Painted Lady Movie Night, August 4th, 2009

[Jacques Treatment]

The first movie we watched was Danny Elfman's "Forbidden Zone." Clearly a trip through the minds of Elfman and his performance art troupe, "The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo," most of the music (and art) has a definite 30s feel to it. The movie is a series of sketches very loosely connected together by a plot: The Hercules Family live in a ramshackle house connected to something called "The Forbidden Zone," located in "the 8th Dimension." When Susan B. "Frenchy" Hercules gets bored, she goes exploring and manages to get lost in the Forbidden Zone, and it's up to her family and friends to get her back. There are some notable casting surprises that I'm sure those of you who are too interested for your own good to look up on the IMDb.

The movie is set up to feel like a live-action version of a cartoon from the 1930s, but with adult sensibilities--bondage and nudity figure highly in the story--but it's very silly, and you can just sort of check your mind at the door and enjoy it.

The second movie was a total break from that: "Kung Pow: Enter the Fist." It's a Frankenstein effort: unholy and stitched together out of corpses, but it's also a success at what it does, mostly. Steve Oedekerk, through clever the use of blue-screen, edits himself into the movies, with new dubbing and sound effects added. Although some of the dub-related jokes get a little annoying, they do manage some pretty funny moments.

--J,

living in the 8th dimension