Every so often, I see a movie that I can't wait to watch again, and that I can't wait to show to other people. Voyage of the Rock Aliens is one of those, and I'm amazed that I've never heard of this movie before.
This movie has everything, it's set in the 80s with some retro elements (beyond Ruth Gordon), aliens, rock music, and a few other things I'm not mentioning specifically to avoid the spoilers (which is why this…
A movie that is almost entirely made watchable (not good, but watchable) by the music. The characters are super shallow and underdeveloped, the performances are inconsistent, the dialogue is weak, and the driving scenes often just look bad. But there's a lot of surf rock and the like (and one song by a lion puppet) which is enough to make getting through the sixty-some minutes of this film just doable. I also did find that the ending quite lazy, underwhelming, and relying on bad exposition to try to justify it.
It could've been a lot better, but I'd also have settled for being entertainingly worse.
It's clear what this is trying to be, and if I were to see it in that context, and if that's done really well, then maybe that'd be a bit more entertaining. But that would require the live-action part of this to really do a lot of heavy lifting. This spends a couple minutes, it seems, working through the introduction and the credits and if this spent anywhere near the same amount of time establishing the characters here it might've…
Maybe this is more of a 4 star film than a 4.5 star film, but this sure is up there for me. The concept here, of a roaming grifter trying to make good somehow, feels like the sort of thing that there's a lot of movies from the 1930s and 1940s all doing similar things. And so on some level this felt a bit too familiar early on. Heck, this isn't even the only "Frank Morgan is full of it"…
I'm not terribly familiar with James Whitmore, who plays perhaps one of the most slippery lawyers of all time, and there's certainly a "discount Spencer Tracy" vibe about him, but his performance as John J. Malone did grow on me over the course of this and he does bring a charm to such a sleazy role, which is a delicate balance. The other lead role, though, is Marjorie Main who I'm certainly familiar with, and she has a great performance…
