Voyage Of The Rock Aliens

published in Fatal Visions No.5, Melbourne, 1989

In an issue of American Film back in 1985, John Waters did an interview with and appraisal of Pia Zadora. You could have been excused for thinking that Waters was playing a cheap game at updating his trash sensibilities and trying to be one jump ahead of the B-grade crowd. At the time, Pia's latest movie was Lonely Lady (based on Harold Robbins' book). I wouldn't have gone out of my way to see it, except I saw it as a double bill in San Francisco in 1984 with Russ Meyers' Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls (a beautiful Cinemascope print). Believe me: Lonely Lady really is so seriously bad, you'd swear it came from another dimension. It's that kind of badness that only comes from outright dedication to total art on the part of the filmmakers - except they fail miserably. The Medved Brothers (and you can kick their butts for me if you ever cross them in the street) have made a career of sorts by trying to force a programmatic aesthetic out of such ad hoc occurrences, rendering their four publications inane, inaccurate and insipid, save for some occasional research data they uncover.

In many ways, Pia seems as though she had the Medveds design her career, it truly is so archetypically vacuous in the grand Hollywood style of hyperbole and hype-cash. But Waters was able to put this in perspective in 1985 - possibly because he was hanging around to get her into one of his own mainstream crossover productions (Pink flamingos 2, etc). Whatever the case, Pia is the essence par excellence of all the off-beam jokes people sling at the so-called bimbos of the entertainment industry (from Marilyn Munro to Farah Fawcett to Madonna). Of course the catch is that all these so called bimbos are far from dumb. The dumbos are those who call them bimbos. Pia Zadora in the end comes off as a mix of Munro, Fawcett and Madonna, all rolled into a chubby little child-bride figurine for her filthy rich hubby Meshulam Riklis. Like all bimbos in the spotlight, she must be getting a helluva kick out of riling those who think the arts and entertainment fields have standards to which all should measure up.

That brings us to Pia's latest starring screen effort to date: Voyage Of The Rock Aliens. Now really this film is unique. Once again, I find myself stressing the point of uniqueness, because this film is so bad it affords a cinematic experience that most other boringly bad cheap movies are incapable of generating. Imagine someone sitting down and saying, "Hey, I've got a great idea! Let's update The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the 80s MTV generation! You know - sort of mix everything up so it's like a hodgepodge of Beach Blanket Bingo, Monster of Party Beach, Grease, Porky's, Xanadu, Toxic Avenger, Ferris Beuller's Day Off and ... and ... yeah - Michael Jackson's "Beat It"!". The catch being that this is proposed in total seriousness and with a self-deluding sense of wholesome teenager entertainment. The plot is too difficult to detail (just start criss-crossing the plots of all the films just mentioned and you've sort of got it - plus throw it in bits of Spermula, Galaxina, Cotton Candy and Flashdance!). Pia wears over 20 costumes (per half hour) and executes some of the worst choreographed routines ever dreamt up in a cheap LA dance studio. Jermaine Jackson appears in the beginning pretending to be his brother Michael - he fails, so he's gone for the rest of the movie! (The duet he sings with her, "When The Rain Begins To Fall" - the original title of this film prior to the producers realising they had a stick on their hands - didn't exactly set the pop sugar charts on fire.)

As for the main men in the film, one looks like Frank N. Furter's beach boy creation from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, while the other looks like a genetic Bamix job between Timothy Bottoms and Kevin Dillon (think about it). And - this'll kill ya - the main music score is provided by Real Life! "Send Me An Angel" wafts throughout the whole film like someone left a New Romantic muzak machine plugged into the film's final sound mix. (Who am I to laugh? They have recently reformed and they're still wearing those incredible Sandra Rhodes-type sci-fi Punk outfits. Très holocaust, darlings.) But if that's not enough, one of the film score's producers is Mr. Teen Hollywood, Mike Curb, come back to haunt us after the movie score he provided for The Garbage Pail Kids movie (but that's another amazing story).

Yep - Voyage Of The Rock Aliens has enough for at least 10 films. The only problem is it's like watching those ten films at once - but that's pretty post-modern these days anyway. A final note: check out the latest issue of Life (yet another 'Hollywood Anniversary' issue). Pia and Meshulam recently purchased Pickfair (one of the most famous of all Hollywood star residences, next to the Spahn Ranch) for $7 million, and are in the middle of spending the same again on refurbishing it for their family. Life tries to create a picture of domestic bliss and gracious good luck, with Pia in designer overalls on a ladder scraping the ceiling. The real alien in all of this, of course, is Pia herself: if she is a typical earthling, I'm the Venusian distributor of Weekly World News.

Text © Philip Brophy 1989. Images © respective copyright holders