Pleasure Planet

Pyun’s masterclass in how to make a feature film with a double-digit budget, or where there is no production design, there will be smoke machines or perhaps some junk or rags will be hung up to suggest a fantastical environment. Unfortunately, Vicious Lips does not live up to the miserably low expectations that they elicit. In practice, it thus serves as a painful reminder of the specific characteristics of direct-to-video productions of the golden era of video rentalshops, when anything that had at least a more or less feature-length runtime and attractive packaging found a place on the shelves. Unfortunately, the content of this film’s premise of a futuristic all-girl glam-rock band that gets shipwrecked on a bizarre planet on the way to an important gig remains merely a hopelessly overstretched load of crap despite Pyun’s avant-garde editing games and the incomprehensible enthusiasm of the performers. With a high degree of leniency, it can be taken at least as one of the cheapest, most bizarre and drawn-out Alien rip-offs (if, instead of Giger’s monster, we settle for a guy in werewolf make-up). (12.07.2018)