Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1984) -**½
There was no movie on the schedule at this year’s B-Fest that I was dreading more than Voyage of the Rock Aliens. You all know by now how I feel about musicals and failed comedies separately, so just imagine how I’d greet the prospect of a film that was both at once! The trailer that I watched while deciding which movies from the lineup to target for review misled me, however. Although it’s true enough that Voyage of the Rock Aliens is desperately lame whenever it’s doing anything that warrants a title like Voyage of the Rock Aliens, this movie spends a fair amount of its running time being several other virtually unrelated things instead: a slasher parody, a Troma Lite satire on nuclear accidents and toxic waste, a tribute to Erich von Zipper and his gang from the American International Pictures beach party movies, a skewering of tin-pot authoritarians in the spirit of The Blues Brothers, and more. Some of those things it does rather well, surprisingly enough, making Voyage of the Rock Aliens one of those rare movies that benefit from having nothing to do with themselves.
Maybe I should establish up front that these are not “rock aliens” in the sense of that quasi-omnipotent boulder-guy that made Captain Kirk team up with Abraham Lincoln and the founder of the Vulcan cult of logic to fight Genghis Khan and the first Klingon emperor that one time. You know the old saw about extraterrestrials monitoring Earth’s radio and television transmissions in order to study human culture? Well, that’s sort of what happened on the planet Rhema*, only its inhabitants didn’t initially do so on purpose. They just happened to tune in the right set of frequencies one day, and became fascinated with what they heard and saw. Now the planetary government has dispatched a team of six astronauts under the command of the dedicated and utterly reliable Abcd (Tom Nolan) on an open-ended mission to locate the source of this “rock and roll” stuff. You will begin to get a feel for this movie’s sense of humor, I think, if I tell you that the other five men in Abcd’s crew are named Efghi (Jeffrey Casey), Jklm (Gregory Bond), Nopqr (Craig Quiter), Stuvwxyz (Patrick Byrnes), and Aeiou (Marc Jackson). Also, because there’s every chance that their mission will take a very long time, the Rheman explorers will spend most of the voyage in suspended animation, shrunken down and plasticized into Ken dolls dressed like Devo. Until such time as they encounter a likely world, their vessel— which resembles a cross between an Imperial Star Destroyer and a Gibson Flying V— is guided and controlled by a robot called 1359 (voiced by Peter Cullen, right before he landed another robot-voicing gig that seems destined to remain for the rest of time the main thing that he’s remembered for).
As we join the action, 1359 is investigating the electromagnetic emissions of the planets Teldar, Malox, and Acirema. The first two worlds are broadcasting nothing of interest, but 1359’s observations of Acirema require putting the movie on hold for over six minutes so that we can watch the video for “When the Rain Falls Down,” Jermaine Jackson’s who-asked-for-this? duet with Pia Zadora, of all people, in its perplexing post-apocalyptic entirety. For some reason, the ship’s computer deems this a false positive (Is it weird that 1359 and the ship’s computer are two separate entities? Because that seems weird to me.), and recommends that the mission proceed on to the last habitable planet within 2000 light years— an obscure, out-of-the-way world known to its natives as Earth. 1359 revives his carbon-based shipmates, and informs them of the recommended course. Then they all sing a lousy synth-pop song about their mission, which I guess means that we now know what a space shanty sounds like.
Abcd and his crew take up geosynchronous orbit above the little town of Speelburg, on the reeking shores of pollution-besmirched and mutant-haunted Lake Eerie. And although 1359 prudently disguises their combined planetary lander and teleportation uplink as a native device called a “telephone booth,” the aliens’ arrival is witnessed by Speelburg’s demented sheriff (Ruth Gordon, from Isn’t It Shocking? and Rosemary’s Baby), who happens to be perving on her hunky neighbor via telescope at the time of the landing. The old bat will spend the rest of the film convinced that her town is under attack by axe-murdering juvenile delinquents from outer space, conflating three very real but unrelated problems into one all-encompassing chimera.
What disruptions the aliens do cause stem primarily from their misguided efforts to blend in, and to observe Earth’s people without being perceived to do so. Most of all, they stem from Abcd inserting himself and his followers into the biggest interpersonal drama among the students of Heidi High School. The leading social faction at Heidi High is an outfit called the Pack, which is at once a gang of hoodlums and the entourage of a rockabilly band. Their leader— but confusingly not the band’s regular lead singer— is an oily, violent creep called Frankie (Craig Sheffer, of Hellraiser: Inferno and Nightbreed). Frankie has been dating Dee-Dee (Pia Zadora once again, whom we’ve also seen as an extraterrestrial tyke in Santa Claus Conquers the Martians), but their relationship teeters constantly on the brink of dissolution over the question of her musical ambitions. Dee-Dee intends to be a star, but Frankie will countenance just one band at Heidi High, and he’ll be the one to decide who sings for it. Mind you, his judgment is called into unavoidable question the first time we see the Pack perform with his prescribed frontman. Duke (Jimmy Haddox, the real-life singer/guitarist of Jimmy and the Mustangs, the real-life rockabilly re-enactors who portray the musicians among the gang) turns out to be a both a doofus and a dead ringer for Arch Hall Jr. In any case, Dee-Dee is in a mood to be receptive toward advances from other males, and Abcd literally explodes with passion when his crew’s explorations lead him into contact with her at a diner called Local Teenage Hangout. The alien commander tries various gambits to attract the Earth girl’s affections, eventually succeeding when he and his crew are mistaken for a touring new wave band by Dee-Dee’s friend, Diane (Alison La Placa), who is both Heidi High’s top auto-shop gearhead and the chief organizer of this year’s senior cotillion. The dance turns into a battle of the bands between the Rhemans and the Pack, with the stakes rising into low Earth orbit once Abcd invites Dee-Dee to take the stage with him and his crew.
