The Forbidden Zone

In the immortal words of T.S.  Elliot, "And should I then presume? And how shall I begin?"

Unlike most of the movies on this site, The Forbidden Zone is intentionally weird and idiotic, or weirdly idiotic (actually, now that i think of it, it's idiotically weird). It's hard to make an intentional cult film--it often just comes off to self-conscious and smug to be authentically strange and subversive. However, The Forbidden Zone pulls it off because, however art-school absurd it is, it winds up going even further than intended.

 Yeah, i'm pretty sure that's a blunt. It'd better be.

A true relic of the 80s, down to Herve Villechaize as King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension (Yes!) It's also the first movie soundtrack by Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo--or, as they were still known back then, the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo...

This German Expressionist/Max Fleischer aesthetic will continue throughout. Except when superseded by moments of bad 60s horror, 40s musicals, Warhol knockoffs and scat humor.

And we open with this guy running out of his basement and--whoa! Blackface. Before the credits even start.

Wait until they get to the Jews, the women, the trannys and the midgets. And the white guys: Everyone is mocked on the basest level in The Forbidden Zone. If you're not ready for that, note the word "forbidden" and move along. Hurry, before the child abuse jokes and menstruation gags kick in! Hitler and Satan will be here soon! Run!

So, the whole  premise, such as it is, is that there is a gateway to the Sixth Dimension (aka the Forbidden Zone) in the basement of the Hercules family: Ma, Pa, Gramps, Flash and Frenchy.

For some reason, The Forbidden Zone has old people played by twentysomething art goons in Caligari makeup and the kids played by aging Jewish comics in Boy Scout suits. But that is neither the last nor the least weird thing we shall see here....

Flash and Frenchy go to school, with their classmates: nerds, skanks, the knife-wielding pimp, the inbred pigtail twins, Chicken Boy and der Fuhrer.There are craps games and gunfights and some sweet jazz harmonizing, but school sucks. Frenchy jumps out the window, goes home, slips on a rollerskate and finds herself in the Forbidden Zone, where she is promptly treated to some weird boxing dudes and a song! Well, sorta, anyway!

Apparently this kid lost his nerve on set, so they wound up having to superimpose someone else's mouth over his face. Like Bette Davis' incorrectly fitted gown in All About Eve or the cloud that passed over the cornfield during a crucial shot in Bonnie and Clyde, it's the sort of on-set problem that only improves the filmic result. This is one of the movie's better musical numbers: The idea of people lip-synching to old 30s big band tunes was a fun idea, but it gets old if that's the only gag. The "Pico & Sepulveda" number is another excellent bit, but most of them--you're just kind of twiddling your thumbs. Or, given what you're watching, gobbling another handful of 'shrooms.

So, King Fausto of the Herve Dimension immediately falls madly in love with Frenchy, despite her odd mole and her penchant for sticking her tongue out at everybody. However, this does not sit well with his wife...

Behold Doris, the Queen of the Sixth Dimension, none other than Susan Tyrell HerSelf. Bow down!

Not because of Queen Doris, but because Susan Tyrrell. Susan Tyrrell's mom was a British diplomat and her dad was Carole Lombard and Loretta Young's agent. Susan Tyrrell played Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams at Lincoln Center and was nominated for an Academy Award for Fat City. Susan Tyrrell has appeared in the films of Andy Warhol, John Waters and Pee-Wee Herman. I wish I was one-tenth that awesome and so do you.

Anyway, Queen Susan Tyrrell sings a song that i'm pretty sure she did at the Mudd Club at least once and then has Frenchy locked up in the dungeon, where she meets some other locked-up girl... boy... boy we already saw, wearing a wig. (It can be hard to tell in this movie whether it's supposed to be a drag queen or a real female because both are often just boys in wigs.) Also King Herve pops through a window to snap photos in a moment that is creepier than was probably intended to be. And then he goes to make it up to the queen...

