Director: Slava Tsukerman
Writers: Slave Tsukerman, Anne Carlisle, Nina V. Kerova
Photography: Yuri Neyman
Music: Brenda I. Hutchinson, Clive Smith, Slave Tsukerman
Editors: Sharyn L. Ross, Slave Tsukerman
Cast: Anne Carlisle, Paula E. Sheppard, Bob Brady, Susan Doukas, Elaine C. Grove, Stanley Knapp, Jack Adalist, Otto von Wernherr
I have to wonder what I would think of Liquid Sky now if I were seeing it for the first time. I loved it then for its New York City fashion and punk-rock swagger, its acerbic but predictable squalls against the square and the conventional, and altogether its monumental strangeness. Released in the era of Blade Runner, Diva, The Thing, and Videodrome, they are all of a piece: loud, irritating, in your face. Liquid Sky hits with a saturated keyboard soundtrack, psychedelic special effects, and a narrative that is allusive and obvious by turns like a silent picture. It’s about aliens from outer space—tiny aliens from outer space—who feed on human brain chemicals released during orgasm and heroin intoxication. Anne Carlisle plays both the lead, Margaret, and also one of her fashion rivals, Jimmy. Margaret is bisexual and involved with ‘60s hip liberal college professor and her former teacher, Owen (Bob Brady, who is also the casting director in this low-budget all-hands effort), and also with Adrian (Paula E. Sheppard), a downtown performance artist and drug dealer. Margaret is from Connecticut and still trying to live it down.
No one here is very good at acting nor is director/writer/composer/editor Slava Tsukerman, a Soviet émigré, much of a hand at directing them. They’re self-conscious and hammy by turns and lots of scenes feel like first takes from different movies. Even technical issues like audio volumes are out of whack. The picture is overlong and feels bloated, clunky, and slow-moving. It has too many plot threads and too much awkward cross-cutting, and it’s often unpleasant too, with rape scenes and other spasms and eruptions of violence. The scenes with alien points of view are more often just confusing, though here is where the psychedelics kick in. The most significant detail about Liquid Sky may be that no one associated with it has gone on to anything. In 2014 Tsukerman and Carlisle announced that a sequel was in the works, but no further word since. I can’t defend the whole thing, but there are still parts of it I love.
I have to wonder what I would think of Liquid Sky now if I were seeing it for the first time. I loved it then for its New York City fashion and punk-rock swagger, its acerbic but predictable squalls against the square and the conventional, and altogether its monumental strangeness. Released in the era of Blade Runner, Diva, The Thing, and Videodrome, they are all of a piece: loud, irritating, in your face. Liquid Sky hits with a saturated keyboard soundtrack, psychedelic special effects, and a narrative that is allusive and obvious by turns like a silent picture. It’s about aliens from outer space—tiny aliens from outer space—who feed on human brain chemicals released during orgasm and heroin intoxication. Anne Carlisle plays both the lead, Margaret, and also one of her fashion rivals, Jimmy. Margaret is bisexual and involved with ‘60s hip liberal college professor and her former teacher, Owen (Bob Brady, who is also the casting director in this low-budget all-hands effort), and also with Adrian (Paula E. Sheppard), a downtown performance artist and drug dealer. Margaret is from Connecticut and still trying to live it down.
No one here is very good at acting nor is director/writer/composer/editor Slava Tsukerman, a Soviet émigré, much of a hand at directing them. They’re self-conscious and hammy by turns and lots of scenes feel like first takes from different movies. Even technical issues like audio volumes are out of whack. The picture is overlong and feels bloated, clunky, and slow-moving. It has too many plot threads and too much awkward cross-cutting, and it’s often unpleasant too, with rape scenes and other spasms and eruptions of violence. The scenes with alien points of view are more often just confusing, though here is where the psychedelics kick in. The most significant detail about Liquid Sky may be that no one associated with it has gone on to anything. In 2014 Tsukerman and Carlisle announced that a sequel was in the works, but no further word since. I can’t defend the whole thing, but there are still parts of it I love.
The sci-fi premise, for example, which in a way could have only come from a Soviet frame of mind, taking on American hedonism in a stroke by coupling heroin use with wanton sex with high fashion. The alien feeds on the lust and the scores, which takes every paranoid sense of dangerous New York encounters copping drugs or sex and blows them up liquid sky high. This debauched world of fashion is even more scary on those terms. The emptiness is calculated with precision—as is the mockery.
