Transcendental Film - Richard Elfman's Forbidden Zone

By Kylie Wakefield
Collegian Staff
December 6, 2006

What’s so wonderful about senseless storylines, zany underfunded antics, raunchy unpolluted imagery and ravishing musical numbers? Everything.

There is no surefire way to describe Richard Elfman’s 1980 cult masterpiece Forbidden Zone. It takes you on the cinematic ride of your life. It spins you around, turns you upside down, and leaves you breathlessly wondering what just occurred during the past 83 minutes.

The film opens with Huckleberry P. Jones, a narcotics dealer and pimp, who stashes heroin in the basement of his vacant property in Venice, Calif. While in the basement, he stumbles upon the Sixth Dimension and, terrified of this, he sells the cardboard home to the Hercules family, perhaps the weirdest bunch of characters in film history. There’s the main character Frenchy Hercules, the daughter with an overbearing French accent. The rest of the family consists of Frenchy’s mother Ma, who is nearing 70 years old, her father Pa, a 40-something with a Swedish accent, her 12-year old brother Flash, who is played by a senior citizen, and her grandfather, who remains tied up all day for no particular reason. It’s an immensely interesting combination of personalities.

The plot has Frenchy team up with her friend Squeezit to find his transgender sister Rene, who has fallen into the Forbidden Zone. The midget King Fausto, leader of the Sixth Dimension, falls in love with Frenchy and captures her, while his wife Queen Doris becomes enraged with jealously. The whole family eventually slips into the Forbidden Zone, searching for one another in a world filled with frog-servants, monkey man prisoners, Royal septic tanks and other insanely random characters, all of whom could only be produced by the mind of a pure, unadulterated genius.

One of the best aspects of Forbidden Zone is its amazing music. Composed by Richard’s brother Danny Elfman and his theatrical band The Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo, the soundtrack incorporates big band music with computer sounds, creating one of the greatest unknown musical recordings of all time. The songs found on the soundtrack are early snippets of Danny’s later work on Tim Burton films such as The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands. The numbers are catchy, addictive, and prove that talent is no stranger to the Elfman family. By the way, Danny also plays Satan in the movie. Could it get any better?

With its fantastic cinematography, unique lighting styles, imaginative low-budget sets, a great soundtrack, entertainingly bad acting and side-splitting dialogue, Forbidden Zone is my favorite cult film. It requires patience and a sense of humor, but if you’re up for it, I highly recommend this 1980 gem. Just remember, when living in the Sixth Dimension, things can get rough.

wakefieldk1@lasalle.edu