Fun fact: Herve Villechaize and Susan Tyrrell were actually dating. And, to answer the question that we're all asking: "I roll her up like a donut!" (Or that's what they say on the DVD commentary.)

In the meantime, Frenchy's brother and grandfather decide to jump down into the Sixth Dimension basement hole to rescue her....

Thus follows more scat humor, some flat rabbi jokes, a crucifixion bit, random whippings, some buggery, some bestiality, just padding out the running time here...

 

Meanwhile, Queen Susan Tyrrell ties up Frenchy in her electrified torture chamber. I must say, i enjoy a nice, scenery-chewing Susan Tyrrell Sprechstimme  more than the tenth or eleventh lip-synch to a Cab Calloway tune. Don't get me wrong: I freaking love Cab Calloway. Did i ever tell you about the time i saw him at a Mets game when i was about six? It was summer and--

--whoa! Alright, yeah, back to the film. I will say one thing: Even if The Forbidden Zone loses your attention, it won't be for long. The evil queen is defeated with the help of Warhol superstar Viva, who is wearing some kind of turd hat and never stops talking--in other words, standard Viva. Frenchy is declared the new Queen of the Sixth Dimension and everyone eats a bunch of hash brownies, drinks some Tequila and gets down to the Go-Gos...

The weirdest thing about The Forbidden Zone is perhaps how gosh darn much everyone involved believed in it. Herve Villechaize not only sunk his pay back into the film, he painted the freaking sets. (Only the part below the wainscotting. Ba-zing!) Many others also played multiple roles both in front of and behind the camera. I'm not sure what inspired such dedication, except for the fact that The Forbidden Zone looks like it was a fuck of a lot of fun to make.

Mae West

Most television biopics suck. Jennifer Love Hewitt as Audrey Hepburn, Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor, any number of bland blonde starlets as Marilyn Monroe. However, there are a few exceptions: Christina Ricci as Lizzie Borden, Gina Gershon as Donatella Versace, Loni Andersen as Jayne Mansfield and Ann Jillian as Mae West.

During the 80s, Jillian was in the sassy waitress sitcom It's a Living, playing the sassiest waitress. While she doesn't quite possess the pulchritude of Mae West, she does convey more than a little of the sexiness, the self-possession and the wit of that resoundingly feminine proto-femninist.

The movie covers Mae's career through her child star days, her time in vaudeville, her scandalous stage productions of the 20s, her film career in the 30s and her later comeback. (Although they stop well before Myra Breckinridge. Because there's pretty much no one who wants to acknowledge that ever happened.) The wide chronology also offers plenty of opportunities for fabulous period costumes.

We first see Baby Mae as a precocious child performer with a head of Nellie Olsen ringlets, stomping her feet and demanding her spotlight (a tale West was to tell often later in life). Giving Baby Mae constant encouragement, support and new frocks is her mother Matilda, player by Piper Laurie as pretty much the polar opposite of the mom in Carrie.

We see the brunette Mae West plug along in vaudeville, trying singing trios, dancing duos, solo shimmys. She picks up a husband, who seems to spend most of his time following her around going, "Awww, Mae!" until she finally brushes him off--from both the act and the marriage. Well, i mean, she doesn't divorce him, she just gets him booked "on another circuit, with a lotta women. For forty weeks."

Mae is mentored and taught the fine points of individuality and style by a drag queen played by none other than Roddy McDowall. He watches in horror as she squeaks and grinds her way through a tawdry cave girl routine but, in the great tradition down to Bianca del Rio HerSelf, he counsels the tacky newcomer on how to get better. He takes Mae through everything from the nature of being a star to how to develop a routine to the finer points of contouring. I recall watching this movie when i was a kid and thinking: I need someone like this in my life.

