Forbidden Zone (1980): The end of an era; the foretelling of the next

Forbidden Zone (1980)
dir: Richard Elfman

Forbidden Zone serves as an ode to The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, just as everything about The Mystic Knights was completely changing. The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo was the original incarnation of the Danny Elfman-led new wave band Oingo Boingo. Throughout the '70s, under the leadership of either Richard or Danny Elfman, The Mystic Knights served as a form of musical-theater or cabaret where the band played either old school big band music or Danny Elfman compositions. The plan had been to play things you couldn't hear live anywhere else at the time.

Richard Elfman conceived of Forbidden Zone to be a cinematic equivalent of seeing The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo live in concert. It is an attempt to preserve a band whose main point was also preservation. But, Elfman didn't just want to preserve the band. He also was trying to recall and preserve an era which had been long gone: that of the early 1920s and 30s cartoons.

In the 1920s and 30s, there were a whole slew of black and white, hand-drawn cartoons that were pushing boundaries, and also engaging with some of the musical artists of the generation. The most well known of these were the early Silly Symphonies, before they were taken over by Mickey and the gang. For instance, Ub Iwerks' The Skeleton Dance was a playful, hand-drawn Halloween cartoon about skeletons dancing at midnight set to a minor key foxtrot. Less widely remembered are the cartoons featuring Cab Calloway, like the Koko the Clown/Betty Boop cartoons, or a cameo in 1944's Swooner Crooner. Elfman took everything from these cartoons. Everything. Not just the visual style, but the racism, sexism, and stereotypes.

Forbidden Zone is a silly movie about a bunch of weird cartoonish caricatures who discover that there is a door in their basement that leads to the 6th Dimension, the Forbidden Zone. The door was first discovered by a heroin dealer/smuggler. The next to go through the door was Rene Henderson (Matthew Bright), who became imprisoned by the King and Queen. Then, one by one, the other characters head down the rabbit hole in an attempt to rescue Rene and each other.

Of course, the plot is just a conceptual excuse on which to hang the musical numbers and the bizarre characters. There is Frenchy, a woman with a bizarre French accent (Mrs. Elfman). Squeezit Henderson, Rene's brother and also a chickenboy (Matthew Bright). Flash Hercules, a 12-year-old boy scout played by a 70+ year old man. King Fausto (Herve Villechaize) and Queen Doris (Susan Tyrrell), who rule the Forbidden Zone. The ex-queen who was overthrown for Queen Doris (Warhol superstar Viva). The Princess, a woman who runs around in her underwear whipping people. Satan, who leads the Mystic Knights (Danny Elfman). And, the Kipper Kids, whom one may recognize from UHF as the fill-in act after Stanley is kidnapped.

The musical numbers range from Cab Calloway to Freddy Martin's Pico and Sepulveda. The Three Stooges-originated Alphabet song makes an appearance, as do a few original pieces from Danny Elfman. All these numbers have high concept psychotic staging, and most of them have little consequence to the film itself. Pico and Sepulveda, for instance, is a worker song whose main purpose is to get Pa Hercules to the Forbidden Zone.

The influences of the look of Forbidden Zone also range widely. The sets take inspiration from German Expressionist sets of the UFA era (see The Cabinet of Dr Caligari), and the cartoons are from the Fleischers and Iwerks.

Elfman manages to offend everybody throughout the course of the movie. Everybody is a caricature of everything, which includes use of blackface, topless women, and a Jewish financier. Given that Elfman is Jewish, and he used his grandpa for the financier, it's hard to say that this is casual racism, but more just a crass sense of humor representative of the dark American subconscious. It's a movie whose belief that "I'm an equal opportunity offender" it a very valid defense (your acceptance of this will vary from viewer to viewer).

Forbidden Zone is a roller coaster into a twisted cultural history of America. It looks at the multimedia pop culture we started from, and creates something entirely new and wacky from it. In a sense, it is almost proto-hipster in its reuse of various American eras to subvert and also appropriate. But, Forbidden Zone isn't about appropriating only the powerful and good parts of the culture, but also acknowledging all the bad parts as well.

Of course, since I said it was proto-hipster, Forbidden Zone feels somewhat ahead of its time by like 25 years. It would foretell when pop culture started to truly eat itself. When we would be looking not just to reuse the culture of old, but to recreate it and reappropriate it to cleanse our past while also being casually racist in a chummy we're all buddies here kind of way.

Forbidden Zone is hilarious and original in the way it created something surreal and almost dada out of the culture of the past. It wasn't content just to reuse, but it created something new out of the pieces of America's past. It's pacing is, at times, a little plodding (even for a 73-minute movie), but the big set pieces are worth the time. From the Kipper Kids in jock straps shaking their booties (proto-Twerking) to Susan Tyrrell singing in a glittery impressionistic dress with her breasts being thrust out, Forbidden Zone is a movie guaranteed to entertain and, probably, to offend.

Final Note: Originally filmed in Black and White, Forbidden Zone was intended to be a colorized version, and sent to China upon completion for hand-colorization. Its ultra-low budget restricted this until 2003 when Legend Films gave Richard Elfman the money to do it. The colorized version looks amazing, and realistic, and should not be missed.

