FANTASIA OBSCURA: Is Danny Elfman’s Surreal Musical Comedy a Cult Classic or an Offensive Oddity?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you just have to… Ah screw it, there’s no way to make this one sound better than it is…
Forbidden Zone (1980)
Distributed by: Self-distributed, initially
Directed by: Richard Elfman
They say some things only come around once in your life. If it’s something good, you remember it fondly, and if it’s not, you hope never to see it again.
Let’s try to figure out where this falls on that scale…
Note: This film is loaded with triggering material dealt with in a flippant manner, which gets described below, and is not for the very young, squeamish, or easily offended.
We’re told and shown in the opening before the credits that on April 17th, at 4 PM, Huckleberry P. Jones (Gene Cunningham, aka Ugh-Fudge Bwana) of Venice, CA, went to an abandoned property he owned to stash heroin in its basement. While there, he found a doorway to the Sixth Dimension, which freaked him out, and encouraged him to sell the property to some poor suckers while he concentrated on his other lines of work, pimping and drug dealing.
The suckers in question were the Hercules family: Pa (Cunningham), Ma (Virginia Rose), Grampa (Hyman Diamond, his only role and under a pseudonym), son Flash (Phil Gordon in the first of only two roles in his career), and daughter Frenchie (Marie-Pascal Elfman in the second of her only two roles). They avoid the basement, but when the Sixth Dimension tempts a neighbor to visit, Renee Henderson (Matthew Bright, who co-wrote the film and after this abandoned acting for writing and directing), told to them by her brother Squeezit (also Bright), encourages the family to make their way one by one down through the door.
They encounter there a realm overseen by King Fausto (Herve Villechaize), who makes pronouncements when he’s not visiting his harem in the dungeon. The real power behind the throne, however, is Queen Doris (Susan Tyrrell), cold and sadistic, who tortures all who come her way, a trait that she passed on to her daughter the Princess (Gisele Lindley, the first of her only two roles). Queen Doris’ motivations behind this, she explains through a musical number:
In terms of plot, the set-up above pretty much gets randomly plugged into the same formula: Character gets encouraged to go through the door in the basement, said character ultimately gets addressed by a member of the royal household, which ends in imprisonment, torture, what-have-you. For example, we have Frenchie getting sucked in, where she encounters two boxers (the Kipper Kids) and Bust Rod, the Servant Frog (Jan Stuart Schwartz) before the Princess finds her and has her taken away:
Later, when Squeezit makes his way on down, he gets an audience with Satan (Danny Elfman, backed up by the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo), which ends up being a case of different day, same well-you-know…
And that’s the thing of it: There’s lots of bits thrown in to offend and shock, but not much in terms of actual film to work with here. Which was probably inevitable, as Richard Elfman’s intent was not much developed beyond finding some way to capture the essence and atmosphere of a Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo stage show, just as he was ready to move on from the group and hand it over to his brother Danny, who wasn’t really enthusiastic about being part of the troupe before this.
Apparently, the term “concert film” was either never said to Richard or ignored completely, hence this production. In fact, Richard is on record as stating that he had no idea what he was doing, no training whatsoever, before starting the project, which shows.
Which ultimately keeps the film from being embraced by a modern audience. Richard claims that he delved into the film throwing everything he could into it without a filter, which also shows. There’s lots that went into this production that he might have felt fit his theme, creating the look and feel of a big band performance done to score a Fleischer Brothers cartoon, but the choices made are certainly startling.
In trying to get a rise out of a more jaded, late-1970s audience (which were made of sterner stuff than those from the late-2010s), he resorts to such crudities as blackface characters where we get the full treatment for brief bits, such as Cunningham’s depiction of Jones, as well as animations of exaggerated lips and eyes coming out of a black background in the animations by John Muto; gratuitous skin, especially for the Princess who never covers herself, and gets groped a few times during the production, while other actresses are likewise under-costumed and over-handled for no real reason; insensitive put-downs of LGBT+, using ugly jokes about gays and trans people being delivered by cross-dressing actors; Jewish stereotypes taken to an extreme; demeaning African American depictions; casual Nazi/AltRight references thrown about; scatological imagery casually thrown about; triggering depictions of broken families and child abuse; and general gross-out humor for the sake of going for a gag reflex.
In short, it’s a very unifying film, in that there’s at least one objectionable thing in the movie to get everyone offended before it’s over…
The best you can say about all that is, that working without a filter and using such tropes without context or consideration, this can’t help but come off as crass, especially these days. Someone who knew what they were doing and/or cared more would likely have not made such cringe-worthy choices then, and probably avoid them altogether now. Considering how sloppy everything else with the film turned out to be, what’s one more slip-shod screw-up among the rest? Who’s got time to keep count…?
(Speaking of sloppy, you may have noticed the switching back and forth in the materials here between black-and-white and color; originally the film was shot in black-and-white, then supposed to have its frames hand-tinted, but Elfman could not afford to do so then. He does ultimately manage to have the film colorized for a 2008 re-release.)
Poster for a re-release of the film in 2004
Looking at how the crew came together for this film, one could conclude that while this film was a complete mess, it was their complete mess. Marie-Pascal was at the time Richard’s wife, as well as the set designer. Bright grew up with the Elfman brothers, and had been sharing an apartment with Villechaize, who bought into the film so hard that not only did he kick back his paycheck to keep the film going, he’d paint sets for it on the weekend. Everyone really felt they had a stake in this production, though why is hard to fathom.
About the only person who didn’t seem that attached was Danny Elfman. Danny supposedly needed encouragement from Richard to first join the band, then needed to be encouraged further later on to do the music for Forbidden Zone, in what turned out to be his first film score.
As far as the band went, however, soon as Richard pulled away, Danny took over, shortened the band’s name to just Oingo Boingo, and got a bit more involved with the group as he moved it away from cabaret:
And as far as working on film scores from then on, well-l-l-l-l…
So, where does this all go on that scale, then…?
NEXT TIME: And so, let us celebrate the true spirit of Earth Day…
…after we have to sit through watching Mother Nature make a bunch of folks croak…