Mae doesn't just pick up stage business and dance steps fast, she's also a quick study in life. She learns quick that when two men fight over a woman, it's often more about ego than love; that a woman who'll put up with anything from a man usually does. As the real Mae said: "I made up my mind early that I would never love another person as much as I loved myself. Maybe that sounds selfish. It is. But I saw what a mess people could make of their lives when they're smitten. Some of them go temporarily insane."

But TV movie Mae hooks up with rich businessguy James Timony, played by power bottom James Brolin. Blonde and begowned, Mae becomes a headliner with a bevy of tuxedoed chorus boys and a nice way with "C. C. Rider" and "Frankie and Johnny."

She writes and stars in her own play, Sex, promptly gets arrested and, after some laugh-tracked courtroom scenes, is thrown in the clink and comes out bigger and badder than ever. She writes and stars in Diamond Lil on Broadway, goes to Hollywood--if it seems to be happening awfully fast, it's because it is. The only real pause point, interestingly, is during the shooting of West's first film, Night After Night, where she gives a fine clinic in standing up for one's artistic rights (and comic timing).

Timony trails besottedly behind her the whole way but Mae West is too busy with her career to let anyone put a ring on it (again).  "Marriage is not a natural state! It was something invented by women to hang on to men!" This is kind of the closest we get to authentic Mae once the de rigeur romance kicks in..

The "becoming" part of the film is much more interesting and it's largely because it's all about Mae, not about some tacked-on romance. Mae West may have been well know for being more interested in career than romantic relationships but, once this movie hits the romantic relationship, that's all it's about. Unsurprising. The movie also brushes past the controversial nature of West's plays -- interracial relationships, homosexuality, cross-dressing, drug use, adultery, prostitution, castration, political corruption. Mae West: Too edgy for the 80s....

Jillian is notably less voluptuous than Mae West (isn't everybody, though) but she rocks the flapper look well. And heaven knows she does a better job then other ersatz Maes, the worst of which must be Faye Dunaway in a bargain-basement pseudo-religious flick entitled The Calling (don't inquire further, but let's just say there's a really cheap-ass Liberace too). It's recently been announced that Bette Midler will be playing Mae for HBO and, heaven knows, ain't no one (living) going to deliver those lines better. Still, her Mae West will probably give us a latter Mae, while Ann Jillian's Mae West , before it lapses into sentimentality, gives us an interesting depiction of her early years.

The Manitou

The Manitou was one of the wave of occult horror flicks during the 70s--this time with some of that fashionable Native American culture and a few of those newfangled computers thrown in. Other than that, it's just your standard flick about a chick with a tumor on her back that has an undead Native American medicine man living in it.

Wot? I know--weird even by the addled standards of the Quaalude decade...

Our star is Tony Curtis, slumming--if you can call anything Tony Curtis does slumming, he always just seemed happy and bemused to be there, glad you see you, thank for the check--plays a two-bit psychic who hustles old ladies (so many Tony Curtis roles involve the words "two-bit" and "hustle")...

C'mon, sweetheart, let's go. I gotta get this schmatte back to Williams Costume by five
or I pay for another day's rental.

He's got a sweet San Fran bachelor pad with an awesome stereo, drinks beer out of a wineglass and knows lots of babes. Among said babes is his ex, played by Susan Strasberg with a pussycat bow at her neck and a fetus on her back. (Yes, Susan, your father was a guru of the American theatre, you fucked Richard Burton and Warren Beatty, you hung out with Marilyn Monroe, but here you are in The Manitou. And just wait until the topless laser scene...)

Strasberg shows up on his doorstep and they wander around the various tourist locales of San Francisco, as they always do in movies set there--everyone always goes to Fisherman's Wharf and the steep hills. No one ever goes to a Kwik-E-Mart. She tells him about this tumor she's got and Curtis is all, "Oh, that's too bad. But it's on your back, right? Not on your front? Like, not your lower front? Okay then." I mean, I was in New York during 9-11 and i know what fucking in the face of death is like but I'd consider "removal of a large tumor tomorrow" more of a "let's cuddle" occasion.

