Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1984)

I'm still bothered by last week's movie, Blank Check, if I'm being honest with you. Every now and again I find myself thinking about it, like; Did I overanalyse this? Am I just overthinking things here? But I genuinely am unpleasantly surprised and slightly disturbed that a Disney movie could have a such a unsettling and sinister undertone to it and yet still be available on the network now, to stream, for anybody, any age, to watch. I honestly feel like it shouldn't be available. Not without a warning... But the good news is that I've found another Youtube Channel with a penchant for showing free-to-watch B-Movies erring very much inside the realm of "how did this get made?" (my favourite kind) and I've picked one that immediately jumped out to me as being so finger curlingly cringe that I am absolutely going to fucking hate it. Voyage of the Rock Aliens - a 1984 musical / comedy / sci-fi that I'm reliably informed is incredibly eighties... Great... I like 80's music, but not that hairspray, leather spandex bollocks, and this movie looks like it's full of that, so I'm undeniably going to absolutely loathe this I think.

After the opening vignette airs; an action set piece music video between 2 rival gangs, one lead by Jermaine Jackson (here as Rain, apparently), fighting for the affection of rival gang member Dee Dee (Pia Zadora), which was admittedly a pretty catchy slab of electric 80's pop... we pan out to discover the whole thing is being witnessed by Robot 1359 (voiced by the legendary Peter Cullen - shit he was Optimus Prime?!!) who, deciding to set course for Earth, proceeds to... literally get the rest of the miniaturised crew out of the fridge! And then proceed to "wake them". Back to regular size and proceeding to lay in a course, the crew (who are real life band Rhema) who all seemed to be named after sequences of letters for some reason... proceed to break out in a music number of their own, very much in a Talking Heads, early Depeche Mode sort of vein... That jaunty short done with, the crew arrive to observe Earth in greater detail from space. Back on Earth, after Dee Dee and "The Pack" jam out to a freaky kind of beach monster invasion, that despite only being a few short minutes long was immediately better than The Horror of Party Beach, Frankie (Craig Sheffer) and his incredibly chiselled jaw line show up and ruin all the fun when he freaks out seeing his band play with somebody else other than him and takes them away to the gym to practice. Meanwhile Robot 1359 leads the rest of the alien crew onto Earth's surface and outlines that "observing physical properties and locating an intelligent life form" is their primary goal, however unbeknownst to them, their arrival was witnessed by a nosey Sherriff (Ruth Gordon)... As the aliens and Robot 1359 - who changes his appearance to a fire hydrant - begin to explore Earth we learn that Dee Dee and Frankie are an item but that Dee Dee has her concerns that Frankie spends too much time with The Pack. That and Frankie is also a total jerk. But after Jimmy & The Mustangs - a real life band - bang out a rock & roll diner-esque song, which is actually pretty decent, who should happen to walk into that same diner but the alien crew with Frankie and Jimmy's bands both mistakenly thinking they're just really into New Wave space pop. Understandable, it's the 80's. People did dress up as weird looking sci-fi aliens in the 80's... As the aliens start 'exploring' the diner by doing all kinds of weird stuff, Dee Dee and her best friend Diane (Alison La Placa) have a moment in the bathroom where they belt out another electro pop number about Frankie, and when Dee Dee emerges from the toilets back into the diner she catches the eye of the alien commander ABCD (Tom Nolan) who literally explodes into pieces witnessing how hot she is... no literally. The aliens swiftly have to exit the diner, carrying parts of ABCD with them but it's the perfect excuse for another musical number at least. Arriving back on Earth... on a tractor... driven by Diane for... some reason... Diane asks the alien band (they're never really given a name, except for ABCD and the EFGHI JKLM NOPQR STUVWYZ and if you think I'm typing that out every time...) if they will play at a talent show she is hosting later in the evening, with ABCD agreeing for them when he spots Dee Dee and asks if she will be there. Retreating to the ship, having a little love fantasy about Dee Dee - segway to a duet, ABCD then returns to Earth alone with the "sexual response stimulator"!! But it backfires and only seems to attract all the men in the diner. But it does get Dee Dee's attention long enough for her to ask ABCD if she can sing with his band, having always wanted to sing with The Pack, but Frankie never giving her the chance. ABCD obviously agrees, but - after a minor cutaway to one of the aliens witnessing some patients from a mental hospital escape (?), The Pack with Jimmy & The Mustangs in tow, all turn up at the diner and see Dee Dee with ABCD. Jealous Frankie being obviously outraged, they take things outside, but they are unable to lay a finger on ABCD has he protects himself with some kind of forcefield... back with the mental patients (one of them being a chainsaw wielding Michael Berryman) we see them buying a whole bunch of weapons, grenades, mines, the works, for... some reason... and they even get waved at by the Sherriff as they walk passed her office... I assume this is going somewhere... The evening of the talent show rolls around with Jimmy & The Mustangs playing a song interspersed with scenes of a police officer and the mental patient that is Michael Berryman, I'm calling him Chainsaw, fighting, and after Frankie has The Pack make sure ABCD and his band can't get in the building, they find an alternative way in: by teleporting into the toilets! Frankie is beside himself as they make their way into the hall, and when he cuts Dee Dee off just as she is about to tell him she's going to sing with the alien band, Dee Dee announces her and Frankie are finished, and she launches into their musical number. But just as they are getting to the end, Jimmy & The Mustangs jump into their next song but before they can even get halfway through, the alien band jumps back in with another song! And the two bands begin to duel, trading places throughout the song. Song over, Frankie storms out, and Diane, catching him leaving tries to find him but instead crosses paths with Chainsaw, but just when it seems like they are going to do a cliché horror movie skit, instead, Chainsaw has trouble with his chainsaw, and Diane scalds him before helping him fix it. Fair play, movie. Well done. Meanwhile Dee Dee and ABCD take a walk where she asks to join the band full time, but ABCD reveals to her he is an alien which she understands almost immediately and takes remarkably well... and the pair travel back to ABCD's ship. Back on Earth, Frankie announces to the rest of the gang that The Pack are through, as their violent ways have cost him Dee Dee which they don't take very well, but it is a nice segway into a solo love ballad that is actually really great. No, like genuinely. Meanwhile when Dee Dee learns that she would have to give up having emotions and would never get to travel home again if she runs away with ABCD she begins to get cold feet and decides to leave, just as Frankie runs into the other mental patient that isn't Michael Berryman and gets into a fight with him, with Dee Dee arriving just in time to distract him long enough for Frankie to escape. Then, the tentacle monster from right at the beginning has suddenly enveloped the entire school! And as Dee Dee and Frankie try to escape, Diane and Chainsaw finally get his chainsaw working, with him suddenly having a change of heart and using it instead to fight off the tentacle monster, winning Diane's affection in the process! Heartbroken that Dee Dee has chosen a reformed Frankie over him, ABCD orders the band / crew back onboard, discovering that in the interim period, The Pack found their teleporter and have trashed the place. But before leaving, the aliens interfere to stop The Pack from attacking Frankie in the park, with Frankie vowing that from now on, him and Dee Dee will be a duet!

