The 1980s are a difficult time to explain to people who weren’t there. For the 20th century, every decade had a distinctive look and feel, right up until the late ’90s when everything cultural started to have a whiff of nostalgia. One can look at only a few seconds of a film from the 20th century and be able to tell which decade it came from. Meanwhile, here in this rotten century, nothing seems to have changed since the early 2000s. Fashion, music, movies…there are new names, but a unique, stylistic identity to the times we live in has been lost.
Back to the ’80s. Then was the culmination of decades of change, and the overarching theme seemed to be garishness. Bright colors everywhere (except in the home, which remained stubbornly brown), music with strange sounding instruments, big hair, and, as today’s movie shows, outfits that are beginning to look as bizarre as powdered wigs and pantaloons.
From 1989 comes Alien Private Eye, written, produced, directed, and edited by Vik Rubenfeld. Shot in 1987, but stuck in a can until it obtained a VHS release, Alien Private Eye is another film rescued from the approaching abyss by Vinegar Syndrome, who cleaned it up and released a Blu-ray in 2022. And it’s good they did. Before they ran this flick through the ringer, the only way to watch it were degraded VHS transfers uploaded to the tubes, and those are barely watchable, with fuzzy picture and muddy sound.
So, what does one get with the clean, crisp version from Vinegar Syndrome? They get a shitty movie romp extraordinaire, that’s what.
Alien Private Eye stars Nicholas Hill as Lemro, an alien from the planet Styx, who is here on Earth for vacation. His idea of a vacation is to set up a noir-style detective agency in downtown Los Angeles. The Styxians, right in line with this flick’s budget, look like us, except they have Spock ears. Lemro covers up his ears with a silk-banded fedora. It’s flashy, but fits in with his general aesthetic. As do his multiple pairs of fingerless gloves that match whatever color outfit he chooses, usually featuring a puffy jacket with a bunch of doodads on it. I don’t mean to make this review all about what Lemro is wearing, but it’s such an integral part of the film, and its shittiness, that it has to be mentioned. To ignore it would be like writing about the Grand Canyon and not mentioning the view.
Lemro, through wild coincidence, ends up involved with a woman, Rene (Brenda Winston), who has come across a piece of Styxian technology, a disc, that can be used to produce an addictive drug called Soma. It’s little more than space smack.
Meanwhile, a ruthless gang of toughs, led by the evil Kilgore (Cliff Aduddell), had first gotten ahold of the disc and produced a batch of Soma, and now they want more. Kilgore has dreams of taking over the world drug market with this highly addictive, otherworldly narcotic. He and his henchman Scunge (Robert Axelrod), set out to retrieve the disc by any means necessary.
Lemro isn’t the only alien in the movie. A pair of cops from Styx want Lemro to secure the disc. These two don’t provide much to the plot more than exposition, but they are invaluable to this flick’s shitty movie bona fides. Leeann Lee, playing Electra, delivers every single one of her ridiculous lines as if her only acting experience was period pornography, while John Alexander, as Scama, was like a low rent George C. Scott crossed with Hervé Villechaize. It’s a combo that must be seen to be believed.
It’s not just those two who stink up the line readings. Everyone in the cast is guilty, but they stand out the most. Alien Private Eye is stacked with action front to back to keep viewers engaged, there are even a pair of extraterrestrial laser arm bracers, but it’s the dialogue and those saying it that is the true draw. Rubenfeld took every turn of phrase at high speed, barreling off of the road into the trees whenever the opportunity arose, and the cast was talentless enough to oblige.
The cherry on top is the music from Frank Weber, which personifies the ’80s just as much as anything else in the movie.
The total package ends up being a delight for the mutants who are into bad flicks that produce belly laughs, and an absolute viewing nightmare for just about everyone else. Well, mutant blood flows through this reviewer’s veins, so I declare Alien Private Eye to be shitty gold, displacing Jason X in the #75 spot of the Watchability Index. Check it out.