In Brief: A nugget of unfiltered, low-budget, 80s-permed, synth-pop extravagance. So pop it in your glass pipe and light it up. ***
source: Netflix (not currently available)
How do you solve a problem like Albert Pyun?
We’ll always be together, however far it seeeeeeems. We’ll always be together, together in radioactive dreammsssssss
I usually can’t help but mock his films, yet every time I find one, I am inescapably drawn to watch it. And even as I laugh, I know he is distinguished from the hordes of low-budget schlock-hounds we might consider his peers. The joke’s on me, really. He does his thing and I tag along every time. I might poke fun, but I’m the sidekick. And he’s accumulated many more over the years, in various dark, unwashed corners of cult cinema. Because we must consider this: even if he’s made a hundred bad films, hardly any of them are bad in the same way. And a select few are bad in ways no one had ever previously envisioned. 
His work has varied wildly in budget, quality, and genre, but it all comfortably evades clear classification as, ‘good’. Certainly, the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle, Cyborg deserves more cult appeal considering it is Pyun making a rock opera, sans music, after the producers obviously told him, “No Mr. Pyun, you are not allowed to make this a rock opera”. But while that’s an interesting thought, and a noble rebellion on paper, if you don’t consider that going into the film, it’s just odd and uncomfortable: like it was shot on itchy film stock. Such antics sum up Pyun as an artistic force. He is a man who proclaims each project was a grand vision that was improperly nurtured by uncaring, external forces. But with every rule comes an exception. And for Albert Pyun, that would be Vicious Lips.
What is Vicious Lips? It’s basically a risqué, live-action, sublimation of Jem and the Holograms. Plot is secondary and here details and event are mixed-and-matched to arrive at a format that might be best described as ‘functionally abstract.’ That is, given how thin the core material is –mostly neon and hair-spray – chopping it up and packaging it as a synth-pop fantasia is actually a pretty good idea that helps both energise matters and repel questions concerning certain narrative deficiencies- questions that likely could not find good answers anyway. But really, none of that matters because, despite its small budget, Vicious Lips is just a rock-and-roll ride through 80s space.
One of these hair-styles in not like the others…
Meanwhile, at a meeting of ’80s Anonymous’
Set in the distant future, the all-girl band Vicious Lips have lost their lead vocalist, Ace Lucas. This is a problem because they’ve just been given the chance of a lifetime: to perform at an inter-galactic pop music festival that can make or break careers. So they have to do two things- 1) find a new vocalist and 2) traverse the galaxy to try and make it to their set on time. Luckily a new singer is quickly acquired from a school talent show, and, with a stolen spaceship, they’re on their way. Unfortunately they get hit by an asteroid, crash-land, and subsequently discover that a vicious mass-murderer was imprisoned in the ship they stole and the impact has set him free. How are the girls ever going to tease their hair just right amidst all this calamity?
And meanwhile, in the dystopia-room…
Remember kids, if you must smoke, don’t inhale
If all that sounds mad-cap and gloriously unhinged well, it is, but not quite in the way you might expect. With such a small budget the film doesn’t have a lot of room for changing sets or indulging in wild spectacle leading to hefty doses of improvisation and with that, the most 80s-est, New York-iest far-flung future you could ask for. The quality of the more outlandish special effects gain additional clout when set within other scenes that re-arrange objects in the same room to create new backdrops. What really counts here is atmosphere and visuals. If Pyun is short on amazing things to film, then he can at least keep things interesting by filming the ordinary in an amazing way. Through ambitious lighting and framing, and judicious use of smoke machines, every set holds the overriding aesthetic steady- culminating in a bombastic amateurishness that suggests, in another cut of the film Rushmore, that Max Fisher might have staged his own rendition of Bladerunner. Add the most garish 80s fashion that time tried to forget and a healthy dose of infuriatingly up-beat power-pop and whatever’s left of the film’s ingredients hardly seem relevant.
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Dropping the bass
Reflections of 80s pop excess
To try and expand on the film’s storyline, it would seem a psychological trip through the new vocalist’s young mind as she tries to find her identity as a performer. Meanwhile she must resist the previous vocalist’s personality cult while also contending with various degrees of resistance from the rest of the group. Or perhaps there was no previous lead singer and she merely reels from the psychic disconnect of artistic reinvention or revelation. Or whatever, really. Concrete interpretation feels at odds with the overall aesthetic of the project which, under Pyun’s (possibly competent?) guidance, remains ethereal and impervious to concrete interpretation. What emerges above all else is a real feeling of excitement, adventure, and countless possibilities that fly in the face of a shoe-string budget. As the singer cuts loose so the film flies, intoxicating us with its absurd picture of artistic release.
Turn around, bright-eyes.
Roving bands of mutated 50s greasers threaten the very future of synth-pop
In the future there shall be showers of neon.
So obviously, this appears to be the closest Pyun ever got to delivering on his own boisterous initial sketches. Although with plenty more of his films yet to see, perhaps he’s succeeded elsewhere. If so, it certainly wasn’t with Steven Seagal in Ticker or the cyborg martial arts opus Heatseeker. Here, the results are a genuine and pleasant surprise. It likely helped that this was only his fourth feature and he was aided by a booming direct-to-video market that afforded an artistic rogue like himself a little more elbow room. And did I mention that Vicious Lips boasts a three-breasted hooker that pre-dates Total Recall? That’s the sort of thing that can swing a BC/AD-style divide in the historical record. So as the 28th year of the Three-Boobed Mutant Hooker draws to a close, Pyun’s film still holds sway.
Almost makes me wish I had three hands. And a hair-clippers. And a paper bag.
Concentric Ocelot Party 
Reblogged this on Personal Superlative.