One of my favorite sub-genres of the eighties is the science fiction musical. Vicious Lips (1986) is a classic installment along with Forbidden Zone (1980), The Return Of Captain Invincible (1983), the cartoon series Jem (1985-88), and my personal favorite Voyage Of The Rock Aliens (1984). Each of these movies is an irresistibly coked out fusion of genres glued together with big hair, shoulder pads, and a micro budget.
Vicious Lips was helmed by trash auteur Albert Pyun who really makes the most of what he’s been handed. The sets aren’t finished so Pyun has to shoot creatively around the gaps or he just drapes pink fabric over the incomplete portions. This gives Vicious Lips the same sort of disjointed feeling as Alien From L.A. (1988). Vicious Lips, like so many of Pyun’s early films, is suggestive of a good many ideas that the filmmaker simply could not realize with the money available.
Pyun’s script is pretty simple and clearly takes the limits of the production into account. The band Vicious Lips has just gotten a new lead singer, Judy Jetson (Dru-Anne Perry), when they set off with their sleazy manager Matty (Anthony Kentz) to play the gig that will make them stars. A bulk of the film is revealed to be a nightmare that Judy has en route to the show. This retconned dream sequence starts off making about as much sense as any Pyun flick before going totally off the rails with killer alien beasts, cannibal punk rockers, and sultry desert sirens. One gets the impression that Pyun simply wrote himself into a corner and had to invent a way out.
After Judy awakes from her dream it’s onto the show stopping finale number “Lunar Madness”. Of all the rockin’ hot tunes in Vicious Lips “Lunar Madness” is the best. It’s an intense Pat Benatar knock off with science fiction allusions galore. It’s a song with enough drive and muscle to feel conclusive and end the film.
The biggest issue with this campy eighties spectacle is that, by turning most of the film into a dream and then wrapping up the picture with a song, there really are no characters arcs or dramatic stakes. Pyun essentially makes most of Vicious Lips irrelevant, repeating the same mistakes as Paul McCartney with Give My Regards To Broadstreet (1984). The primary difference is that Pyun’s film is too stupid not to be fun while McCartney’s movie is just downright boring.
