My memories, having not seen the film in over 40 years:

I first saw Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky on VHS in the early ‘80s at the age of 20, and I loved its New Wave style, its Bowie-like androgyny, the blend of music and visuals, and its aimless characters exploring life through sex, drugs, violence, and sci-fi.

I also quite liked some of the editing choices, which I think were brilliant. The actors, who I assume were mostly amateurs, are actually quite good in most places, and not as bad as some internet commentators maintain.

The plot, from my memory, is about miniature aliens who have landed on the roof of an apartment building, and they’re somehow using a woman in the building (Anne Carlisle) to harvest chemicals from the brains of people she has sex with for its heroine-like rush. Those harvested do not survive.

I remember being particularly impressed by the final scenes, where Carlisle’s character confronts the aliens. IN medium and long shots, we see her frantically reacting to the aliens in a wild, spasmodic dance, but when we cut to her point of view, she’s frozen and peering at the aliens. This dichotomy of frantic motion and almost hypnotic communion with the aliens felt thematically similar to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which Astronaut Bowman meets and is abducted by the aliens, and the experience is terrifying, transcendent, and entirely new.

Now, I’m going to watch the film afresh.

I will confess, I forgot how sad the movie is, but I also forgot how funny it is. It’s sad because Margaret, played by Anne Carlisle, is a beautiful young woman who is treated as little more than a sex object by the men and women in her life. It’s all about what people want from her - at no point does anyone do anything for her, until the aliens grant her wish and eliminate the bodies that are beginning to pile up in her penthouse apartment.

At first, the aliens, like nearly everyone in the movie, use Margaret for sex. In the aliens’ case, they are feeding on the heroine like chemicals produced in the human brain during orgasm. Margaret is seemingly protected from the aliens, not out of kindness or gratitude, but because the sex she experiences is never pleasurable for her. She is an object of lust, and her enjoyment is never a consideration.

But when Margaret is overwhelmed by the bodies piling up in her apartment, the aliens make them vanish.

“They did it for me!” said Margaret in wonder, and my heart broke because the experience of kindness was literally alien to her.

Anne Carlisle played two characters in the film, Margaret and Jimmy, a cruel, narcissistic, gay model and drug addict who calls Margaret a “chicken” and cruelly says she’s ugly. Carlisle also co-wrote the movie.

“I had studied acting for a while, but I had also become very involved in club life,” said Carlisle in an interview at the Alamo Drafthouse in New York, included as an extra on the Blu-Ray. “And this is really my story, exaggerated.”

This tracks because many of the interactions between Margaret and those who seek to victimize her feel very real.

Many of the characters in the movie are based on people she knew. Carlisle played Jimmy in the movie because the real-life Jimmy was unable to do it. “He was too close to the character.”

I have to talk about the soundtrack, which I think is brilliant, absolutely unique, and so of the moment. A year earlier or later would have made this soundtrack impossible.

The movie is also funny. It opens with what appears to be a giant UFO hovering over New York, which is instantly revealed to be a tiny ship, about the size of a dinner plate. There are killer, funny lines of dialogue, some of which are quite dark:

• “To be fashionable, be androgynous. I kill with my cunt, isn’t it fashionable?”

• “There’s nothing else to do; we might as well dance.”

• “Margaret is an uptight WASP cunt from Connecticut.”

• “You’re from Germany? I’m Jewish,” says Jimmy’s mother, Sylvia, as she works to seduce a German scientist.

Sylvia is very funny. Her infatuation and unsuccessful seduction of the German scientist would be sweet and romantic in a normal movie. In a scene where she orders Chinese food, we learn how much she loves shrimp, an odd character detail that adds nothing but humor to the narrative.

I think Liquid Sky was far ahead of its time in terms of queer characters. Sadly, few of the characters, queer or straight, are kind. They are all driven by short-term need: mostly sex and drugs. It’s nihilistic, and in her Alamo Drafthouse interview, Carlisle admits that during that period of her life, she was a nihilist. Happily, after leaving acting, she returned to school and became an art therapist, and later still worked with people experiencing homelessness.

Some final thoughts, in no particular order:

• The use of neon in this movie reminds me of John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and a recent trip I took to the American Sign Museum in Cincinnati.

• The scientist’s arrival by airplane mirrors the UFO’s arrival at the beginning of the film, a nice bit of symmetry.

• A reference to the battles between mods and rockers feels like a reference to Franc Roddam’s Quadrophenia (1979). That said, it’s also a historical event.

• When the first two people die from sex, a clear crystal, what Margaret calls a “glass arrow,” is embedded in their heads. When Margaret pulls one of the arrows free, it disappears from her hand. Later, dead bodies are instantly vanished by the aliens, per Margaret’s request.

• One of the more fucked up sequences is when Margaret kills Jimmy via oral sex, where Anne Carlisle plays both characters.

• It turns out Anne Carlisle wrote a novelization of the film, published by Doubleday! Something I’ll be looking for.

• Is this a rape/revenge film?

• Do the aliens take Margaret with them at the end of the film? The possibility of a sequel in which Carlisle returns suggests to me that she does.

• I love the fact that Margaret wears a wedding dress to finally confront the aliens. She finally feels loved, and I truly hope she finds it.

The DVD is filled with extras, including some deteriorated rehearsal videos, interviews with Carlisle and Tsukerman, and much more.

I have a fondness for this film, and unlike some decades-later rewatches, I found myself enjoying it without many cringy moments.

Recommended reading: “A brief history of neon-soaked cult film Liquid Sky” by Colleen Kelsey, on InterviewMagazine.com.