Review by Ben Bussey
The above image is included just to ensure we are all well aware that this film is a product of the early 1990s.
I realise to my alarm that 90s retro seems to be a thing now, and it occurs to me that some younger readers might need to have some misconceptions put right. Much as how we young folk back then liked to imagine that everyone in the 1960s practiced free love, dropped acid, protested war and was a generally groovy person with radical values, I fear that kids today might be under similar illusions about the early 90s; that everyone cast off the artifice and “greed is good” philosophy of the 80s, and became a free-thinking, flannel-wearing, coffee-drinking headbanger. This is, of course, absolute bollocks. The grunge scene, if we have to call it that, may well have started life as a genuine grassroots movement against the mainstream, but all that really happened was the mainstream rapidly appropriated it – without really having the first clue what it was all about.
So, you’re asking – is this in some way what Bad Channels is all about? Well… no. It’s about aliens who take over a small town American radio station in order to hijack the airwaves, send out a signal which psychically manipulates young women, then teleports them into tiny glass jars having shrunk them to about eight inches in size. And it’s every bit as sophisticated as it sounds.
Don’t worry, I’m getting to the damn point; which is, as most of us agree, the early 90s were not a great time for horror movies. Sure, there were some good ones here and there, but on the whole the genre just didn’t seem to be working, particularly in the US – and the more I think about it, the more I suspect that cultural shift in America had something to do with it. There are all kinds of reasons the genre had absolutely flourished in the 80s – the boom in video and cable/satellite television, breakthroughs in special make-up effects, and an overall taste for the tasteless: tits, gore, neon lighting and power ballads reigned supreme. Companies like Full Moon well born and bred in this era. But how could horror filmmakers reconcile those crass, tawdry, politically incorrect sensibilities in an era which was casting aside those values in the hope of reconnecting with something more earthy and ‘real?’ Answer – for the most part, they didn’t, and wouldn’t until (like it or not) the post-modern irony of Scream breathed new life into the genre in 1996.
Now, Bad Channels doesn’t necessarily embody everything that was wrong with early 90s horror, but it does highlight some of the key problems people like Full Moon faced, and how they tried and failed to overcome them. For the most part it’s pretty standard Full Moon fare, clearly produced for peanuts on whatever sets were available – with the bulk of the action in this case taking place in a little radio station in the desert, outside of a town which, based on what we see, consists of nothing more than a roadside diner, a hospital and a high school gym. The plot’s simple enough, though (again in standard Full Moon fashion) it’s weighed down by a long and unnecessarily verbose build-up, in which we learn that notorious ‘shock jock’ Dan O’Dare (Paul Hipp, whose character name I assume is a pun on the old Eagle comic space hero) has taken residence on Buttfuck Nowhere FM in a last ditch effort to save his career with a publicity-seeking 3-day marathon show. Meanwhile, Lisa Cummings (Martha Quinn), the obligatory wannabe cable news anchor looking for her first big story, is dismayed to be sent to cover O’Dare’s stunt – until she sees a UFO arrive nearby. But when the aliens really do take over, Dan’s listeners obviously just think it’s part of the show…
So far, so Roger Corman in his sleep. Then it all gets really batshit, with the aforementioned centrepiece scenes in which a succession of young women are hypnotised by music, and ultimately kidnapped by the aliens. It’s with these that Bad Channels crosses over pretty much into full-blown musical territory, as the bands the ladies hear over the airwaves come to life before their eyes, compelling them to dance like women possessed, which it seems is an essential part of shrinking them to Barbie doll proportions and dropping them in a jar like Doctor Pretorious. (I dunno, ask Charles Band about it, the whole damn thing is said to be his idea – although the film was actually directed by Ted Nicolau.) The thing is, these musical interludes are so painfully at odds with everything else that’s going on. First up we have screaming glam metallers Fair Game doing some hideous screaming glam metal, yet with strangely atypical lyrics about government corruption (early 90s, I guess); next we have the grungers pictured above, DMT, doing a painfully lazy and obvious recreation of the Teen Spirit video, with a considerably less catchy song about wanking (‘Touching Myself Again’); and finally there’s some prototype Insane Clown Posse types called Sykotik Sinfoney doing a mock-happy tune about being bipolar. Oh, and did I mention there’s also original music from Blue Oyster Cult…? I guess the idea here was to appear relevant, maybr even (gulp) edgy, to the young early 90s audience. I think we can safely say they weren’t especially successful in this.
What makes Bad Channels all the more of an oddity is – beyond the music and the aliens (which are, needless to say, very low quality), there’s almost nothing to sell it. Most alarming of all, it’s all very PG-13: there’s the odd F-bomb, but no gore (what little action there is winding up very cartoonish) and no nudity (even with the hypnotised dancing girls). Subsequently, just about the only way I can recommend Bad Channels is – again – as an example of what a strange place the horror genre was in the early 90s. Still, it’s not without a few laughs, and has more than passing entertainment value just for the sheer what-the-fuckness of it all.
Bad Channels is out on Region 2 DVD on 17th March, from 88 Films.