of the songs are good but the background music playing on a loop is deeply annoying and the cast just keep on repeating the same lines over and over. There is about two sentences of plot in the entire thing.

Overall this collection of clips and songs is barely a movie, it is stylised for sure, but that is really all it has. It's an extended 80s music video and nothing else. If you like that type of thing then great, for everyone else it's a pass.

Doing a little research on "Vicious Lips", I unearthed the fact that the movie never got a home video release in North America until more than twenty-five years after the movie was completed (though the movie was released on video in other countries.) Watching the movie, it becomes clear why apparently no North American video company was eager to distribute the movie. The fact that it was written and directed by Albert Pyun (for some reason billed as "Albert F. Pyun" here) should give a clue. This is an AWFUL movie. It's a real cheap production, often looking like it was filmed in basements as well as abandoned buildings, and often with the camera zooming in very close to the actors to hide the cheapness and to have stuff happen out of camera range so no expense has to be spent to actually show it. The movie is broadly acted so that every character comes across as a dimwit. The songs are very forgettable, and would have been considered that even back in the 1980s when the movie was made. But the worst thing about the movie is the screenplay. The characters are really thin, and there are huge chunks of the movie when little to nothing is happening. Not only that, in the last ten minutes there is a surprise twist that will have you throwing your remote at your television. All of which makes this movie one of Pyun's worst efforts among the countless bad movies he's made.

In a neon drenched future, a struggling all girl band, The Vicious Lips, recruits teenage Judy Jetson to replace their missing lead and escape Earth for the biggest gig in the galaxy only to crash on a hostile desert planet crawling with danger.

This is possibly the greatest "future band" film never to leave the 1980s. It radiates lazy '80s charm, big hair, smoke machines, synth punk attitude, and a day glo palette that practically screams from every frame. The music, largely led by Dru Anne Perry, is surprisingly strong and drives the film's momentum with genuine energy. Credit to Michael McCarty and his music team for delivering some genuinely good '80s tracks.

Vicious Lips clearly laid the groundwork for Paul Verhoeven's three breasted woman bar scene in Total Recall. There's other makeup prosthetic effects that would show up in Empire Pictures and Fullmoon films like Arena (1989), and Oblivion (1994) to name a few.

Lead actresses Perry (as Judy), stunning Gina Calabrese, Linda Kerridge, and Shayne Farris all commit to their roles, bringing sass and swagger even when the script leaves them with little. The charisma and look are there it's just the narrative that stutters. Radioactive Dream Nightclub owner Maxine Mortogo (Mary Anne Graves) is a memorable screen presence, a Sean Young, Lady Gaga type before either Gaga was a fixture, along with her creepy, pointy tooth aide Milo, played by Christian Andrews. The wacky manager Matty Asher (Anthony Kentz) brings the over the top, sleazy energy to the cheap scifi sets and low rent Star Wars ships, exactly what you'd expect from this kind of intergalactic yarn.

Shot in under a week on a low budget, the film is severely limited by its resources. Albert Pyun's direction has moments of visual flair, but questionable editing choices and erratic framing often undermine the momentum. It does have some interesting makeup effects, and the film works best when neon drenched. The desert sequence, which takes up much of the second half, is atmospheric but padded, dragging out the already thin storyline.

As an Empire Pictures' movie, with Charles Band lightly involved, it's not as cohesive as Prison Ship: Star Slammer released the same year. Don't expect the likes of Albert Pyun's Cyborg, The Sword and the Sorcerer, or even Nemesis either, it's more zero budget Howard the Duck mixed with the oddity The Apple (1980) at times.

Still, what Vicious Lips lacks in polish, it makes up for in B-movie atmosphere. The glowing sets, overexposed neon, and synthetic score create a weirdly hypnotic tone. It may not be great cinema, but it's cult material through and through.

Overall, Vicious Lips is a flawed relic limited in scope and cinematography but drenched in sci fi pop energy. A neon artifact from an era when drive and luna madness tried to triumph over budget.

"Vicious Lips" is set in the far future, where a band finally gets the opportunity for That Breakthrough Gig -- if they can make it to an "in" club on another planet in time...

Given that the plot features no major twists, turns or surprises, given that the set is extremely trashy, the number of locations limited and the choice of them not overly inspired, Vicious Lips seems like a longish episode of the original Star Trek sans the familiarity with the characters we all know and love -- so whatever persuaded me to rate it "excellent"?

I'm a sucker for Big Hair, and The Music of the Eighties, both of which the movie has plenty of, since the all-girl band's guitar-and-synth sound is vaguely reminiscent of the early Kim Wilde's, if both "rockier" and catchier (and a lot like that of "Radioactive Dreams", another Albert Pyun-movie of that era with a more coherent plot, but no big hair). Last but not least, the general air of ultra-trash somehow utterly fails to be annoying, lending a certain charm to the movie instead, soon turning the initial impression ("Hey, I could do that!") into a burning desire to phone up all your friends:

"Let's make a movie!"

I was in my 20's in the 1980's and there just wasn't too much to worry about during most of the decade, so films often drifted into sci-fi fantasy territory, just like they did during the 1950's, an also relatively carefree decade.

This is a sci-fi musical about an all-girl group named the Vicious Lips that lands a gig at an interstellar concert event. On their way to the venue, their spaceship crashes on a desert planet, and they bicker and fight with each other in the dark ship wreckage. There's also a monster of some sort lurking around, and the girl's sleazy manager is wandering around the desert looking for help with two mostly-naked blondes.

The girls look like a live-action Jem and the Holograms, and their New Wave rock music is awful. They're shown on stage using fictional musical instruments, kind of partially disassembled guitars with blue bug zappers on the end. Starring no one you've ever heard of, and they are uniformly terrible actors. Written and directed by Z-movie auteur Albert Pyun. Empire Pictures produced it, but from what I read, this wasn't released in the U.S. until the DVD in 2011. Some people seem to have elevated it to cult status, and it is actually on a "Cult Movie Marathon" DVD set, which seems to get pretty good reviews on the world's largest website, probably owing to the viewers' collective nostalgia, not the quality of the film.

I give it 3/10 for originality.