Year: 1992
Runtime: 88 min
Director: Ted Niccolou
Starring: Martha Quinn, Paul Hipp, Aaron Lustig, Melissa Behr, Michael Huddleston.
Some things just have a natural way of fitting together, like pieces of a puzzle. Peanut butter and jelly, mustard and hot dogs, Bruce Campbell and one-liners. One thing that I would have thought was an easy addition to that list would be rock and roll and science fiction. I mean, c’mon, Heavy Metal alone should have made that clear! But sometimes even a perfect combination can fall apart.
And with that not-at-all clumsy segue, allow me to introduce Bad Channels!
Full Moon’s videos are a tricky lot to watch. You never know if you’re going to get a brilliant little gem from a clever filmmaker (a la, Dollman) or something that leaves a sour taste in your mouth (a la, Murdercycle). No matter how good the trailer or how awesome the box art, you are always rolling the dice with one of Charles Band’s little gems. In fact, the only sure thing seems to be that his obsession with itty, bitty Smurf-sized people will always be front and center.
Bad Channels isn’t directed by the maestro himself, though it purports to be based on an original idea from his imagination factory and I don’t doubt it for a minute. After all, the central theme of the story is about turning gorgeous women into little Barbie dolls for…uh, well I don’t really know what our alien buddy wants with the ladies, but it’s best to assume it’s nothing good.
And that’s the whole plot. Not in a nutshell, not with any details omitted. Alien wants little women and not the literary kind, so he uses the magic of rock and roll to transmogrify them into convenient carry-on size. End of review. You can go home now.
Alright, alright, I’ll dig a little deeper than that. Sheesh, hold on…
The basics are that Dangerous Dave O’Dare, the alliterative shock rock DJ played by Paul Hipp, has arrived in a small town in California to take over the on air work at a fledgling polka radio station that wants to hit the big leagues. A publicity stunt involving O’Dare locked in chains until a listener can guess the combination to the padlock helps to introduce our other main character, a reporter named Lisa, played by none other than MTV’s original VJ Martha Quinn!
…what do you mean “what’s a VJ”? Radio had disc jockeys and MTV had video jockeys and—you know what, nevermind. I’m feeling pretty old right now.
At the time this movie was made, Quinn was still a pretty hot topic, having made a lasting impression on many youths through the 80s. Unfortunately, her skills as a VJ did not extend to acting, and her performance here just shows how desperately this movie needed one or two real actors.
I mean, sure, we get character actor Aaron Lustig delivering the movie’s only chuckles as the station’s director, a fussy little guy more concerned with on air ratings than a possible alien invasion.
Oh, I keep forgetting to explain that part. Maybe because the movie almost plays it as an afterthought.
In the middle of the radio station’s first night on the air, a bulbous-headed alien takes over the facility and intends to kidnap beautiful women with the power of rock and roll. Yeah. I wasn’t joking when I said that earlier. His presence turns the movie into one long music video, because each of the women he shrinks first becomes hypnotized by a different rock song performed by largely unknown bands like Sykotic Sinfoney, Fair Game, Joker, and DMT. The biggest claim to fame the movie has, and it markets this aggressively, is that it has an actual film score supposedly composed by the one and only Blue Oyster Cult, who are conspicuously absent from the music video segments.
I say supposedly composed because, honestly, it’s impossible to tell. There’s none of that Cult personality infused into the auditory noises that dribble in when no one is talking, and I think I only heard one of their songs play in part of a scene, though the credits claim two were featured. Maybe so, but if that’s the case, they were shoved into the background, which is absolutely the wrong place for any of BOC’s tunes. I’m a fan of their sci-fi inspired hard rock and though their name is front and center, their music is not, and if I’d been involved with the making of Bad Channels that would have been something I would have moved mountains to try and rectify.
I mean, the tunes we get aren’t bad, in fact some of them are pretty good, but everything can be improved with more Blue Oyster Cult. Everything.
Oh well, we’ll just have to deal with four music videos jammed into the movie without BOC. And when I say ‘music video’ I really mean music videos! The plot stops and the music takes over until each segment ends. They have absolutely nothing to do with the movie, aside from the vague notion that the alien needs to use the music to, I dunno, zap the women with his teleportation ray? It’s a thin excuse at best, and though the music videos are actually pretty good in terms of production quality and song selection (Sykotic Sinfony’s madcap heavy metal carnival Manic Depresso is a highlight) they still drag us out of the story, what little there is, to watch what amounts to an MTV special.
Heck, as an MTV special, this might have been more fun, using music to bookend short story segments with this alien who really never seems overly aggressive. I mean, aside from one minor character, the big bloke doesn’t actually kill anybody. Well, except his scrappy little robot companion. But I guess that just makes him a crappy boss.
The plot meanders about with no sense of urgency. Even as the alien kidnaps these women, it’s all played at a slow pace with absolutely no tension. This would be fine if the movie was more of a comedy, but it isn’t. The jokes are tepid. The movie is a semi-serious homage to the classic 1950 creature features, but director Ted Niccolou displays no real vision for the proceedings, so that events happen without purpose.
At least the alien costume looks kinda neat and the alien’s second form is a nice practical beast with slime and multiple heads, like a big green hydra. I have no idea why so much effort was put into a creature visible for just a minute or so at the very end of the movie, but it was a nice bit of work that livened up this otherwise dull film.
And that’s the final takeaway. Bad Channels is just boring, with only a bit of value as a relic of a time when music videos ruled cable and Full Moon had the budget to actually build a practical alien puppet instead of slapping one together out of bad CG. It might be worth a viewing late at night if you’re trying to complete a Full Moon collection, but this is not one of their finest moments.
