ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. In addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he’s a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and has been a guest on the Making Tarantino podcast. He also contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His most recent essay, “Of Punks and Stains and Student Films: A Tribute to Night Flight, the 80s Late-Night Cult Sensation,” appeared in Drive-In Asylum #26.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks to A.C. for sending this. It would fit Junesploitation on June 12, which was New World day. This was also covered in “Exploring: 10 Tangerine Dream soundtracks.”

These days, we live lives of great convenience. Just about any movie we want to watch is only a few clicks of the remote control or keyboard away. Yet, even with this luxury, I yearn for the days of old when I used to scour the catalogs of mail-order businesses like Video Search of Miami and Sinister Cinema or the dealers’ tables at cons in search of elusive films. Those treasure hunts were thrilling when you unearthed a gem that had never been released on home media in the United States, such as Death Line a/k/a Raw Meat (my blurry VHS dupe bore the title Tren de la Mort and had Spanish subtitles) or Jess Franco’s The Bloody Judge a/k/a Night of the Blood Beast (my copy was
entitled The Throne of Fire and was in French with no English subtitles).

But I realized those fun times were over when even Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos, a film never released theatrically in the United States, got a special edition DVD. For years, I’d stared at the same three stills from that film in books on horror films. But now, it was mine to own. Today, everything, no matter how obscure, gets an official home-media release. Well, almost everything. Wavelength, a science-fiction film from 1983, still has never been released to DVD or streaming in this country.

Robert Carradine is a down-on-his-luck musician. One day, when things are looking bleak, he meets an attractive young woman in a bar. She’s played by the estimable Cherie Currie of the groundbreaking rock band The Runaways. They quickly hit it off, hook up, and become a couple. He soon learns that his new girlfriend is psychic. She starts hearing strange voices, leading them to an underground bunker in the desert where the evil government is experimenting on three captured aliens. With the help of a drunken old coot played by Keenan Wynn (of course), they work to free the child-like aliens so that they can return to their mothership and go home. In other words, it’s the same plot as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with bigger ambitions, but on a fraction of the budget. The beautiful special effects shot in the finale delayed the film’s release until after E.T. had become a box-office behemoth. Perhaps in an alternate universe, Wavelength came first. One can only imagine.

Sincerely written and directed by Mike Gray, a former documentary filmmaker who wrote The China Syndrome and Chuck Norris’s Code of Silence, charmingly acted by Carradine and Currie, with a typically great score by Tangerine Dream, Wavelength was once a staple of HBO. Now it’s fallen into the black hole of forgotten films. (A soft-looking rip from an old VHS tape is available on YouTube.) It’s not a world-beater, but it’s a well-done B-movie, which was released theatrically by New World Pictures with little fanfare and even less box-office success. (I saw it in an empty theater during its original run.) Here’s to Wavelength’s rediscovery. Like an artifact from a film grail quest in the good old days, it’s a tiny gem.