| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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THE REVENGE OF THE TEENAGE VIXENS FROM OUTER SPACE
Rating:
USA. 1986.
Director/Photography Jeff Ferrell, Screenplay/Producers Jeff Ferrell & Michelle Lichter. Production Company Malamute Productions.
Cast:
Lisa Schwedrop (Carla Murray), Howard Scott (Paul Moretti), Amy Crumpacker (Stephanie Miles), Julian Schemberg (Jack Moretti), Sterling Ramberg (Danny Pierce), Anne Lilly (Queen/Mary Jo), Susanne Darbey (Zody), Peter Guss (John Murray)
Plot: Four girls from a planet that has no men sign into high school where they immediately set about seducing every male present. When the human girlfriends get justifiably upset, the vixens retaliate by turning people and entire towns into vegetables.
There was a brief fad in the mid-to-late 1980s fad for deliberately bad sf movies. But of these few of the films produced were actually funny or even worthwhile films you could cite Big Meat Eater (1983) and Hell Comes to Frogtown (1987) but one is hard-pressed to find any others.
There is probably no sadder sight than a film trying to be self-consciously bad and failing at even that. The Revenge of the Teenage Vixens from Outer Space is one that certainly falls into this category. It comes out as some sort of horrible collision between a self-conscious attempt to make an Edward D. Wood Jr film and a copy of the teen makeout film like Porkys (1982). The alien vixens are really no more than a group of man-snatching hyper-sexed bimbos and the film sort of plays out as a battle of bitcheries between the alien bimbos and the good human girlfriends it could quite easily be a film about say girls from different schools or one group from the country, the other from town fighting over their men. (If nothing else the film at least gets full marks for accuracy in its title. Well maybe not the teenage bit, as most of the teens in the film seem to be well into their twenties).
Everybody acts badly and the effects are really cheesy. If the film had been made by somebody like Fred Olen Ray or Dave DeCouteau who specialize in this sort of cheesy deliberately bad film, its redeeming virtue would probably be lots of scenes with the girls taking their clothes off, but the film doesnt even have that small prurient saving grace. Some scenes are just awful such as one where one of the vixens causes mischief by making one guys glasses go skittering down a hallway and him to uncontrollably cartwheel. The film verges on the almost surreal in its awfulness especially in the scenes where the vixens start turning people and then entire towns into giant carrots, pumpkins, squashes and zucchinis. The film ends with a bizarre abruptness on a completely left field The Wizard of Oz (1939) in-joke as Julian Schemberg is reunited with his alien queen love, she clicks her red slippers and they fly off back to her planet chanting Theres no place like home.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1998
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