Watching the finale of Liquid Sky a few weeks back, the image of an androgynous, new wave lady with lethal, alien powers facing a showdown on a Manhattan rooftop with the skyscrapers looming large in the background gave me a strange sense of cinematic déjà vu. I knew I’d seen her before, somewhere.
The other day it hit me: GOZER.
Now I’m not claiming there’s anything deliberate or underhand going on here. But: ‘Liquid Sky’ was 1982, Ghostbusters was 1984. Isn’t it at least possible that someone on the production team for the latter caught a screening of the former, and thought, hey, that’s kinda neat?
A pretty off the wall reference point for a family-friendly studio blockbuster you might think, but perhaps it was this very spirit of open-mindedness that helped make ‘Ghostbusters’ the atmospheric, clever and imaginative film it undoubtedly is. Stretching this already tenuous musing to breaking point, perhaps it could be suggested that Sigourney Weaver’s demonically possessed sexual predator in ‘Ghostbusters’ also owes a debt to Anne Carlisle’s turn in ‘Liquid Sky’? No? Alright then, fine.
Of course, the respective finales of these films aren’t *actually* set in (or rather, on top of) either the Empire State Building or the more picturesque Chrysler Building, but their presence looms large in both movies – literally so in ‘Liquid Sky’s skyline, whilst ‘Ghostbusters’ haunted, gothic apartment block can clearly be read as a fictional stand-in for one or other of the skyscrapers.
It occurs to me that these buildings – built on a competing basis and completed within a year of each other in 1930/31 - actually have a long history of associations with cinematic monstrosity and alien power. Perhaps this is an obvious result of their brutally imposing art deco/gothic crossover architecture (I’m sure anyone who knows the first thing about architecture will do a doubletake at such clunky and no doubt wrongly applied terminology, but that’s what they’ve always looked like to my dumb eyes - sorry), and the way they dominate the skyline.
Or perhaps it’s more to do with the ongoing legacy of KING KONG.
From here, my brain jumps not to the significance of the big ape, but to the terminal power of decision that ‘King Kong’ invests in poor old Fay Wray, and how uncannily that brings us back to the exaggerated representations of female destructive power seen in the vicinity of these big ol’ phallic monuments to masculine industrial potency in ‘Liquid Sky’ and ‘Ghostbusters’. Do we dare draw a straight line between “beauty” killing “the beast” in the 1930s and Anne Carlisle “killing with her cunt” in the 1980s…?
I’d like to. Oh, c’mon, please, can we? No? Doesn’t float? Well, as Bill Murray puts it in the inevitably rather more normative ending of ‘Ghostbusters’: “that chick is toast!”
Growing up in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, I remember it seemed that a hefty proportion of the action/adventure type movies I watched were set in New York. This could just be my imagination, led astray by the fact that NY seems to inevitably become a strong presence in films which are set in the city, whereas LA or anonymous small town locations often sink into the background unless given special attention. But perhaps there actually WERE a lot of New York-set films in production in this era, moving the action there off the back of the success of movies like ‘Ghostbusters’. I don’t know.
Either way, this weird childhood nostalgia for New York based movies was also something that occurred to me whilst watching Larry Cohen’s stonecold classic independent monster movie Q: The Winged Serpent (1982). Needless to say, I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to watch this one as a kid, which is a shame, as I’m sure my eleven year old self would have loved it then even more than my grown up self loves it now.
So, where in Cohen’s movie do you suppose the resurrected Quetzalcoatl calls home when visiting NY? Right up at the top of the Chrysler Building, that’s where - the semi-derelict spire bit where nobody ever goes. Apparently Cohen and his crew clambered up there and filmed the whole thing on location, 1000 feet in the air, stunts and effects shots and all. What a hero.
Of course, this Quetzalcoatl is also a female – a big, mean firebreathing one, plucking sunbathers off Manhattan rooftops to feed her newly hatched brood. Following the lead of Egon and the boys in a somewhat earthier fashion, David Carradine and his team of police commandos viciously machine gun the poor beastie to pieces, destroy her nest, and normality is restored….. for now.
It’s a pity ‘Attack Of The 50ft Woman’ wasn’t set in New York, or I could have gotten a whole dissertation out of this one.
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