Liquid Sky
Liquid Sky
R | 15 April 1983 (USA)
Liquid Sky Trailers

An alien creature invades New York's punk subculture in its search for an opiate released by the brain during an orgasm.

Reviews
Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!
SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie
Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.
Benas Mcloughlin Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.
Shuggy I saw this when it came out and was intrigued, and wondered if it would become a cult movie. Seeing it again, I see clearly why it never did.The premise, that aliens might be tiny and feast on our endorphins, whether from drugs or sex, was novel then. The (16-colour?) computer graphics to illustrate it were all we knew, and androgyny and sexual freedom were just beginning to be overshadowed by the AIDS epidemic.In hindsight, the film is amateurish: the characters and dialogue are as stilted as porn (or so I'm told). The music sounds like it is played on a Commodore 64, with an emphasis on square waves that hurt the ears, and Marin Marias' "Sonnerie" has never been so boring. The plot line makes little sense. The aliens leave glass daggers in the heads of two of the characters they kill, and the daggers vanish. The next two corpses themselves vanish, one in front of many onlookers who soon seem to forget the event. While the five deaths are all presented as if from the aliens' viewpoint (and all very similarly), we gain little insight into them or their modus operandi. Most of the human characters are unlikable and one of the two who is (albeit tedious), comes to an unjust and unhappy end.Rocky Horror (1975) did androgyny, camp, face-painting, sex, drugs & alien invasion vastly better, and with wit and songs. It's sad to think of what this might have been.
Pavel Mayer Watched it after about 30 years again, and it was still a stunning, shocking and hilarious experience today as it was when I saw it the first time. This was in the mid 1980s in a cinema in Munich where Liquid Sky was shown every week for at least ten years. The only film I am aware of that gained an even more prominent cult status is the "Rocky Horror Picture Show".There are other parallels to the "Rocky Horror Picture Show": Liquid Sky has a similar effect on your mind that could best be described as liberating. It is a bold movie, an attack of sound and color, sex, violence, drugs and crazy characters. What makes all this bearable is the hilarity of the whole story. While normally in movies you are often required to suspend your disbelief to enjoy it, in Liquid Sky disbelief is the rescue line that keeps you sane and lets you enjoy it.Some scenes were burned into my mind forever when I first saw it. However, it is the kind of movie you can watch over and over, like a good piece of art.It is also a child of its time, giving a glimpse into subcultures in New York in the late 70s/early 80s that may have been the avant-garde for the 90s Rave-Culture.Liquid Sky is one of a kind, and you will have missed a life experience if you never saw it.
lobofoam Liquid Sky is set against the 80's punk scene, with most of the main characters working as avant-garde models. If the movement had been as bizarre as what is depicted in the film, I have no doubt it would still be around today. For a film with such a low-budget, the acting is surprisingly good. Anne Carlisle (who also worked on the script) plays dual roles. She stars as the main character, Margaret, a small town girl who moved to New York City seeking fame and fortune. While Margaret realized her dreams, life as a successful model seems joyless and empty. She has a monologue near the end of the film that is truly heartbreaking. These moments of cinematic magic occur when terrific acting meets terrific writing. Carlisle also plays Jimmy, a gay male model who serves as Margaret's antagonist. Paula Sheppard is perfectly cast as Margaret's girlfriend, a lesbian drug dealer. ...Then the aliens show up. While the special effects are a constant reminder of the film's 500,000 budget, they do possess a certain rough charm. The aliens themselves are never seen, and their spaceship is roughly the size of a dinner plate. Sometimes the film is shot from the alien's point-of-view, a cheap effect achieved by polarizing the film stock. What turns Liquid Sky from a mere curiosity into a cult classic is the deft direction of Vladislav Tsukerman. He creates a rich sense of mood and character through the use of unexpected and original camera angles and framing. With the help of some precise editing, he juggles a myriad of characters and subplots that don't converge until the end of the film. The overall effect is interesting, never disjointed. Admittedly, the downstairs heroin addict is given too much screen time and he has little to do with the overall plot (despite the fact that his drug of choice provides the film with his name.)
Henrik Erlandsson The years around 1980 seem turbulent in this film. If I say subculture clubbing, East Berlin, rogue fashion photography, androgeny and making a statement and you're still interested in catching an outrageous exaggeration of the times, I say watch this film.It's distinctly kooky. It features an abundance of (non-revealing) sex, drugs, killing, and heavy cussing, so much that you would think this a modern Hollywood film, not a 1982 one...This film really only lacks production on dialogue and replacing the utterly obnoxious 'main theme' or whatever you'd like to call that monstrosity, to be a true blockbuster cult movie and making the actors superstars.As for the story, hah, well it's weird enough but that's at least what made me want to see it. It's really very simply but was so weird I couldn't tell which way it'd go. Which is VERY different from modern stories. No spoilers, suffer the music and explore the story. :) It reminded me of those very different and strange comics of the 80s from Italy and France, and of Little Nemo in Slumberland, where the main character wakes up from a weird dream and says he's lost. This movie is just like that.