Creemedia

Creemedia

FUTURE SEX

LIQUID SKY Directed by Slava Tsukerman (Z/Cinevista Films) CAFE FLESH Directed by Rinse Dream (Caribbean Films)

by Joe (TV Eye) Fernbacher

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 aka “serious” fucking.

Exploring the ever-shifting mythologies of heroin; the mixed-up vagaries of pre-nuclear war androgyny; the self-righteous, selfproclaimed 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 smirlyngly bivouacs itself somewhere between the filmic dullathons of Andy Warhol, pop-artist Roy Lichtenstein’s lumpish cartoon-visions of a failed technocracy gone madly awry, MTV as seen through the glazed-over eyes of the severely drugged, and softcore porn.

It’s an impish grotesquerie capable of impressing the viewer on many levels at once. Visually, it harkens 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 midto late’50s.

The movie concerns an LSDinspired 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 Sedge wick, Nico, Cyndi Lauper and Nina Blackwood, naturally attracts the hovering aliens attention and affection—hell, who knows what evil lurks in the Zpyzxdelist’s 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 does get 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 unintentional and 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 DARKOK. 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 David 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 unctious “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 flipper new music radio stations throughout 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?

TED MACK ATTACK!

STAR SEARCH

(SYNDICATED TV)

For people who grew up with Ted Mack and other infamous talent hunt shows, Star Search addiction probably isn’t a surprise. For us youn’uns? The first season of Star Search was a sneak attack, the potato chips you couldn’t stop eating. For 26 weeks, we watched the reality of what we’d only seen imitated in bad TV mini-series—young hopefuls from sea to overpopulated sea bleeding and begging for stardom in the entertainment field. Creator/host/MC/Wizard of Oz Ed McMahon calls it the greatest talent competition in the world—right now it’s the only one, but that doesn’t lessen the thrill. Catch the reruns this summer, wait for season two next fall. If you think you have talent and know you have nerves of steel (plus no shame), audition.

Even though it was their first season (and for syndication, not network) , the Star Search bomb squad checked out over 20,000 people who came to auditions, sent tapes and glossies, got seen at the right places at the right times by squad members braving nooks and crannies across the country. There were 180 acts actually making it on the shows as actor, actress, vocal group, dancer, male vocalist, female vocalist, spokesmodel or comedian. A panel of judges picked one out of two in every category each week; winners got a thousand for performing, a^housand for winning, and a slot as “champion” the following week. Top weekly winners made it to the semi-finals. The “stars” of the finals won $100,000 each. If point number one of Star Search’s potency is the fun of the fame game, the second is the bucks. They’re big. Serious money means serious competition.

The networks who turned this show down are probably kicking themselves in their supertrains now. Even while the season was still weeding out the woofers, 20 million viewers were tuning in. TV Guide ran a guess-the-winners contest, for which a couple hundred thousand entries were expected and over half a million received.

Point three is expectations— expectations and people like Oklahoma singer Sam Harris. The 22-year-old came on the show with tuxedo tails, tennis shoes and chops that have been compared to Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin. He won for something like 15 weeks. Even before his final night blitz, he was signed to Motown Records, sealed and delivered to a manager and agent, and booked for an April concert in New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Harris was the first season wonder, but he wasn’t the only one to have his professional life homed and bred on Star Search. As the runner-up in the female vocalist competition sang in her horrendous self-penned ode to success: if you can’t get seen, you can’t happen. For most people it’s the other show biz cliche, the one about pounding the pavement and pounding your head against the wall. Star Search may be tacky, and corny, and have a few talent scouts with tin cans for ears, but it does indeed make stars. All the male vocalist semi-finalists have recording contracts, other show successes have snared TV contracts and movie shots. Half the show’s appeal is seeing the ones that should go back to Kansas. The other half is seeing real money and real luck happen to people who deserve it.

Laura Fissinger