Forbidden Zone - Richard Elfman

Nationality: USA

Pros: The ultimate in amateur and low-budget cult mayhem with all the dubious charms that that entails.  Also a crazy world of paper sets that give it a genuinely surrealist touch.
Cons: Adolescent style embarrassment/ crude humour - if that bothers you! 

There’s nothing more annoying than those sorts of comparisons that run something like this: “if X lived in the country of Q and collaborated with Y on a genre totally out of character for him then the result might be something like this film.”  However, in this case I cannot shake off the following notion:  If a teenage tearaway David Lynch teamed up with Frank Zappa late at night after watching a bit too much of the Three Stooges, then the result might have been something like Forbidden Zone.  This is a grotesque black and white slice of adolescent mayhem and a glorious dose of underground and slightly sleazy American counter-culture – shades of Fritz the Cat style naughtiness not far away at all.  A sleaze and naughtiness that no other country could possibly have produced.  Forbidden Zone is a rampaging cavalcade of frog factotums, a human chandelier, a teacher with a machine gun, a very jazzy Satan and more dodgy underwear per square meter than I have ever seen anywhere else, spiced with lots of stylised torture, improbable clothed sex (one way to beat the censors I suppose!) and dancing in various combinations – capped off by a sprightly French leading lady with a deliciously bad French accent.  It is the rough-edged and extremely amateur feel of the film that is its main characteristic and its main charm.  Deliberately cardboard and paper sets, crazily contrived effects, ridiculously wooden acting, a plot dragged every which way like a leaf in the wind and, of course, totally crackpot music (Danny Elfman’s first soundtrack).  And the strange thing is that it is precisely this artificiality that makes the film work – almost elevates it to the level of genuine art-house surrealism in some ways, even reminding me in an odd way of the strange setless world of Dogville.  I have to say though, the embarrassment factor is quite high at some points.  The adolescent humour and crudities – I am not sure!  Do they represent another part of this film’s effective and somewhat subversive lunacy?  Or does it just drag on tiresomely and get in the way?  I suppose you have to decide that for yourself. 

The plot itself, such as it is, is a simple one and highly subservient to the general storm of fantasy and surrealism.  In a grotesque little house lives a grotesque little family.  Father works in a grotesque little factory (one of the best scenes in the entire film in my opinion), the kids go to an uber-grotesque little school.  All a highly accurate and terrifying representation of the real world (!) save that everyone has a tendency to sing.  Slightly less realistic is the portal this house contains to the 6th dimension – the Forbidden Zone.  A portal that bears an alarming resemblance to a digestive tract.  And the Forbidden Zone itself is a weird fantasy underworld ruled over by a stridently insane queen and an oddly romantic dwarf king – sort of like a warped Alice in Wonderland.  The abrupt descent of our pretty French-accented lead character into this underworld causes all sorts of problems for the said romantic dwarf and stridently insane (insanely jealous) queen, leading to political upheaval, imprisonment, torture, rescues and fights of various kinds and lots of dancing, which I shall leave to be discovered by the viewer.

Whether you will be able to respond to this heavy mix of crudeness and free-flowing imagination is going to be a personal matter, but the energy of the piece and the almost genius approach to the extremely low budget through those wonderfully artificial sets are undeniable.  Definitely one of the kings (a capering dwarf king) of the no-budget cinema!