You are an alien. You have traveled across galaxies. You arrive on earth. New York. Sometime in the futuristic 1980s - you get the picture. Your needs are simple: drugs - and plenty of them. You’re lucky, you have arrived atop the apartment of a drug-addled model, Margaret, and her coke snorting boyfriend. You’ve found drugs. You observe Margaret and her man.  Then you discover something better: sex and drugs. For when humans cum their brains produce the essence of the drug you seek. To obtain it, you have to kill them at their moment of orgasm. And guess what? Margaret can’t climax, so everyone she fucks becomes your ticket to nirvana. She thinks she’s an avenging angel, who can “kill with her cunt”; and you are an inter-planetary orgasm-addict.

This is basically the premise of Slava Tsukerman’s 1982, weird and wonderful sci-fi flick Liquid Sky, a love it or loathe movie, which has slowly but surely established itself as a must-see event. Apart from being “one of the formative forces of indie film,” with its wet dream performance by the beautifully androgynous Anne Carlisle, as both model Margaret and her junkie beau, Liquid Sky is highly ambiguous and allows the audience to bring its own interpretations to a viewing.

Over the years it has been described as a feminist film; a critique of western society; what Bright Lights, Big City should have been, except without Michael J. Fox; an examination of the superficiality of modern culture; a movie about sexualization; an analysis of capitalism - by which we are seduced, fucked and eventually killed. All or none these may be correct. But what is certain, we bring to Liquid Sky our own prejudices and values through which we define ourselves, and this is a far more dangerous thought than any glib, coffee-bar hypothesis. If you haven’t already, go see it, and who knows you may even see yourself.