So, they bang, and as Strasberg and her tumor sleep, she mutters, "Panna witchy salatoo." It is not the last time we will hear this nonsense phrase repeated portentously. Nay, it will be repeated over and over until one longs for the simplicity of a "Klaatu barada nikto!" or "Pazuzu!"

So, they X-ray the tumor and the mop-topped and pastel-coated doctor declares, "They are sure that the tumor on her neck is actually a fetus." I cannot think I of something I would less want to hear from a medical professional. I' think I'd rather hear "malignant" than "monster fetus."

Of course, Tony Curtis rolls with this as he rolls with everything in The Manitou (or anywhere else) and goes to rip off another old lady. (Curtis would go on to remain unphased by the weird and the undead in Sextette.) However, when old lady goes full Linda Blair in the middle of a tarot reading, levitates and chants "Panna witchy salatoo," he finally freaks out. Bitch's monster baby tumor is fucking with my livelihood!

So he goes back and tells the doctor all about "Panna witchy salatoo"  and the doctor is like, "Whatever" and messes with his giant mainframe computer some more before stomping off to operate to remove said tumor. I'm waiting for some right-wing politician to run in and stop him because Unborn Undead Native American Mutant Demon Parasites have a right to be born, even in the case of threatening the life of the mother and jeopardizing all the lives and souls on Earth. But i'm getting ahead of myself in the story...

Holy diver, Batman!

Anyway, the doctors try to X-ray the tumor, Strasberg has seizures and speaks in "possessed voice." They try to cut it off, the surgeon slits his wrist. They try to laser it off, the laser goes nuts like a Spinal Tap stage prop gone wrong. So Tony Curtis flounces off to to find Stella Stevens, who is slathered in self-tanner to the edge of blackface and is apparently some kind of California psychic buddy of his.

They have a seance with a Gabor sister, some weird shit goes down with heads rising up out of the table and people speaking in tongues and freaky wind (But isn't there always freaky wind?) Stella's stoner hubby finds a passage in a book that seems to mention the human-tumor phenomena as well as the "panna witchy salatoo" and the gang is off to find the author...

Burgess Meredith! Yes! You loved his kung fu battle in Foul Play and leading motherfuckers straight to hell in Torture Garden, so here he is! The Scooby Gang asks for his help, he yadda yaddas about some more old books. Then they go up in his attic, which is a mere staircase above his paneling n' shag, ferns n' pre-Columbia art living room, but shrouded in yard-square cobwebs and inches of dust because, y'know, attic.

Burgess Meredith tells them that what they need is a non-parasitical undead Native American shaman to battle the Native American shaman that is attempting to resurrect himself. Tony Curtis hustles and bribes (via a deus ex machina "aunt" who has $100,000 to donate to the little Indian kids or whatever because Tony Curtis knows motherfuckers don't do shit for free). In the meantime, the tumor has finally given birth to itself--although it's a dwarf thank to the goddamn X-rays, which means it looks kind of like Tom Cruise in Rock of Ages drag.

Tonight, the role of the undead medicine man will be played by Glen Danzig...

So Tony Curtis and Live Shaman do battle with Undead Shaman. There's ice storms and computer malfunctions and random gore. Little Undead Shaman seems rather arbitrary in his attacks--he might use mind control to force a doctor to cut himself with a scalpel, or it might somehow create a giant lizard to chew on your hand, he might throw a possessed old lady at your or he might just rip your skin off. But, well, we already understand that logic isn't part of the The Manitou's universe. Panna witchy salatoo. Anahl nathrak, uthvas bethud, do cheol dienve...

Anyway, The Manitou is what happens when no one's really paying attention, just throwing casting options and plot points against the wall like so much chimp scat and seeing what sticks. But that's what makes it fun to watch: If you can't come up with good snark for The Manitou, no one can help you....