Forbidden Zone (1980)

• Year: 1980
• Released: 21 Mar 1982
• Country: United States
• Adwords: 1 nomination
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080752/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/forbidden_zone
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p,
• Language: English, French, German
• MPA Rating: R
• Genre: Comedy, Fantasy, Musical
• Runtime: 74 min
• Writer: Richard Elfman, Matthew Bright, Martin Nicholson
• Director: Richard Elfman
• Cast: Gene Cunningham, Marie-Pascale Elfman, Virginia Rose
• Keywords: musical, school shooting,

	6.5/10
	64/100

Forbidden Zone Storyline

The film begins on “Friday, April 17” at 4 pm in Venice, California. Huckleberry P. Jones (Gene Cunningham), local pimp, narcotics peddler and slumlord, enters a vacant house that he owns. While stashing heroin in the basement, he stumbles upon a mysterious door and enters it, falling into the Sixth Dimension, from which he promptly escapes.After retrieving the heroin, he sells the house to the Hercules family. On their way to school, “Frenchy” Hercules (Marie-Pascale Elfman) and her brother Flash (Phil Gordon) have a conversation with Squeezit Henderson (Matthew Bright), who tells them that, while being violently beaten by his mother, he had a vision of his transgender twin sister René (also played by Bright), who had fallen into the Sixth Dimension through the door in the Hercules’ basement. Frenchy returns home to confide in her mother, and decides to take just a “little peek” behind the forbidden door in the basement.After arriving in the Sixth Dimension, she is captured by the perpetually topless Princess, who brings Frenchy to the rulers of the Sixth Dimension, the midget King Fausto (Hervé Villechaize) and his queen, Doris (Susan Tyrrell). When the king falls for Frenchy, Queen Doris orders their frog servant, Bust Rod, to lock her up. In order to make sure that Frenchy is not harmed, King Fausto tells Bust Rod to take Frenchy to Cell 63, where the king keeps his favorite concubines (as well as René).The next day at school, Flash tries to convince Squeezit to help him rescue René and Frenchy. When Squeezit refuses, Flash enlists the help of Gramps instead. In the Sixth Dimension, they speak to an old Jewish man who tells them how to help Frenchy escape, but they soon are captured by Bust Rod. Queen Doris interrogates Flash and Gramps and then lowers them into a large septic tank. She then plots her revenge against Frenchy, relocating all the denizens of Cell 63 to a torture chamber. She leaves the Princess to oversee Frenchy’s torture and execution, but when a fuse is blown, the torture is put on hold and the prisoners from Cell 63 are relocated to keep the King from finding them.After escaping the septic tank, Flash and Gramps come across a woman who tells them that she was once happily married to the king, until Doris stole the throne by seducing her, “even though she’s not my type”. The ex-queen has been sitting in her cell for 1,000 years, and has been writing a screenplay in order to keep her sanity.Meanwhile, Pa Hercules is blasted through the stratosphere by an explosion caused by improperly extinguishing his cigarette in a vat of highly flammable tar during his work break at the La Brea Tar Pit Factory. After re-entry, Pa falls through the Hercules family basement and into the Sixth Dimension, where he is imprisoned. Finding a phone, Flash calls Squeezit at his house and again asks for his help. Finally, Squeezit agrees to go into the Sixth Dimension to help rescue Frenchy and René (mostly in order to escape from his abusive mother when he catches her in the arms of a drunken sailor (Joe Spinell)… who happens to be his estranged father). Once in the Sixth Dimension, Squeezit is quickly captured by Satan (Danny Elfman) and his robed minions, with whom he makes a deal to bring him the Princess in exchange for Satan’s help freeing René and Frenchy.After Squeezit accomplishes this task, Satan tells him not to worry about his friends before having him decapitated. Queen Doris sends Bust Rod to keep an eye on the king, and to ensure he doesn’t find out where she’s hidden Frenchy. King Fausto catches Bust Rod and forces him to lead him to Frenchy and René, whom he orders to leave the Sixth Dimension to avoid the Queen’s wrath. However, en route to safety, René is stricken with pseudo-menstrual cramps, and they are again captured by the frog.Squeezit’s severed head, which has now sprouted chicken wings, finds the king and informs him of what has happened. While preparing to kill Frenchy, Doris is confronted by the ex-queen, and the two engage in a cat-fight, with Doris eventually coming out as the victor. Just as she is about to kill Frenchy, King Fausto stops her, explaining that Satan’s Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo are holding the Princess hostage, and will kill her should anything befall Frenchy. Flash and Gramps arrive, and Flash is knocked down by Gramps. Ma Hercules enters and, seeing a seemingly dead Flash, shoots Queen Doris. King Fausto mourns Doris, then marries Frenchy to make her his next queen.The film ends with another musical number showing the surviving characters looking toward a great future as they plan to take over everyone and everything in the Galaxy.

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Forbidden Zone Movie Reviews

A chaotic musical fetish!

