3pm - 1980s - Forbiden Zone - dir. Richard Elfman - Starring: Hervé Villechaize, Susan Tyrrell, Gisele Lindley
Forbidden Zone has never been released in New Zealand. There's a reason for this: it's terrible. Terribly brilliant. There are no words for a film that features - to quote the press release - "a bizarro world of frog butlers, topless princesses, machine-gun toting teachers, eccentric dwarves, their demonic wives, and the Devil himself."
Honestly, you've never seen anything like it. This was as much a reaction to '80s "cult films" as it is a group of brilliantly twisted individuals having fun being young and dumb, while on camera. This is low-budget indie film-making at its most ambitious. Animation is used as a substitute for photo-real effects, elaborate sets are made out of crumpled paper, and bad acting is replaced by good acting with cinema's worst, and best, copy and paste jobs ever. The music's by underground band Oingo Boingo, and the director's brother: Danny Elfman, who went on to score at least a dozen Tim Burton films, the Spider-Man movies and The Simpsons theme! To make the madness even better, we'll be watching the colourised version, which means that the black-and-white film has been hand-painted to have gloriously demented hues like the reds in the image above! If you have to see a so-bad-it's-good film this year... make sure its Forbidden Zone:
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