Shot on the tiniest of budgets over several years, Forbidden Zone is a real honest-to-god labour of love. Its main raison d’être was, it would seem, largely to record the sort of thing that The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo were doing on stage as part of their cabaret act before they morphed from a performance art troupe into New Wave band… and dropped most of the name… and bucketloads of members. In the end, that had actually already happened by the time the film was completed.

The Hercules family lives in a seemingly ordinary house in Venice (the one in California, not the real one… Also not the real one in California but a plywood version), however this house is in fact atop a portal to the Sixth Dimension™, a strange and, as ever, dangerous place. On their way to school one day, family progeny Frenchy (Marie-Pascale Elfman) and Flash (Phil Gordon) are told by their neighbour Squeezit (Matthew Bright, AKA ‘Toshiro Boloney’) that he had a vision that his missing sister René (also Bright) disappeared through said portal, which is conveniently accessible in the house’s basement. Frenchy takes it upon herself to investigate this mysterious other realm hidden beneath her house, but she’s soon captured by its marauding princess (Gisele Lindley) and taken before the tyrannical King Fausto (Hervé Villechaize) and his queen, Doris (Susan Tyrrell). Fausto is immediately hot for Frenchy, raising the ire of his wife who has her imprisoned; he intervenes behind her back, getting her put in his harem instead. Can Frenchy escape? Will her family save her? Will any of this even really matter?

So… if you’ve been keeping track of that ‘forthcoming attractions’ banner on the homepage for the past year or so, you might have spotted this one pop-up from time to time. To be fair, quite a few of the films that regularly turn up there haven’t been written up yet out of sheer laziness, though at least some seem like they require more research put in. This, however, is in fact neither. I’ve been holding off on this one, because the timing seemed very poor to discuss it, but I’m in the middle of writing a big effort post on another film that requires a lot of prep work, so to hell with it, I’ll-a do it now-a.

The whole affair is very much a curate’s egg… I mean, in the modern sense that it’s come to mean, not the original parody of etiquette version. Some of it is quite funny, some of it is interminably bad. The thing tends to shine brightest when it’s focussing on Villechaize and Tyrell, the people you’re most likely to have heard of and really the only ones with any notable career in acting in film or TV or whatever (well, aside from the cameos by Joe Spinell and Viva). I feel I’d best add that qualifier, as maybe the other people not brought in from the Mystic Knights had some sort of stage experience for all I know. Admittedly playing a creepy little man was essentially Villechaize not acting, but that’s by the by. Indeed though, the real star is Tyrell as the pantomime dame-esque evil queen, who nevertheless manages to make her absurd caricature feel like a fleshed-out character rather than one of the simple grotesqueries that permeate the film. She also gets one of the few actual original musical numbers in the film, which is probably the great highlight of the whole thing.

Yes, despite its classification as a musical, the bulk of the film’s songs are jazz standards and vaudeville numbers, as was the troupe’s original wont. They do change up the lyrics on some of them though, most notably ‘Minnie the Moocher’ sung by Danny Elfman as Satan is tweaked to actually reflect the story of the film (such as it is).

So, yeah, good bits. The film dies particularly on its arse however in things like the schoolhouse scenes or pretty much anything where the Kipper Kids are the focus, at which point it all turns into a full-on performance art anti-entertainment wankfest for a bit. Though really large swathes of the humour beyond the art-with-a-capital-F stuff have ages quite poorly as well, like an incessant ‘gag’ that involves Flash and his grandfather humping every woman they come across or whatever the hell is meant to be going on with René. Perhaps most infamous is the film’s rather blatant use of full-on minstrel blackface. Well, in the black and white version; the colourised version takes the more than a little questionable approach of colouring the lips red instead.

Richard Elfman’s previously given an ‘I’ve got black friends’ level of defence of this (and occasionally a similar one for its dubious presentation of René). As of it all blowing up in 2020, he’s apparently prepped a new version that edits the minstrel make-up into clown makeup, claiming that the blackface had always bothered him, but they couldn’t fix it, what with running out of money, yadda yadda yadda. Hmm. The question arises, in that instance, as to why he didn’t have this done in 2008 when the film was first colourised. It’s not like the stuff even has the hallmarks of the ‘ironic’ blackface that was a thing for a while in them there days where it’s explicitly supposed to be a white person in blackface rather than a black person which supposedly made it all right (America elected a black man as president, racism is over, forever, etc., etc.), and good god just typing all that out is giving me a headache. I mean, some of these things had a bit more commentary attached, but the gist that I’m getting at is that it still perpetuates the imagery, as well as the idea of blacking up for comedy… or ‘comedy’, as a lot of it was just in the ‘look how outrageous we’re being’ school, but Tropic Thunder (2008) this is not.