Radio Alien

Here's a sci-fi / horror B flick for the MTV generation, a positively goofy and cartoonish piece of lightly entertaining trash. Paul Hipp stars as "Dangerous" Dan O'Dare, a controversial radio disc jockey doing a marathon at isolated station KDUL. Well, along comes an alien, a bipedal monstrosity with a hilariously oversized head and a faithful robot. The alien (Michael Deak) takes over the station, and puts into a motion a plot to kidnap and shrink hot young woman by hypnotizing them with rock video styled visions.

"Bad Channels" has to rank as one of the silliest things that Full Moon produced. If one is looking for "cheese ball" entertainment, they could do worse than this. The various rock acts are passable, with Sykotik Sinfoney rating as the WTF highlight. This act dresses in various costumes and plays some pretty absurd stuff. All of the creature and makeup effects are pretty tacky, but that may only add to the appeal for some in the audience. That robot has to be seen to be believed.

The cast is basically okay. It is cool to see MTV VJ Martha Quinn in one of the leading roles, as ace reporter Lisa Cummings. The cast includes other familiar faces as Aaron Lustig, Ian Patrick Williams, Michael Huddleston, and Sonny Carl Davis. Sexy co-stars Charlie Spradling, Daryl Strauss, and Melissa Behr give it all their all as they dance away in what they think are these rock videos.

The truly worthy component is a score by the veteran rock band Blue Oyster Cult. Folks do have to wait through the closing credits for the best joke in the movie, a cameo by a Full Moon franchise character. As always, it's a pleasure to see this actor in anything.

Five out of 10.

There's a new DJ in the town of Pahoota, shock jock Dangerous Dan O'Dare (Paul Hipp). He's about to bring some rock'n'roll to the former polka channel KDUL Superstation 66.6. A pretty reporter (former MTV VJ Martha Quinn) is covering the story for a TV network when she sees a UFO. Of course, no one believes her. Dan finds out she's telling the truth when an alien that has a head that looks like a blue-black cauliflower with a window set in front, and his robot minion, take over the radio station. The alien has come to Earth to shrink women and place them in bottles using Dan's voice to pick the best-looking female listeners. Each woman the alien wants experiences a rock fantasy, much like a music video, that others can't see. Yes, really.

This admittedly silly Full Moon film is a sci-fi rock'n'roll comedy, and it delivers the goods with pretty girls, great music and some laughs too. No one will call this movie a classic, but it's fun in a "check your brain at the door" sort of way. The music is pretty awesome. There's a heavy metal song (with Ron Keel), a grunge rock song and, my favorite, "Manic Depresso" by Sykotik Sinfoney, a silly song with guys in clown, cow and nun outfits. Yes, really.

The acting is fairly good, although some actors are a bit over the top. Ted Nicolaou's direction is competent, if uninspired. The music score is by the rock band Blue Oyster Cult. Those who normally skip the end credits may want to know that the final joke takes place after the credits. (Of course, you might need to be a Full Moon fan to really appreciate it.) When Cinemax broadcast this movie back in the 1990s, they unfortunately cut out the final scene. A movie titled DOLLMAN VS. THE DEMONIC TOYS is a sequel to DOLLMAN, DEMONIC TOYS and BAD CHANNELS simultaneously. (Actually, this "sequel" changes the ending to BAD CHANNELS, and it's not good at all.) The DVD includes an 11 minute featurette (a condensed version of "Videozone".)

Although this movie is hard to recommend to the average movie lover, I found it to be highly entertaining.

Well, you certainly won't expect Citizen Kane renting this movie, but it's mildly entertaining. Martha Quinn really needed to have a better agent, given this and other career killers, but her chemistry with Paul Hipp (Dangerous Dan O'Dare) is enjoyable. The goal of the rest of movie is one thing pure and simply: titillation, and it doesn't accomplish that. The rock video visions, which I'm sure were intended to give a rock-n-roll edge to the movie, simply detracted.

