BAD CHANNELS (1992)

DIRECTED by Ted Nicolaou.

SCREENPLAY by Charles Band & Jackson Barr.

STARRING  - Paul Hipp as Dan O' Dare,  Martha Quinn as Lisa Cummings,  Aaron Lustig as Vernon Locknut,  Ian Patrick Williams as Dr. Payne,  Charlie Spradling as Cookie,  Darryl Strauss as Bunny,  Melissa Behr as Nurse Ginger.

SPECIAL GUEST APPEARANCE - Tim Thomerson as Brick Bardo.

PLOT - KDUL is a backwoods, small town radio station, notable mainly for the rock show hosted by shock jock DJ Dan O' Dare. In a drive for increased ratings the station is hosting a marathon event where Dan O' Dare has chained himself to his chair until a listener can guess the combination of the locks upon which he will be released. 

A journalist, Lisa Cummings, is assigned to cover the event for a TV news show, however, on the drive down she witnesses a UFO land next to the radio station, she tries alerting the local authorities but nobody believes her.

The aliens invade the radio station and take over the airwaves, they use a beam to hypnotise three local women, Cookie, Bunny and Nurse Ginger, who they intend to abduct for reasons unknown. The hypno-beam makes the three girls imagine they are starring in thier own personal rock music videos, upon full hypnotisisation the three girls are then shrunk down to a few inches in height and teleported to the alien's temporary base at the radio station.

Only one man can stop the invasion - Dan O' Dare. But as the events unfurl live on air all the audience think he's faking it, just another publicity stunt to boost ratings for the station...

TAGLINE - IN SPACE, NO ONE IS SAFE FROM ROCK 'N ROLL !

PERFORMANCES  - Paul Hipp plays Dan O' Dare the shock jock DJ. Dan is the type of DJ who runs the show by the seat of his pants, he's loudmouthed and spouts lots of snappy dialogue, in short a typical disk jockey. Hipp does the quickfire radio banter convincingly enough but his real strength in the performance comes over when the situation starts to get desperate. Hipp conveys Dan's rising disbelief and increasing desperation at the bizzare and dangerous situation he's found himself in very effectively. There are quite a few scenes where Dan is screaming for help over the airwaves and we then cut to random characters laughing at the radio, all thinking it's just another one of Dan's on air pranks. He's the boy who cried wolf made flesh. Hipp puts across Dan's frustration brilliantly, his performance holds the rest of the film together.

Martha Quinn plays Lisa Cummings, the journalist who sees the UFO landing. Lisa is the only person who believes that Dan is telling the truth and tries her best to help Dan from the outside. Quinn also does a good job at conveying the frustration her character feels as she is disbelieved by all around her, even when girls start disappearing before thier very eyes there are still members of the community who think it's all one big publicity stunt.

The three abductees are played by Charlie Spradling as Cookie,  Darryl Strauss as Bunny and Melissa Behr as Nurse Ginger, to be fair they don't really get a lot to do except dance sexily in thier own private alien induced rock videos and look traumatised after being shrunk. Pay special attention to Melissa Behr as we'll be seeing more of her and Nurse Ginger soon...

Also, keep watching after the end credits have rolled, as we get a special appearance of Tim Thomerson as Brick Bardo. Yes, Dollman himself appears in the closing moments of this film, heading into town after hearing about the alien invasion. Something is clearly going on here...

SFX - We get some nice and comic booky alien designs, the lead alien is quite interesting looking, I can't tell whether he's supposed to be wearing a space suit or whether that's just what he happens to look like...

He's cool looking all the same and I like the air of mystery his ambiguous appearance gives him. He's very B-movie looking but seeing as this is a B-movie then that's absolutely fine. 

The other alien is this bizzare looking robot...

He's not going to win any prizes for special effect of the year (or even special effect of 1992) but he works well enough and I really like the fact that he appears to have an exposed organic brain housed within his robot shell. This raises the question of whether he's a mere robotic servant or a fellow crew member who's been hideously maimed and had to have his brain transplanted into a robotic body to save his life. Maybe he's some other abductee who's been turned into a robot, who knows ? I like it when a movie character sets your imagination to work.

The final form of the main alien is somewhat goofy looking...

It appears to be some kind of three headed plant monster but for some reason its always got that dopey looking expression on it's face which does kind of undermine it's threat level a bit.

SEX & VIOLENCE  - You get some sexy dancing from the three abducted girls, theres also a song performed in one of the dream sequences about masturbation (Touching Myself Again by DMT), it's...awkward to say the least.

There isn't really much violence, people get miniaturised when they get zapped by aliens but they don't die.

RATING  - Bad Channels is an odd little movie that wears it's bizzareness on it's sleeve with pride. Part Sci-fi comedy, part 50's B-movie homage and part early MTV era rock video compilation/musical.

It's in the music segments that the director really seems to sit up and take interest, leaving the story segments to seem a bit flat sometimes. However, the script and performances are all fun enough to paper over these cracks.

As I've said, rock music plays a big part in this film. You get three songs featured in the film, each with thier own dream sequence/video, one for each of the girls captured. Cookie gets abducted to a song by a group called Fair Game, I'm not sure what it's called but it's a fairly standard late 80's/early 90's hair metal style song, the video takes place at the roadhouse diner where Cookie works and features the usual assortment of truckers and bikers that you always seem to find in these places, it's clichéd but fun if you like this type of music.

The second video is when Bunny gets kidnapped to Touching Myself Again by DMT. It's a grunge style song with some awkward dance moves, it's not aged well.

The third and by far the best song is when Nurse Ginger is abducted. The song is called Manic Depresso and the group is Sykotik Sinfony. This band is great, dressed in clown outfits and singing in falsetto voices, they are accompanied by a female guitarist who is dressed as a Nun. The guitarist is absolutely brilliant, spitting out some brutal riffs and giving an insane guitar solo in the middle part of the song. I'm surprised she didn't get signed up to a larger band and go onto bigger things.

The song itself is about what we would now refer to as "toxic positivity", that horrible phenomena of people being encouraged to be falsely happy in the face of depressing odds. I've just come out of a sales job where "toxic positivity" was the order of the day. There we where, being given increasingly unfair and unreachable targets to achieve and if we so much as questioned it we where perceived as being "negative". If you where perceived as being "negative" then you where also pegged as being a "troublemaker" or a "bad influence" on your fellow workers. So instead you had to have a "positive attitude", smiling and joking when all around you was turning to shit and the dole que was beckoning more and more, day by day. Needless to say, I couldn't keep up with this bullshit and ended up getting the sack. I'm glad. I grew to hate that place and it's culture.

It's precisely this attitude that this song attacks and satirises which is why I like it so much. Any song that has the lyric "Grandma knitted me a great new sweater, my little life can't get any better" has got to be solid gold, right ?

In addition to the three songs, the film is scored by psychedelic rock band Blue Oyster Cult, so this film also holds some appeal to fans of that group too.

Bad Channels is a lot of fun, it certainly has it's flaws and much of it has aged badly, but if quirky straight to video sci-fi rock musicals are your thing then give this a go.

Overall I'm giving this 3 and a half minturised babes out of 5. Join me here again tomorrow where we'll find out just what Brick Bardo is up too...