Vicious Lips

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.

This is essentially a rock 'n' roll fable set in a sci-fi environment, as the title band vies for fame and fortune. A gig on a distant planet could be their ticket to the big time, but first they have to get there. Next, they have to learn to start getting along. Judy (Dru-Anne Perry) is brought in to replace the original singer, and Judy has to struggle to be accepted. The balance of director Albert Pyuns' script deals with the girls' being marooned on a desert planet after a near accident in space.

The problem for this viewer was that there really wasn't a strong enough story, or characterization, to latch onto and draw him into the movie. The movie is a curio, to be sure, but for too much of the running time, things are rather dull. Most of the gals in the band are interchangeable, although they are indeed a good looking bunch (gotta love that huge 80s hair!). Perry does her best to create a somewhat engaging character. The best value in "Vicious Lips" comes from the look of the movie, with appropriately trashy and colourful production and costume design. The songs are certainly catchy. There are some fun makeup effects courtesy of Greg Cannom, and John Carl Buechler and his team, and one major creature role, "Milo", played by Christian Andrews. Milo creeps on board the ladies' spaceship and sneaks around, but it takes too long for him to actually interact with any of them. The names of these people are fun; lovely Pyun regular Linda Kerridge ("Fade to Black") plays a band member named "Wynzi Krodo". Mary- Anne Graves seems to be having a good time as rock promoter Maxine Mortogo, but Anthony Kentz is simply annoying as Vicious Lips manager Matty Asher.

A late-in-the-game plot twist is groan inducing, but the resolution creates some good vibes as Vicious Lips rock the joint with a ditty dubbed "Lunar Madness".

Five out of 10.

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.

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.

This is really a film in a weird genre - punk music combined with science fiction. Yet, taking into account the almost total lack of subject and action and the low-cost budget preventing any spectacular effects specific to science-fiction movies the film is not as bad as it could be. First the music is quite could, catches the attention and somehow justifies the events that trigger the story. Then the characters in the future world are quite carefully sketched and even if they remind somehow the intergalactic bar in 'Star Wars' they are quite funny by their own. The film not being too long is quite a quality here, and at the end of the 75 or so minutes of screening the remaining feeling is of a not so complete loss of time.