This was Teen Beach Movie all over again...! Why does this keep happening to me? I honestly thought going into this it was going to be second-hand embarrassing and a mega cringefest, but it actually wasn't! They did a pretty good job here of balancing things just right. It was cheesy, and it was dorky but in the right measure and it balanced out with the musical numbers which were all genuinely pretty decent, even the ones written especially for the movie. It's clear that there was a well crafted vision going in and a real intention to put that vision together.

A musical is nothing without it's soundtrack and it was well composed here. The rock and roll numbers from Jimmy & The Mustangs gave the movie a cooler edge in contrast to the more electro pop geeky numbers from Rhema but it worked well to showcase the 2 different schools of thought and pit them against each other on equal ground. Aside from them the original songs, half of which are sung by Pia Zadora, are also pretty decent in their own right. All of them well written and very much a style of their time, but in particular, Frankie's last song: Nature of the Beast was really good and gave me strong Hall & Oates vibes. I genuinely am going to give the soundtrack a listen, the songs were that good!

Acting wise as well, everyone was pretty decent across the board. Especially considering the x2 bands in the movie were musicians in the first instance and not "genuine" actors, they still did a decent job. Tom Nolan as ABCD was goofy and dorky, but it was part of his character and Pia Zadora as Dee Dee and the lead female character did a really good job of holding the whole film together. Craig Sheffer as Frankie was in danger of getting a little bit vanilla with the tough-guy, jealous boyfriend stereotype but he ended up having enough depth to his character that he burned through it. It was great to see Michael Berryman as one of the mental patients too, who is a cinematic legend, and on the subject of legends it made me silly happy to hear Peter Cullen's voice in something that wasn't Transformers.

Cinematography-wise the movie was shot decent enough. The whole thing - I think - was shot on cross processed film stock as there was a significant colour shift going on through the whole thing, and that was probably intentional to give the movie a more sci-fi'y edge? It at least made it a bit different, and the camerawork here was decent enough that it felt like a professionally shot movie but there were a few times where scenes were just shot face on or side on without switching up any angles, and it exposed it a bit for being a bit amateur at times. But it didn't ruin my enjoyment of it any less. 

There is a danger, with musicals, that the storyline can sometimes take a back seat... I think... I haven't really watched that many... but it wasn't the case here. It was a very simple, romance-by-numbers approach: the new boy arrives on block, the hot girl seeks his affection, but ultimately is happy with the status quo, and it wasn't ever going to break any new ground, but it was told well enough, and there was certainly enough else going on around it with the crazy mini sub-plots, and enough to transition into musical numbers smoothly and still tell a story. In comparison: Justin and Kelly fell massively short in this category, doing just enough to pad the gaps between musical numbers, but here it felt like there was a whole movie going on and the musical numbers were supplementary to that. This wasn't just a musical. It was a movie musical.

And I am not a musical fan. I've watched a couple now for the blog, but I still consider myself to be very much in unchartered waters when I'm looking at a musical, because aside from the ones I've already covered, I have very little frame of reference. But I enjoyed this. And maybe it's because of that, that I enjoyed it like I did? Because I've got nothing else from the 80's to compare it to? I mean it's certainly not Grease, or Flashdance (love Michael Sambello btw, just wanted to find an opportunity to name drop him in here somewhere!) but going in, I fully expected an embarrassing, corny over-the-top cock rock musical but it was nothing like that at all. Instead it was well thought out, well produced, and well performed slab of absolute 80's cheese. But it was fun. It didn't take itself too seriously, it didn't try too hard, it recognized that it was dorky but stayed composed enough to not slip into ridiculousness and it was an enjoyable movie that I would genuinely watch again. And might. Good job people, 3 out of 5.