New Years Evil (1980): Horror on the TV

New Year's Evil (1980)
dir: Emmett Alston

1980s horror movies have a reputation for mainly containing acts of graphic violence perpetrated against women, while violence against men flinches. Obviously, this is more true in some movies than others. The two prime counter-examples in my mind are Johnny Depp's volcano of blood in Nightmare on Elm Street, and Kevin Bacon getting spiked through the neck in Friday the 13th. Then, there's New Years Evil.

New Years Evil has exactly one female character who lasts more than 10 minutes. That character is Blaze, the uh...heroine?...of the movie. Blaze is a punky mid-30s sexed-up rock show hostess who is throwing her show's New Years Eve party in a Los Angeles hotel, featuring a hell of a lot of crappy bands. Her husband is supposedly in Palm Springs getting coked up, and she's busy mildly ignoring her son who has an announcement five minutes before a huge televised performance. Oh, and Blaze's female assistant is killed before the opening credits, but everybody thinks she's just missing.

The movie is then split into two separate movies (but never with a split screen, unfortunately).  The first film is Blaze putting on her punk/rock n roll New Years Eve party.  Right as she starts, she is called by a guy calling himself Evil who states that he will be killing people. And, every hour on the hour, Evil calls back and torments Blaze with recordings of the murders he just committed, while leading the police on a goose chase to find the victims.

The second film is Evil calling Blaze and killing women on the hours.  He picks up girls, sexualizes them if they aren't sexualized, then kill them.  The murders aren't really all that brutal, though a cop states that all of the victims have had their breasts mutilated, and the killer has mommy issues.  To the movies' sole credit, we never see the breast mutilation, and even when we see the bodies, their breasts look intact.

Eventually, as was telegraphed from the opening scene, and the repeated mentions throughout the film, the killer is revealed to be the missing husband, who's goal was to discredit and murder his wife for being a sexed up workaholic bitch who ignored his needs and the needs of their son.  The husband plans on killing Blaze by chaining her beneath an elevator, sending it up to the top floor, then sending it back down to crush her beneath it.  Because formula dictates, he fails, but the message was received.

With horror movies, especially in the '80s, the killer was the tool to implement conservative values upon transgressing victims (generally teenagers).  New Years Evil is no different.  In 1980, we were already seeing the backlash of the feminist movement, as women moved from behind-the-scenes mothers into public-facing tough women.  1979 has Kramer vs Kramer, which posed the wife as needing to leave her entire family to "find herself" and gain her financial independence.  Four months after New Years Evil, William Adler would release his novel War of the Roses, which, unlike the movie, was a screed posed against the ambitious Barbara Rose for daring to try to make a company of her own selling pate.

In this light, New Years Evil was a movie that was violent against both sexualized and successful women.  The first murder is Blaze's female assistant, a moderately successful woman serving another woman.  The second murder is a psych ward nurse, whom Evil had seduced.  The third and fourth murders were a pair of semi-ditzy sexed-up women whom Evil had picked up at a bar.  The fifth murder was a teenage girl who had been heavy petting with a boy at a drive in.  And, then there's the torture of Blaze.  These are all of the females in the entire movie.  Let me repeat that for posterity: these six victims were the only women in the entire movie. And, there were no men who were victims.

New Years Evil becomes a screed against the sexualized woman, as is usual for 80s horrors.  Unlike most of the horror movies, the man who is also doing his share of sexualizing the women is not victimized or murdered.  Indeed, in most of the cases, the sexualizer in New Years Evil is the murderer.  Only the drive-in teenage boy is sexualized but is not the murderer, and is also not victimized (except for having his car stolen, which, really, doesn't count in a horror movie).

But, worse than that, New Years Evil is a screed against the successful woman, embodied by Blaze.  Blaze is a woman who is married, but neglects her family for her job, which, if she was a man, would normally be the symbol of patriarchical success in movies of old.  Men are regularly neglectful of their family in the service of their successful jobs. Blaze, because she is wife and mother, isn't allowed to be successful, or even mildly neglectful. She's not allowed to be distracted by the oncoming four-hour-long televised show that will she is the host of.  No, because she is wife and mother, she has to attend to her son's needs even though he's coming to her 5 minutes before she has to go on the air.

New Years Evil is actually a hugely misogynistic horror flick, seemingly even more than usual.  Which is a shame, because it is actually a clever idea for a film in general.  As a sort of slasher radio show, it could have been amazing, especially if it wasn't so reactionary against both sex and success in women.  But, the movie is bogged down with the need to murder women, and to rail against successful women.

Plus, it's actually kind of bad.  It's not laughably terrible, except for a scene with the murderer hiding in a dumpster.  It does have some cheesy, overdrawn lines.  But, the movie isn't actively offensive in quality.  This is just merely average to bad in quality.  It isn't recommended for gore.  It isn't recommended for humor.  It isn't ironically enjoyable.  It isn't actively good.  It is a wasted idea that never quite took off the ground.

The main purpose of the movie, now, is to exist as a statement of what men thought of feminism in the early 80s.  It shows the patriarchy's reaction to women attempting to succeed.  And, it's a valuable tool for that tye of cultural statement.  For actual enjoyment, stay clear.