I very much enjoyed this movie and watch it again and again. What can I say? It’s artistic and enjoyable, very much the kind of thing I like in movies. Also the fact of its’ bizarre, dark and surreal mood and humour toward the film. It’s like David Lynch’s take on Betty Boop, that’s how good it is! The characters are insane and possibly on drugs, the King is a sex-addicted monster, yet somehow a gentlemen to the woman he loves, one of the characters is well, uh, a transsexual, another character is a frog. I couldn’t recommend it more for it is a musical fantasy giving to us by Richard Elfman. Seriously, leave it to the Elfmans’ to give us one of the greatest musicals ever!

a definitive ‘take it or leave it’ flick. I’ll take more, please!

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson once said, “It never got weird enough for me.” With all respect and love to that late-great Gonzo God, I wonder if he would eat those words following a viewing of this. This is truly one of the weirdest movies ever conceived, shot, executed, whatever-ed. But it’s brilliance is in the fact that amid its chaos and delirious mayhem is that it’s not really all that incoherent. It may not be any more or less crazy a piece of avant-garde experimentation than a super-obscure picture like Pussbucket.

The difference, I think, lies in professionalism. In a small way I’m reminded of Russ Meyer; Richard Elfman is a very careful director with his camera, never making a shot unintentionally out of focus or deranged in masturbatory terms, and with his production designer (if maybe it was just him and his wife who also financed the picture) create madness that can’t exactly be called shoddy in production value. Like it or not, and I can imagine people definitely NOT liking this, there’s some art going on here.

It’s also the kind of movie you can’t peg down. I was laughing mad throughout, almost convulsively at one other step after another in the ‘plot’ (and yes, there is one, once checked into the ‘Zone’ and the 6th dimension and the annals of the Queen and the family going through the zone), but is it entirely a comedy? Actually – yes, it is. But what kind of comedy? There’s a sensibility that borrows heavily at times from those delightfully insane cartoons from the 1920s and 1930s (Un Iwerks’ obscurer shorts come to mind), but only at times like bits in that classroom singing old songs.

There’s also characters in black-face (yes, black-face), obvious caricatures of black people and Jews, a little person (the actor from Man with the Golden Gun), a guy with a giant frog head and a suit, and Satan. Did I mention it’s a musical shot in black and white and that it’s also like if Rocky Horror Picture Show wasn’t likable for its badness but was genuinely f***ed-up as a true cult hit?

Enough trying to explain it- this is cult in the sense of Eraserhead or Ichi the Killer, or even one of the real old-school guards of the avant-garde like Jack SMith. You really do have to see it to believe it, and understand how much of a mix of forms and styles work its way into it, of the obvious and joyfully exaggerated “characters” (just between that one Queen with the hair and the little guy it could be enough, but then what about the little guy’s new French mistress?), of the sudden title-cards, of the animations from time to time with most prominent example a travel down an intestine.

Not to mention the music, which is some of the purest genius in the picture (this and Blues Brothers, both good for a double feature not too oddly enough considering one specific song I need not mention here, are great wacky musicals of 1980). There’s two facets: the usage of old blues and show-tunes of the 30s, almost like speakeasy songs, and then the songs of Oingo Boingo, Danny Elfman’s equally weird band he had before becoming a composer. Needless to say he composes his first time here, and it’s a great training ground for the likes of other great scores in Tim Burton’s pictures; his one appearance as Satan is a howler, though overall he matches up to what his brother has to offer as a filmmaker of verve and daring.

How much you might respond positively to the daring of Forbidden Zone will depend on how seriously you take it. I don’t think I got any profound life lessons, but if you can tap into the vibe of the picture then you got it made. It doesn’t get much weirder than this, and I love it for it on whatever terms it makes as imaginative low-budget gonzo comedy.

If David Lynch Had Directed Betty Boop . . .

No live-action movie has ever captured the anarchic feel of the rubbery Max Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s better than “Forbidden Zone.” It’s an LSD-fueled Betty Boop picture mixed with “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Inferno,” all filtered through David Lynch’s kaleidoscope (or run through R. Crumb’s Cuisinart).

The story, such as it is, deals with the adventures of Frenchy Hercules, who lives over a doorway to the “Sixth Dimension,” which is ruled by King Fausto (Herve Villechaize) and Queen Doris (Susan Tyrrell) with sadomasochistic glee. The whole flick really fits the Betty Boop formula perfectly–a shapely heroine (who loves to rumba) falls from her own bizarre “reality” into an even stranger one. Much mayhem and cool swing music ensue, as Frenchy’s brother and grandfather (playing the roles of Bimbo and Koko the Clown from the old Fleischer cartoons) try to rescue the unfortunate girl.

This strange mix of animation and live action really has to be seen to be believed–all very low budget and very imaginative (a quality sorely lacking in movies lately). Fans of Oingo Boingo won’t want to miss this one (especially group leader Danny Elfman’s Cab Calloway-like turn as Satan in the flick’s best scene). There are racial and ethnic stereotypes galore, but since this movie seems to exist in an entirely different universe, it doesn’t come across as offensive.

Not for everyone–but a “can’t miss” for some. Worth seeing just for the musical numbers alone.