Friday, November 4, 2016

Bad Channels (1992) Movie Review

Bad Channels is a 1992 straight-to-video film from Full Moon Entertainment.

"Dangerous" Dan O'Dare is a DJ who is returning to the air after receiving a six month suspension from the FCC. O'Dare's suspension, it's revealed, stemmed from him producing a live broadcast of himself having anal sex with a female police officer. At the beginning of the film, he is chained and shackled to the wall of radio station KDUL while a nonstop loop of polka music plays. He's performing a stunt in which he can't unshackle himself or turn off the polka until a listener calls in and guesses the combination to his padlock. This has apparently been going on for hours, but people are still calling and guessing. A correct guess is supposed to earn the guesser a new car.

https://i.imgur.com/57d4m05.jpg
And what's the deal with airline food?

KDUL, as it turns out, is broadcasting at 666kHz, a frequency no one else has ever been willing to use out of superstition. Since 666kHz is barren, KDUL is able to broadcast across the entire nation without any interference, thereby making them the most powerful AM radio station in the world. An electrical worker named Willis is outside a substation looking at their transformers when he notices flashes of light and a strange green fungus coming from one. Willis, for reasons unexplained, believes this is being caused by the radio station "kicking in" and decides to check it out. He approaches the fungus and is suddenly abducted by aliens.

Meanwhile, the polka marathon continues. A still locked O'Dare is being interviewed on TV network CWN when he asks the host to make a guess to the combination. The host says, "1, 2, 3," and he's right. Anchor Lisa Cummings is pissed off by this and accuses O'Dare of setting the contest up just to earn TV coverage. O'Dare confesses that it was all a setup, but says it was so he could meet Cummings. Cummings yells at him and then sees mysterious lights off in the distance, behind O'Dare. She reports this to Sheriff Hickman who thinks she's crazy.

After they leave and O'Dare goes back inside, a food delivery man is abducted by aliens just outside of KDUL. Down at the substation, Hickman and Cummings come across Willis who is back on earth. Willis is crying and rambling about aliens poking and prodding him. He opens his shirt and reveals that his chest and stomach are covered in the green fungus. Cummings thinks this is a great news story and starts recording it. Willis is taken to the hospital where the doctor describes it as "the worst case of jock itch he's ever seen", because lol?

https://i.imgur.com/VHUZ1Ym.jpg
Get that man some goddamned Lamisil!

Down at the hospital, Cummings is carrying a camera around and trying to get an interview with Willis. Meanwhile at KDUL, O'Dare is making fun of people who believe in UFOs when, wouldn't you know it, an alien and a robot blow through the front door of the building and take over the station. The alien and robot look ridiculous. O'Dare describes the alien as looking like a "turd with a porthole window", and he's right. The whole situation is being live broadcast, but it's assumed to be a stunt and no one responds to it at all.

https://i.imgur.com/XFfOZs5.jpg
I told you O'Dare was right.

The door returns without explanation and is quickly sealed with the mysterious green fungus. The alien and robot cover the studio with fungus, install strange tools on the station's equipment, and force O'Dare to continue broadcasting. The intruders manage to use the power of clear frequencies to shrink various townswomen and capture them in glass bottles. This includes a truckstop waitress, a nurse at the hospital, the cymbal player in a high school's band, and Cummings. The alien kills the robot after a mistake temporarily let Cummings evade capture. Each of the capture scenes is bizarre, a hallucination in the form of a music video. The last in particular is complete nightmare fuel.

https://i.imgur.com/rrJNYhP.jpg
Seriously, what the hell is even going on here?

O'Dare ultimately realizes that the power of his voice is being used to capture the women, but the threat of the alien renders him helpless to stop. After one of his coworkers is seemingly killed while trying to fight off the alien, O'Dare figures out that the fungus and alien are vulnerable to Germisol for some reason. He sprays the alien with his Germisol can, but runs out before he can finish him off. In a last ditch effort to escape, he enters into fisticuffs with the alien. This is one of the worst fight scenes in the history of cinema.

O'Dare stabs the alien with a knife he found and is able to save three of the four women. The stabbing somehow turned the alien into a half-robot half weird Super Mario Bros. piranha plant looking thing. O'Dare's coworker suddenly comes back from the dead and breaks out of a fungus cocoon, and O'Dare is able to find more cans of Germisol. He gives cans to everyone, and they surround and start spraying the alien until it dies and magically vanishes. This is somehow an even worse fight scene.

https://i.imgur.com/h8X2Pqh.jpg
Antiseptic vs Alien: The Final Showdown

O'Dare, his coworker, and the three women, forgetting the fourth completely, blast through the door and exit the station. People crowded around KDUL break into applause, but the sheriff says that O'Dare is under arrest (I guess for causing a panic?). Cummings tells the sheriff to "just look in there", he does, and O'Dare and Cummings walk off and start making out even though she completely hated him just minutes earlier. The remaining woman beats on her glass container, screams for help, and the credits roll.

Unexplained is why the alien and robot chose to capture women in glass containers; and why, if they were interested in women, were their first abductions of men. Is Willis going to be okay? What even happened to the food guy? Is O'Dare still going to be arrested? Why was so much antiseptic laying around, and why was the alien vulnerable to it? Where did the alien even come from, and was it actually an alien since it had robot legs? Did operating on 666kHz have anything to do with anything? The world will never know.

The film's only real redeeming quality comes from the soundtrack, which is quite good throughout. My recommendation: buy the soundtrack and forget the movie even exists.