Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #222 Bad Channels (1992)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like four kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker, actor or television show. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career. That’s also true of the motion pictures and television projects of the late Tawny Kitaen.
A generous patron is now paying me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I’m about halfway through the complete filmography troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart. Oh, and I’m delving deep into the world of Oliver Stone for one of you beautiful people as well.
Like Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman, Full Moon Features’ wildly prolific Charles Band is absolutely brilliant at branding and considerably less accomplished at making movies. He’s the king of direct-to-video high concept, with a knack for pumping out movies with titles and premises so utterly irresistible, like Gary Busey as the Ginger Dead Man, Tim Thomerson as Dollman and Tommy Chong in Evil Bong that it almost doesn’t matter whether the ensuing product is any damn good or not.
I have accordingly spent a disturbingly vast amount of time on Wikipedia looking up various colorfully ghoulish Charles Band productions and wondering whether they’re campy delights full of b-movie charm or utterly unwatchable.
1992’s Bad Channels was consequently on my radar even before a patron chose it for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 because reduced to its bare outlines it looks like it could be an absolute blast or it could be an endurance test even at eighty-two minutes.
I knew going in that Bad Channels was probably going to be fucking terrible. But would it be fucking terrible in a good or bad way?
A low-budget, hair metal goof on the legend of Orson Welles’ War of the World, Bad Channels stars Paul Hipp as Dangerous Dan O’Dare, the self-professed Bad Boy of Rock and Roll and a controversial shock jock who was banned for six solid months after having loud sex on the airwaves with a colleague who also happened be a police officer.
The madman of rock radio gets a new gig as the new voice of an all-polka station with a freakishly powerful signal and suspiciously satanic call letters. As the film begins, Dangerous Dan is deep into a nearly day-long stunt where he has chained himself to a chair and will not stop playing the album Polka Party until a listener calls in with the right numbers for the combination lock.
The listener with the magical combination of numbers gets an automobile as well so when a sonorous-voiced colleague of Dangerous Dan wins by guessing the combination is “1,2,3” people are understandably suspicious.
No one, but no one, is more concerned about ethics in Rock and Roll Shock Jock Journalism than Lisa Cummings, an ambitious newshound played by former rock jock Martha Quinn.
The two soon discover, to their shock and horror, something arguably bigger and more important than even Ethics in Rock and Roll Shock Jock Journalism when they stumble upon an alien invasion of the cheapest and lamest sort.
An alien who looks like he has a giant glob of malformed coal for a head and an alien that looks like a bargain basement robot from an adorably clunky past invade the radio station with an eye towards using the airwaves to lure sexy babes into becoming their tiny prisoners.
The special effects in Bad Channels can charitably be described as “winningly homemade” and less charitably be deemed “shitty.” That goes for the character design, storytelling, world-building and music as well.
Dangerous Dan is mortified to discover that his new professional home has been taken over by aliens who seem weirdly oblivious to his presence as well as the presence of what appears to be the radio station’s only other employee, a doughy engineer.
Dangerous Dan tries to warn his listeners of the danger posed by the extraterrestrial invaders with the hard-on for hard rock but they understandably have a hard time believing the words of someone with such a deplorably lax attitude when it comes to Ethics in Rock and Roll Shock Jock Journalism.
They assume that Dangerous Dan’s talk of malevolent space aliens using radio waves to lure bodacious video vixens into tiny little tubes is just more of his signature crazy banter.
They do not realize that the half-assed aliens have an equally half-assed plan to use the sinister power of rock and roll to make hot women—and only hot women—think they’re video vixens rocking out to eminently forgettable numbers by the likes of Joker, DMT, Fair Game and Sykotik Sinfoney, who’ve got a bit of an Insane Clown Posse thing going on.
If you haven’t heard of these bands, that’s for a very good reason: they fucking suck. There’s a reason their careers seemingly peaked with being prominently featured in an almost impressively stupid early 1990s Full Moon schlock fest.
The music of Blue Oyster Cult who did the score and soundtrack, is also featured but somehow not as prominently as their no-name wannabe peers.
Bad Channels lasts a mere eighty-two minutes, or about the bare minimum to qualify as a feature film. It’d be even shorter without a series of music video-style sequences that do little but run out the clock and add to the generic but winning rock and roll vibe.
This may be a stupid, incompetent, astonishingly lazy exploitation movie but it’s a stupid, incompetent, astonishingly lazy exploitation movie that rocks. The rock on display may be sub-par but it’s rock all the same and for a rock and roll guy like me that makes a big difference.
The aliens never seem like much of a threat, in no small part because they don’t seem to even notice that the world’s most controversial rock and roll DJ is telling the world about them so I can’t say I was terribly surprised when they turn out to be absurdly easy to defeat.
All it takes are some simple disinfectants to defeat the aliens and send them scrambling back to their home planet.
Bad Channels is every bit as stupid and silly and cheesy as it looks. It’s utter, unapologetic schloc, a wild and random hodgepodge of rock and roll, alien invasion and outlaw DJ tropes executed with utter shamelessness.
This is not a good movie. It’s the opposite of a good movie but it’s egregiously bad in a fun, memorable way that partially makes me want to delve deeper into the bottomless pool of cheese and craziness that is Full Moon’s world and partially makes me want to stay the hell away.
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