Pandemonium (1987)

MOVIE #1,860 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 07.30.24 From spoof comedy to the Australian art house, though this is just as comedic and even more weird. Weird is putting it lightly, in fact. This is high concept insanity: Nazi lesbian twins try to joint-marry a mute woman raised by dingos as her paralyzed mother alongside a bumbling father (who is wearing a giant Rocky & Bullwinkle moose head) try to intervene. And that's just the first fifteen minutes. This has been called the Australian Rocky Horror Picture Show, minus the music and all of the charm. Its pace is so frenetic and overtly offensive (there isn't a taboo they don't try to lambast, from AIDS to Christianity to dogs being mutilated by a guy dressed as a dingo) that the result is pure, dissociative chaos. There are actually a lot of spoof-level gags in this, but the tenor is so dark they don't really register.

Pandemonium ‘87 is so purposely made for the midnight circuit that it comes off as completely pandering in that regard, and difficult to take at face value (I feel similarly about Peter Jackson's Meet the Feebles … what was going on down under in the late 80s?). Films made explicitly to shock people rarely work and this is no exception. But its nice aesthetics alongside its very specific type of over-the-top horny strangeness and swing-for-fences Big Idea conceptualism make it a movie you should probably see once and once only. So it really is nothing like the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Lastly, it's very funny that I could only watch this because I have a library card (it’s on Kanopy… I couldn't find it anywhere else). At least both of today's movies were under 90 minutes!

---

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,859 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,861 ⫸

---

Pandemonium is a 1987 Australian fantasy comedy horror film in the style of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Raised by a family of dingoes, a young feral girl heads for Babylon, Australia to find her family, only to find that her mother is not all she seems. It was released on April 2, 1987.