Bad Channels (1992)

(In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) Even by the lax standards of early 1990s horror comedies, Bad Channels isn’t any good. I’m not sure if there was any potential in its premise about aliens using a radio station to kidnap women, but bad control of tone and pacing from director Ted Nicolaou (admittedly working from a script co-written by Charles Band) mean that we’re either bored or dumbfounded. At least it’s not mean-spirited or gory (which helps a lot) but there’s a constant nagging feeling that it could have been much better. Much of the plotting feels arbitrary in order to hit the scenes that they were really going for. Even cute girls in fetching early-1990s outfits sadly can’t save this. Grotesque special effects don’t add much but clearly re-establish this as one of Band’s bargain-basement Full Moon Productions. For a film revolving around a rock station, the soundtrack is unsatisfying, badly integrated and eventually forgotten on the way to the conclusion. Considering that Bad Channels is coming from Charles Band, the question is open as to whether it could have been any better—the awful result seems on-brand for his production company, and we have to acknowledge that maybe no one wanted it to be any better. If you’re looking for a much better movie about a radio DJ confronting a world-ending menace, have a dose of Pontypool and don’t look back.