The film that inspired Screaming Streaming

When I started this blog it was because it had become apparent that so many old and forgotten films had made second lives on YouTube in their entirety. While watching the following film on a rare DVD that I own, it was brought to my attention that the same film was freely available online.

                                                     Behold the power of LIQUID SKY.

                                                        And now you can see it for yourself.

LIQUID SKY is a film from 1982 that will be high on your list of weirdest movies ever seen. On the same list as MYSTICS IN BALI, which was covered yesterday. But for completely different reasons.

It takes place in New York during the new wave era of the early 1980s. A fashion model named Margaret (Anne Carlisle) lives her life amidst the neon lights of the dance club and the hip spots of culture. She has an abrasive relationship with Jimmy (also Anne Carlisle in a dual role) who is a drug addict that keeps trying to proposition Margaret for sex.

Yeah, that's kind of creepy. Moving on. Through the excess of the drug infused lives of the characters, a tiny flying saucer lands atop the roof of Margaret's penthouse. A German scientist happens to be following the craft as he watches it from rooftops with a telescope. The tiny aliens appear as psychedelic visuals and their own vision is just as odd.

                                                                                Alien.

                                                                              Alien vision.

These weird fellas are after heroin so they came to the right place but while observing the salacious sex lives of the occupants, they discover that at orgasm, the human brain produces a chemical that closely relates to the composition of heroin. So the aliens begin to kill anyone Margaret fucks as soon as they climax. The bodies then disappear. Margaret assumes she has a power of some sort and so she exploits it to meet her own agenda.

That's your basic plot. Aliens like heroin but kill punk rockers for their sexy brain juices instead.

So needless to say this is a funky film. It's a wash of neon vibrance and electronic synth music. A specimen of the emerging hipster culture of the early 1980s. And it also gave birth to Screaming Streaming. Rock on.