There is probably no sadder sight than a film trying to be self-consciously bad and failing at even that. The Revenge of the Teenage Vixens from Outer Space certainly falls into this category. It comes out as some sort of horrible collision between a self-conscious attempt to make an Edward D. Wood Jr film and a copy of the teen makeout film like Porky’s (1982). The alien vixens are no more than a group of man-snatching (PG-rated) hyper-sexed bimbos and the film plays out as a battle of bitcheries between the alien bimbos and the good human girlfriends – it could easily be a film about say girls from different schools or one group from the country, the other from town fighting over their men. (If nothing else, Teenage Vixens at least gets full marks for accuracy in its title. Well maybe not the teenage bit, as most of the teens in the film seem to be well into their twenties).

Everybody acts badly and the effects are extremely cheesy. If the film had been made by somebody like Fred Olen Ray or Jim Wynorski who specialize in this sort of cheesy deliberately bad film, its redeeming virtue would probably be lots of scenes with the girls taking their clothes off, but the film doesn’t even have that small prurient saving grace. Some scenes are awful – such as one where one of the vixens causes mischief by making one guy’s glasses go skittering down a hallway and him to uncontrollably cartwheel. The film verges on the almost surreal in its awfulness – especially in the scenes where the vixens start turning people and then entire towns into giant carrots, pumpkins, squashes and zucchinis. The film ends with a bizarre abruptness on a completely left field The Wizard of Oz (1939) in-joke as Julian Schemberg is reunited with his alien queen love, she clicks her red slippers and they fly off back to her planet chanting “There’s no place like home.”