Liquid Sky is very funny and cutting in parts, in surprising ways that don’t always fit any better than the rest of it. An astrophysicist from West Berlin intrudes on the action a little ways in. He wears a red leather jacket and is studying and tracking the alien with mysterious electronic gear and a telescope. He asks if he can observe the alien from the nearby apartment of an attractive television producer who is Jewish and has a thing for ordering in shrimp dishes from Chinese restaurants. She’s also turned on that he is German. She doesn’t really believe the alien thing and prefers to think it’s some kind of strange come-on.
The aliens are small. Their spaceship is described as being the size of a dinner plate. It is perched on a nearby ledge on the roof of a building with what appears to be other outdoor dining detritus. The shots of the flying saucer are rarely ever in good perspective. Our minds keep wanting to see it as big as the mother ship in Close Encounters. We have to keep reminding ourselves it is absurdly small, a tableware item.
There are great shots of New York by cinematographer Yuri Neyman and a particular fascination with the Empire State Building. A transitional shot of New York traffic reminded me of similar scenes in Sunrise. The Liquid Sky soundtrack is mostly a handful of midi-like synthesizer themes that repeat with various moods and characters. My favorite is the one associated with the hovering alien ship, a moody bruised figure that fills the soundscape the way the THX promo does, thick supersaturated rolling soundwaves.
Similarly, the visual effects of Liquid Sky are primitive but effective, with coarse rainbow filters on the players and inexplicable bursts of color. “Primitive but effective,” in fact, describes much of Liquid Sky. It’s a strange blend of the shocking and the standup comic’s sweaty yearning to please. As a former Soviet citizen, Slava Tsukerman is an outsider in New York by definition, which gives him an excellent vantage from which to view the city’s fashion scene as it transitioned from the ‘70s to the ’80s. For her part, Carlisle revels in both her roles, dressing up like a peacock, delivering her titanic “I’m from Connecticut” speech, a high-water mark of bored hip affectation. The picture would probably work better if maybe 25 to 40 minutes was pared away. But when it’s good it’s still pretty good, as midnight madness pictures go.
Liquid Sky is very funny and cutting in parts, in surprising ways that don’t always fit any better than the rest of it. An astrophysicist from West Berlin intrudes on the action a little ways in. He wears a red leather jacket and is studying and tracking the alien with mysterious electronic gear and a telescope. He asks if he can observe the alien from the nearby apartment of an attractive television producer who is Jewish and has a thing for ordering in shrimp dishes from Chinese restaurants. She’s also turned on that he is German. She doesn’t really believe the alien thing and prefers to think it’s some kind of strange come-on.
The aliens are small. Their spaceship is described as being the size of a dinner plate. It is perched on a nearby ledge on the roof of a building with what appears to be other outdoor dining detritus. The shots of the flying saucer are rarely ever in good perspective. Our minds keep wanting to see it as big as the mother ship in Close Encounters. We have to keep reminding ourselves it is absurdly small, a tableware item.
There are great shots of New York by cinematographer Yuri Neyman and a particular fascination with the Empire State Building. A transitional shot of New York traffic reminded me of similar scenes in Sunrise. The Liquid Sky soundtrack is mostly a handful of midi-like synthesizer themes that repeat with various moods and characters. My favorite is the one associated with the hovering alien ship, a moody bruised figure that fills the soundscape the way the THX promo does, thick supersaturated rolling soundwaves.
Similarly, the visual effects of Liquid Sky are primitive but effective, with coarse rainbow filters on the players and inexplicable bursts of color. “Primitive but effective,” in fact, describes much of Liquid Sky. It’s a strange blend of the shocking and the standup comic’s sweaty yearning to please. As a former Soviet citizen, Slava Tsukerman is an outsider in New York by definition, which gives him an excellent vantage from which to view the city’s fashion scene as it transitioned from the ‘70s to the ’80s. For her part, Carlisle revels in both her roles, dressing up like a peacock, delivering her titanic “I’m from Connecticut” speech, a high-water mark of bored hip affectation. The picture would probably work better if maybe 25 to 40 minutes was pared away. But when it’s good it’s still pretty good, as midnight madness pictures go.
Reading this it occurred to me that top ten midnight movies all-time might be a fun project but perusing some online lists just now I got bogged down quickly wondering what qualifies as "midnight movie"? Are midnight movies only those that have been billed in a midnight movie program or all movies in the midnight movie style? And if the latter, of course, the possibilities can get out of hand just as quickly, rock & roll, Kung Fu, Blaxploitation, SciFi, Horror, stoner comedies, low-budget B-movies, etc. Anything not overly Hollywood, counter cultural, youth oriented, transgressive, trashy by mainstream standards. Still like the idea but not finding Purple Rain or Wild Zero or Repo Man on online lists gives me pause. I know I saw PR and RM as part of midnight movie programs. -Skip
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