Meanwhile, there’s a breakout at the Speelburg Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The escapees are a notorious chainsaw murderer (Michael Berryman, from Erebus and The Devil’s Rejects) and a second maniac (Wallace Merck, of Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives and Mothman) who has courageously refused to let his disability of being permanently hooked up to a ventilator interfere with his calling to stick people with enormous knives. The sheriff naturally mistakes their sanguinary rampage for the aliens’ work, even as she praises the lunatics’ amassment of an arsenal fit to exterminate her constituents as an exemplary exercise of their God-given rights under the Second Amendment. It should go without saying that no force on Earth can keep a maniac away from a high school dance, so while Dee-Dee and Frankie hash out their differences from the stages at opposite ends of the gym, Diane finds herself pursued through the corridors of the building by the more fearsome of the two killers. And as if all that weren’t enough for one prom night, the giant tentacle monster that lurks at the bottom of Lake Eerie picks the same evening to rise from the depths and attack the town as well.
Although I just described the climax to Voyage of the Rock Aliens, I’ve nevertheless followed at the same time my usual practice of leaving off the synopsis around the beginning of the third act. That’s a problem— probably the most serious problem that this movie poses for itself. Having taken far too long to get to the meat of the story in the first place, Voyage of the Rock Aliens drones on and on to very little purpose after what should have been the end. That said, I will extend some small credit for the unexpected way in which this movie wastes its time and ours after the cotillion. Not content to wrap up with another song or three (although they certainly do that), director James Fargo and the film’s several writers serve up a whole new plot thread about previously un-hinted-at features of life on Rhema that cause Dee-Dee to think twice about seeking stardom among the stars. This final phase also contains the picture’s one genuinely funny musical number, in which Frankie launches a last-minute redemption arc with a spot-on parody of Hall & Oates’s “Maneater” video, featuring a portly and gimp-legged old cougar in place of the original’s majestic black she-panther. Mind you, reconciling Frankie and Dee-Dee this late in the game is by far the least plausible thing that Voyage of the Rock Aliens could possibly have done. It’s churlish, I realize, to complain about unearned dramatic turns in a movie as forthrightly nonsensical as this one, but the simple fact is that a happily-ever-after for those two isn’t half as believable as Diane and the psycho-slasher falling in love over repairs to the latter’s malfunctioning chainsaw— not least because Pia Zadora and Craig Sheffer never develop a fraction of the chemistry that Alison La Placa establishes instantly with Michael Berryman once the saw’s breakdown renders the maniac temporarily harmless.
Another of this movie’s major defects is that it has no coherent musical vision. Even if we accept the extremely sloppy and imprecise usage of “rock” that was common in the mid-1980’s (which, for the record, I emphatically do not), it’s simply baffling that the rockabilly band are the villains in what’s ostensibly the story of an interplanetary search for the wellspring of rock and roll. Probably that was never meant to carry any more significance than to underline the link between Frankie and Erich von Zipper, but the thing is, it meant something in the beach party movies that the hapless comic bad guys represented the youth of the previous decade. Von Zipper and his gang were greasy, reprobate 50’s rockers in deliberate contradistinction to the Kennedy-era beach kids, for whom rock and roll could be detached from its transgressive associations with proletarian culture and race-mixing. Voyage of the Rock Aliens has no such implicit operating theory. On the one hand, Jimmy and the Mustangs were a rockabilly band in the Stray Cats-Blasters-Polecats sense of the term— the kind that arose in tandem with punk, and which shared much of the punk sensibility. They were retro, not obsolete. And on the other hand, it’s impossible to assemble the good guys’ music into any identifiable opposing sound or genre. Dee-Dee’s songs run the gamut from sub-Pat Benetar hard rock to full-on disco, and her opening number sounds like the opening credits music to an anime remake of Grease written by entities that have had music described to them, but have never actually heard it. Frankie announces his face-turn by wrapping himself in the withered husk of blue-eyed soul. And the Rock Aliens themselves? Keyboardist Craig Quiter himself retrospectively described RHEMA as “80’s pop schlock techno cheese,” which is as good a name for… whatever this is… as any. So while Voyage of the Rock Aliens has the form of a pop-culture tribalism movie, it’s really just a celluloid jukebox loaded mostly with crap.
It’s weirdly fortunate, then, that the filmmakers honestly weren’t all that interested in the main plot, nor indeed in the musical numbers that fill so much of the running time. James Fargo’s vision for Voyage of the Rock Aliens was rather that it should encapsulate in one film the experience of channel-hopping among several competing late-late-show movies on television, none of which are successfully holding your attention. That’s why there’s so little integration among any of the various subplots, each of which has not only its own distinct subject matter and genre sensibility, but also its own distinct sense of humor. Make no mistake, this is a demented approach to filmmaking. But while I’m hesitant to say that it works here, it does have the effect of mitigating Voyage of the Rock Aliens’ most irritating features. However witless the Rhemans’ fish-out-of-water clowning becomes, however stridently the Frankie-Dee-Dee-Abcd triangle grates on the viewer’s nerves, however soul-sick one may get at having to listen to Pia Zadora sing, we’re never more than a scene or three away from the next bit with Ruth Gordon, Michael Berryman, or the Lake Eerie tentacle monster. That’s something, anyway, even if I’m not exactly sure what.
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