Grimerlana Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Megamind To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Prismark10 The look of Liquid Sky has been inspired by the David Bowie album cover of Aladdin Sane as well as the new romantic imagery of British 1980s electro pop such as Visage.It does feature a horrid synth soundtrack and some pretty raw acting from many one time only performers.Liquid Sky is an unusual, surreal, kitsch cult film starring Anne Carlisle (Margaret as well as another male character). Many of the cast have distinctive face paint. The screen turns neon and psychedelic when we see it from the aliens point of view.Margaret has been possessed by aliens who have landed their flying saucer on top of her New York apartment building who have come looking to boost their endorphin through heroin. Only that the aliens discover that they can get a similar hit when they have orgasmic sex through her body and their sex partner mysteriously vanishes.A German scientist is investigating the mysterious flying saucer.Liquid Sky is a bizarre avantgarde film with a slim story. It has been restored for Blu Ray and looks fantastic, almost like those clubs that sprung up in London in 1980, where members of Spandau Ballet and Culture Club used to end up in.

maxastree Entertaining festival entry that combines new wave/punk/80's art school filmmaking style with insane club fashion and a dark, distressing allegory about AIDS, addiction, homosexuality and sexual violence.The characters in the film are generally foul-mouthed, and hedonistic. Much of the stories running time focuses on an androgynous female model surrounded by fashion types, poseurs, addicts and people with violent, abusive sexual behaviour, except the central characters own sexuality kills them.Often the film segues into deeply strange montages of cityscapes, club interiors and fashion items in a way that's totally disconnected from standard film editing language, and the script veers from hilarious to impassioned and descriptive.In a distinct contrast to commercial Hollywood, none of the characters truly have "hearts of gold", and at no point is the audience witness to soaring sentimental pap about human suffering and vague gestures of universality or love, so for that reason in itself Liquid Sky is truly alternative cinema of it's day.The "plot" centres on the idea of a small UFO landing in New York, killing people to harness their sexual energy. It's a metaphor for the AIDS virus before the concept had become widely known in the news media. Occasionally pretentious, or somewhat repetitive, but nonetheless the films distinctively foreign voice and mixture of bizarre audio and lapses into psychedelic montage create an indelibly unique stamp.

chaos-rampant Here's another one for my list of great 80s cult movies, one I will remember as fondly as Repo Man, Blue Velvet and Videodrome.The vision is maybe less accomplished but as vibrant as those films, basically what we get at first glance is something between Daisies (the Czech film) and a Yugoslav film I recently discovered called W.R. - Mysteries of the Organism, with many of the same preoccupations— youth, feminism, freedom of expression, attitudes to sex, contrasted with repressive mores in men and sex.The obvious metaphor used here is aliens (as in a flying saucer lands in New york) for the emerging glam punk scene with its androgynous Bowie sex-image and post-Factory and Warhol scene with its drugs and ersatz madness as style. AIDS had officially entered the lexicon the year before, this is reflected in the film as the men evaporating when they achieve an orgasm with our 'alien' heroine.The whole worldview behind this is what you can expect from the 80s. Rejection, solipsism, a general detachment from anything that does not please a sense of escape and fulfillment now, a numbed attitude I normally find vacant. Usually mistaken as Zen, it seems to attach itself to American youth every decade or so since the mods. And yet the dignified assertion of individuality in the face of small-mindedness and abuse shows a still sparkling soul—the girl casually invites to her place a stranger from the club because he promised cocaine, and seems surprised and mildly disgusted that he lied and basically expected sex.Three women are finding out the men in their lives are not worth it, the junkie boyfriend is more interested in his own pleasures, the German in his science of 'observing'. The young model, who exists with more freedom outside the norm, unconsciously removes them from the story. In the end, this synthetic avatar of freedom and unconventionality is consumed and magically disappears in the night as the two women watch.In its nested layering of created situations where a woman explores by allowing fragmented selves to be explored, this is situated close to two of my favorite movies of all time, another Eastern European film called Loves of A Blonde, and Celine and Julie. It's an 80s take on dreamy flight.It's all here so lovely and heartfelt about the overall world, with its heady cocktail of now innocent strangeness and still evocative flicker in the eye.The New York penthouse at night, with its open balcony to gleaming skyscrapers is one of the most vital spaces in any film I know.The cool, composed rejection of fixed roles and images, tuning out minus the constructed cosmology of world-renewal of a decade earlier. The painted faces of models casually desperate to be captured against the gleaming skyscraper-void, stating nothing beyond the flickering moment of things coming to be.The parting shot with our heroine lost in her dervish spin in the dark, a dreamy incarnation that couldn't last.

Fastforward100-1 I can understand why many people would hate this film because it is very extreme, but more than any film I've ever seen, it captures that very brief era in New York City. Punk was over and pseudo-bohemianism was coming next but hadn't arrived yet. The film depicted a fantasy, but that's what New York felt like at that time. I remember going to see it with some friends and being astonished because I had never seen anything remotely like it. It was like "The Wizard of Oz" meets "Naked Lunch". I think what made it work was the combination of the clothes, the disaffected people, and the soundtrack which probably sounds a little cheap now, but sounded spectacularly strange and beautiful at the time. Anne Carlisle's performance as Margaret was a heartbreaker. It wasn't until near the end of the movie that I realized that it was, essentially, a love story between her and the aliens. Paula Sheppard's performance as Adrien was also a standout. Unfortunately it was Paula's last movie, and Anne only had a couple of very small roles after that. A couple of trivia points: the club they went to was The Underground, which was located at the corner of Broadway and 17th Street, across from Union Square. There is a now a big box pet supply store at that location, but it was kind of a seedy area in those days. I was working down the street at the time and remember the movie being made. The penthouse apartment appeared to be somewhere nearby. I would guess that it was on 18th, 19th or 20th Street, between Fifth Ave and Sixth Ave. It's now a very fashionable area, but in those days it was the photo district, and was semi-industrial with very little residential space.