Ed Wood would have given his best angora to be the auteur behind Forbidden Zone, which purposely uses Z-movie staging and amateur-night theatrics to its benefit. The normal characters are grotesques and the grotesques even grotesqe-er, to coin a phrase. Pa Hercules (Ugh-Fudge Bwana) works creating smog at Pico and Sepulveda, where an industrial explosion puts him into orbit, but only briefly. Two of his sons are barely-functioning homosexual neurotics who go to school in their underwear. Gramps wears a beanie and behaves like one of the Three Stooges.

The Forbidden Zone is a perverse Wonderland. Fausto's guards are naked female demons who prance around like nasty gazelles. His main servant is Bust Rod, a humorless human toad. The Kipper Kids are a pair of obscenely stuttering bald boxers. The whole place could be the wet dream of a retarded adolescent. Tasteless jokes abound about Jews - The Yiddishe Charleston is probably a real vintage song - blacks, gays, rape, sodomy, incest and anything else one can come up with from the guilty subconscious.

Two powerhouse assets hold the show together. Now a production designer, John Muto provides superb animation, putting the Zap Comic ethic into motion with Escher-like cascades of rolling dice and bizarre settings inspired by early B&W cartoons (which is why Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'s "Toontown" is equally sinister). His main problem is to segue between the minimalist painted-plywood settings of designer Marie-Pascale Elfman, which he does beautifully, sometimes using pixilated human figures to bridge the gap. I'm assuming that he also provided the clever mattes that achieve grandiose effects such as the march of Satan in the Minnie the Moocher - derived ending. In general, Muto's achievement is every bit as original as anything in heralded efforts like Yellow Submarine.

Most of the entertainment value is in the music. Danny Elfman proves himself a creative dynamo in his twisted main Rock theme and in his band's mutations of old 30s and 40s standards. Miguelito Valdez's Bim Bam Boom was a Desi Arnaz-style Cuban hit in the late 40s that found its way into the film noir Suspense; here it's sampled and combined with new orchestrations by Elfman. A pair of lips are sloppily matted into a face of a perverse-looking boy to sing the frantic lyrics, while the Kipper Kids provide backup with ugh-s and raspberries. Bust Rod and a nude princess rumba to several bars of the song, which reaches the heights of surrealism.

Within the general description of demented, there is some variety to the music: Frenchy Hercules (Marie-Pascale Elfman) warbles a singsongy French tune (Pleure), and Queen Doris has her powerhouse number, Witch's Egg. It's partially animated to excellent effect. Danny Elfman's Satan act from the original Mystic Knights show is a well-judged show-stopper.

Now one of the better working film composers, Danny Elfman's Rocky Horror- slanted interpretation of Satan is one of the more memorable devils in screen history. Hervé Villechaize is fun as the mischievous imp of a king; director Elfman gives him a Citizen Kane-like breakfast scene where he simply walks down the length of the table to bridge the gulf between him and his Queen. Susan Tyrell is easily the star of the show. Although all the other roles are filled with gusto, she transcends the wailing, whiney Queen Doris to create a terrific female monster. A manic depressive type, Doris descends into depths of ham-acted misery before roaring back like an enraged cross between the Bride of Frankenstein and Joan Crawford. She's genuinely sympathetic.

Adding to the horrorshow periphery are Viva as a foul-mouthed dungeon prisoner, and Joe Spinell as a rowdy sailor in poor Squeezit Henderson's humiliating flashback: "Chicken Boy! Chicken Boy!"

Fantoma's DVD of Forbidden Zone will be a must-see for existing fans and the curious alike. The transfer is a great improvement on the 35mm prints I saw when new; after all the trouble taken to achieve the right technical look for the picture, the 1980 optical tracks were murky and distorted, making a lot of dialogue hard to hear, but that's all fixed now. Fantoma also gives us every nasty dialogue line in optional subtitles. The B&W looks good, and is contrasty only when contrast is a desired effect. Framing looks great at 1:78.

The film is remixed in 5.1 and is clear and bright. Danny Elfman's music is also isolated in 5.1 as an extra frill (although I prefer the main title arrangement on the old Varèse Sarabande CD). There's an audio commentary with Richard Elfman and Matthew Bright, and a hefty docu with those two joined by John Muto, Susan Tyrell and Marie-Pascale Elfman. It contains several minutes of Mystic Knights stage antics recorded on old videotapes. There are also scenes from an incomplete Elfman attempt called The Hercules Family, deleted scenes and outtakes, a trailer, a song lyric booklet (sing along!) etc.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Forbidden Zone rates:
Movie: Excellent but ya gotta know what'cher getting yourself into
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: Commentaries, docus, discrete score, outtakes, deleted scenes, samples of other Richard Elfman work, booklet with lyrics.
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: August 28, 2004