Vicious Lips

MOVIE #1,530 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 04.11.24 ALBERT & AKERMAN: AN AUTEURIST STUDY IN CONTRAST + CONTINUUM The opening twenty minutes or so of this — Pyun’s third film, released fourth — are great: I love the hyperkinetic energy. Like when a guy gets his eye stamped out by a cigarette through a peephole and it's just a passing moment. It is edited in an almost abstract way, suggestive of subliminal advertising. There’s more than a little Easter egg in the form of the nightclub being called “Radioactive Dream.” The logline: “Sometime in the distant future, a fledgling band gets an opportunity for a breakthrough, if they can make it in time to a faraway planet to perform in a very popular club.” And so this band, the titular “Vicious Lips,” get into a spaceship with their brand new lead singer in tow, and then — UH-OH! — “A BIG FUCKING ROCK IS COMING” ...

As the spaceship crashes, so does the movie… to a grinding halt. Everything just ambles along with this quirky soundtrack low in the mix intercut with a loud orch hit now and again, the tone alternating between broadly comic and vaguely threatening at random. In about thirty minutes of screentime after they hit an asteroid and land on a sandy planet, almost nothing happens: the band's slick-talking manager begrudgingly goes looking for help and a man-creature enters their ship. I had high hopes for this guy right from the opening credits…


And with the action, so goes the acting…


(Not that it was ever ‘good’ per say, but that is next-level stilted/sleepy.)

Things don't really recover from this disjointed ⅓ of the action: the film just sort of dissolves into a fever dream— a literal, nonsensical nightmare, actually — then POOF! we're at the nightclub for the band's big show and an aardvark man wearing a tuxedo is introducing them? Sure!...


This performance is juxtaposed with a montage of the madness that just transpired, almost as if the film is winking and saying, hey what was that all about? I don't know! They probably just had to pad out the run-time. Then the movie mercifully ends.

Justin Decloux writes, “It’s impossible for me to watch the film and not wonder if Pyun was unconsciously articulating his own state of mind. Vicious Lips was supposed to be Pyun’s ‘prove them wrong’ follow-up to Sword and Radioactive Dreams; a simple, high concept, saleable product that could be knocked out quickly in seven days to the tune of $100,00. It obviously wasn’t enough time or money, because the picture stinks of sheer desperation.” The whole endeavor reminded me of the South Park underwear gnomes’ business plan…


Decloux also compares Vicious Lips to Antonioni and Resnais, which is a bit of a stretch imo, even if the similarities are mostly unintentional. The big ole lackluster “?” of a middle easily makes this his worst effort yet, which is a shame because the genesis of the idea, at least on paper, is a good one. And I fear this is a sentiment I could be repeating throughout this project.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,529 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,531 ⫸

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Sometime in the distant future, a fledgling band gets an opportunity for a breakthrough, if they can make it in time to a faraway planet to perform in a very popular club. It was released on October 28, 1986.