Re-Entering “The Forbidden Zone”

mmatos | July 26, 2007 11:10 am

Recently, a friend invited me over to watch a movie I’d heard a little about but had never seen: The Forbidden Zone (1980), a movie starring Hervé Villechaize and made by the Elfman family. Richard directed and wrote, Marie-Pascale plays Susan B. “Frenchy” Hercules (that’s what IMDB says), and Danny portrays Satan and provides music with his group, then known as the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. As an early Danny Elfman soundtrack, the movie would be fascinating enough, but The Forbidden Zone is an eerie attempt to recreate an especially outré Max Fleischer cartoon, albeit one featuring an actress whose entire performance is done wearing only big white grandma underwear. It is one of the most consistently omg-wtf-lol things you will ever see in your life. After the jump, some YouTubed evidence (which, as the above description should let on, is not necessarily safe for work):

For example, try “The Alphabet Song”:

Educational! Of course, no one in this movie really learned how to act, though that hardly gets in the way most of the time. How could it, when you have things like this batshit version of “Minnie the Moocher”:

Sadly, the film’s most magical moment–a stirring tribute in song to the La Brea Tar Pits–is not currently on YouTube. As my friend said after returning from the john and her guests insisted upon rewinding the sequence so she could see it, “I went to the bathroom during THIS??!?”

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