The Forbidden Zone is playing on TCM at 7:45 tonight!
It’s also showing at 1430 Saturday, and other times on TCM and SHO Thursday and Saturday.
I love this film. Herve Villechaize as King Fausto of the Fifth Dimension, Susan Tyrell as Queen Doris, Danny Elfman (as Satan) and The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo… It’s brilliant!
If I didn’t already have it on DVD I’d be watching it tonight.
Damn! I coulda put this on and annoyed Pepper Mill – when I showed trhis at one of my Bad Film Festivals, she begged me to turn it off — during the opening credits!
On the other hand, she wasn’t feeling good, and she was out most of the time it was on, so it wouldn’t have worked…
But Bad Film Festival? It’s a good film! Actually, I saw it the first time at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. Dr. Donald Reed introduced it as a film you’ll either love or hate. Obviously, I loved it. The music, a mixture of Danny Elfman’s compositions, Yiddish Theatre bits, and others, was great. The bargain-basement sets (painted cardboard and paper) were absurdly amusing. The characters were bizarre. Lots of breasts. (One of Gisele Lindley’s breasts was notably larger than the other. Or smaller – depends on how you look at them.)
And the production numbers. Giver her all the juice! Giver her all the juice! 20,000 volts up her caboose Will make her see the errors of her ways! and Danny Elfman’s riff on Minnie The Moocher and Pico And Sepulveda are classics.
Not according to Pepper Mill. Or my other guests. After she begged for it to be turned off, she found herself outvoted by everyone else, who wanted top see more. But five minutes later they asked that it be turned off, too.
Until I found this Board, the only person that I knew who had seen the entire film was me. So I put it on the bill at my BFF where the theme was “failed cult movies”, meaning those that had failed to generate a significant cult base. This was definitely one, at least at the time.