This is by far, one of the silliest movies I've ever had the pleasure of seeing. I mean, it was so asinine I just *had* to rent it on three separate occasions to prove to different groups of friends that such a monstrosity could be made! It was released in 1992, but feels more like it was made in 1982!

The `hero' is the `bad boy' or radio, Dangerous Dan O'Dare. Dan treats his listeners to publicity stunt after publicity stunt, with the odd 80's glam rock song thrown in for good measure. An alien lands in what appears to a giant novelty light-up yo-yo and proceeds to take over the radio station which just happens to have a nation-wide broadcasting range on frequency 66.6.

The alien uses the radio signals and the sound of Dan's voice to target young women listening to the station, and capture them in little glass tubes. However, before the women are transported, they hallucinate that they're in music videos which take place in the locations they're at. There's nothing funnier than seeing some rockers straight out of the 80's appear in a diner and try to give a convincing performance.

Naturally, a movie of this calibre is full of holes. Dan figures out pretty early on that his voice was being used to target the women, but instead of shutting up, he goes on and on describing the aliens and telling people not to listen, which, of course, they ignore and keep on doing.

I laughed at the cliché small-town cop who must have been paid a set amount each time he discredited the alien's existence. The entire town he's patrolling says they saw an alien, and several of the women were reported having vanished into thin air. But this cop chalks it up to them all being drunk or something. Even when he sees the alien first hand he gives the `sarcastic cop' routine, and tells everyone to move along.

The `music videos' are all terrible, covering all sorts of the least favourable genres. Glam rockers invade the diner, a grunge band causes a ditzy cheerleader to seductively gyrate during band practice, and the crème de la crème, Psychotik Sinfony performs a clown metal piece in the hospital, causing a nun to mosh and play bass guitar.

Back in the operating room, the doctor is operating on a patient who earlier was infected by the alien fungus. When the nurse suddenly disappears, the patient bolts up in amazement. Which begs two questions; what kind of doctor lets his nurse listen to Dan O'Dare while he's performing delicate surgery, and why the hell didn't he use any anaesthetic on the patient!?

The climax is about the least exciting thing in the whole movie. Dan accidentally discovers that fungicide hurts the alien, and the radio station just happens to have a whole box of it! Dan frees the women by randomly playing with the alien's controls and the alien splits open revealing a weird Venus-flytrap-like monster within. Together, Dan and the women they stand around within arm's reach of the alien and spray it with fungicide in the least dramatic way possible. Dan tries to liven things up by shouting `die you rat ba**ard' a few times, but it has no effect.

The reason for the alien capturing the women is never explained, nor does anyone ever consider looking for the space ship that landed only about a mile away. If the radio station was broadcasting nation-wide, why were the only people being abducted from the surrounding town? And how did the alien infect the guy at the beginning before it had even landed?

I could go on for ages, but it'd simply be easier if you were to go out and rent it yourself. You'd at least expect the movie's description on the box sleeve to at least attempt to make it sound like a scary sci-fi horror feature, instead touts it as a `hilarious rock and roll adventure of sci-fi comedy'. You know something's wrong when even the box sleeve doesn't take it seriously.

Utterly bonkers movie regarding a 'shock jock' at the local radio station finding himself in danger (like the girl who cried fire to get attention then burnt to death) because aliens invade the radio studios and start collecting women (including busty waitress Cookie played by once-upon-a-time Full Moon favourite Charlie Spradling) in conical vases. Ted Nicolaou, a veteran of Full Moon films including some of their best really screws this up with lazy-haphazard and purposeless direction while the script by Charles Band and Jackson Barr (probably not a real person) is certainly among the formers' worst efforts. Tim Thomerson's Dollman character is credited and I was confused how I had missed his cameo but stay tuned until the credits finish for a relatively amusing brief Dollman extra scene. The aliens are ridiculous, one a scale covered monster, another a small tin robot that looks like it was a reject from the acclaimed Smash Potato Mix adverts. Truly rubbish film but intriguing and amusingly painful in equal measures.