There’s a Real Life song that’s creeping into my DJ sets and it’s not “Send Me An Angel.” I’ve played “Openhearted,” from the band’s 1983 debut album, Heartland, in my sets at Splash! twice this month. Most likely, it will keep turning up in my new wave sets, at least at bar gigs or early in the night, because it’s a good alternative to the Australian band’s big hit, packed with drama and a sticky melody. Also, the song has been stuck in my head for most of this month, so I probably need to keep playing it until I dislodge the earworm.
But, I have to make a confession about “Openhearted.” I totally, 100% swiped this Real Life song from Voyage of the Rock Aliens. In fact, I wouldn’t even know the song were it not for that bonkers movie and I probably should be embarrassed for saying that. But, also, I’m from L.A., where “Send Me an Angel” has been such a dominant banger for so long that any other Real Life song has long since faded from memory. That is, unless you are so baffled by Pia Zadora’s turn as a high schooler torn between her controlling rockabilly boyfriend and a new wave alien that you watch Voyage of the Rock Aliens every time it pops up in your Tubi recommendations.
In fact, it wasn’t until my second or third watch of Voyage of the Rock Aliens that I finally noticed this song, which launches the 1984 film into calamitous orbit. It was the spoken part of the song that first grabbed my attention. “Sleep on stranger/In your arms/Unfolding night/Have no fear.” So dramatic! So Italo disco! So much better suited for a vampire film, but, damn, this is fire.
I paused and rewound the stream to watch the sequence again. Once I tuned into the singing, the voice was easy to place. There was no doubt that this was Real Life. The raspy vocals were unmistakeable and, tbh, the song structure also had some similarities to “Send Me an Angel.” I googled around, found “Openhearted” and downloaded it.
I’m not writing this solely because “Openhearted” is a persistent earworm. Just as I can’t get this song out of my head, I can’t disconnect it from Voyage of the Rock Aliens. The edit that opens the film highlights the spoken word portion of the song that, on both the album version and extended mix, comes in towards the middle of it. It’s one of the few good choices in the movie.
As “Openhearted” plays, a guitar-shaped space craft smashes through the title card. Voyage of the Rock Aliens, scrawled in an orange 1950s-meets-1980s font, explodes into stardust. A camera leads us inside the spaceship and we see a hand reach for what looks like a car’s stick shift. A short robot who looks like he just rolled in from a 1970s TV show, glides around the flight deck and turns on the lights. It all appears pretty low-budget, but that’s not a slight. Red Dwarf and the Tom Baker episodes of Doctor Who look low-budget too and those shows have it all over today’s slick, prestige genre TV.
But, after that opening scene, Voyage of the Rock Aliens does the first of many pivots that will take place over the course of an hour-and-a-half. The robot scrolls through a Rhemascan (Rhema, btw, is the name of the IRL band who plays the film’s fictional band of aliens) looking for places to land and finds a destination called Acirema. (Please note that Voyage of the Rock Aliens’ inverted spelling of America precedes “Nilbog! That’s goblin spelled backwards!” by about six years.)
Acirema is a planet that’s kind of like The Warriors set on the Mediterranean. Pia Zadora rides into town on the back of a motorcycle, looking as if she just went shopping on the expensive side of the mall, all decked out in white leather and baubles. She’s instantly smitten with Jermaine Jackson, who is from a rival gang, but is also post-apocalyptic chic in an outfit that was probably purchased from a store with “of Beverly Hills” in its name. They sing “When the Rain Begins to Fall,” a song that I should probably be playing alongside Angelyne in my ‘80s sets, but keep forgetting to download because I’m too obsessed with “Openhearted” right now. “When the Rain Begins to Fall” is a lowkey, borderline campy jam. Zadora has gotten a lot of shit over the years because of a Golden Globes fiasco and some allegedly stinker films that even I’m too young to remember, but she’s a good, albeit a little extra, singer.
But, that scene doesn’t have much to do with the movie either. The titular rock aliens ultimately land along the very polluted coast of Lake Eerie, in a town inhabited by the World’s Oldest Teenagers who are a little new wave and a little rockabilly. Zadora reappears as Dee Dee, who wants to sing, if only the boyfriend that she should have dumped at the start of the film would let her. Instead, she vibe shifts left and right throughout the film. Sometimes, she’s Olivia Newton-John as Sandy in Grease. Sometimes, she’s Olivia Newton-John in the “Physical” video. To explain to her best friend why she doesn’t dump her idiot boyfriend, Dee Dee sings “You Bring Out the Lover In Me” in the girls bathroom as the folks in the stalls dance with underwear hanging around their ankles. Frankly, that’s the most brilliant piece of choreography I’ve ever seen, but the song makes no sense in the context of the scene or just the film itself.
Literally nothing about Voyage of the Rock Aliens makes sense, which is probably why it’s a perennial favorite topic for WTF movie blogs and podcasts. But, the music, in particular, is the real head-scratcher. This isn’t like The Legend of the Stardust Brothersˆ, where it’s stylistically all over the place, but everything more or less serves the plot. Here, it’s just a mixed bag of tunes thrown together for unknown reasons. There are some musical theater numbers, a couple Devo-ish synth songs, some ‘50s throwback-style cuts and a few very Vegas numbers. The soundtrack, much like the movie, is a masterclass in bad choices. But, then there’s “Openhearted,” which would have been a much better fit in Once Bitten, a movie that does feature another Real Life song, but is a dynamic opening song that sets up Voyage of the Rock Aliens for something that’s much better than what it is.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Read her recently published work and check out her upcoming gigs.
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