Reviews

I watch this remarkable visual document every 5 or 6 months to remind me of the visionary powers of this great composer and musician. Frank Zappa attempts to weld together several totally different worlds of artistic behaviour. There's the nice, successful middle of the road stuff, personalized by Starr and Moon. The traditional Classic music is shown and half-ridiculed. The almost always invisible groupie scene plays it's part (no actresses here, only the real girls)like it did as a short lived musical group the GTO's (the true meaning is lost; some say Girls together only or outrageously) Frank even took one of the groupies ( Miss Lucy ?) into his home to play nanny to his children. Last, but not at all least, are the Mothers. I omit the of invention part as this was the idea of the record company to soften the blow to the female part of America's silent majority. It was the beginning of the Flo and Eddie period, which Frank sometimes explained on stage as the result of a famous DJ saying that he could make the Mothers as big as the Turtles. Well, Frank used to say: If you wanna be as big as the Turtles, have a few Turtles in your band. The movies shows in a half hidden and symbolic way the craziness of the world, the moral dilemma's and the influence of religion on the psychological development of mankind. This is the first big step into Zappa's conceptual continuity idea, which sadly ended with his death. The movie is a monument to his genius.

There were several moments through this movie I though about going to sit in the back row, closer to the door. I don't know why. It's cheap, gory, constantly borrowing stuff from other movies, and yet it kept on my mind for days. Sometimes the scenes felt real, like turning on the TV in the middle of a reality piece and wondering if it's extremely bad of extremely real. It sort of scared me, and that's rare. It made me experience claustrophobic tension, which I never felt before.

As almost an oldtimer, having enjoyed the original TV series, I rushed to the theater to remember some of the old feeling. Flawed casting, an unbalanced script, hesitating acting and over-the-top special effects made me grind my teeth in anger and close my eyes tight shut in shame. The plot, the effects, the relations, the triple treason etc all have a distinct smell of the improbable. It has several moments you feel like saying "yeah right" to the screen to indicate what you see is truly and utterly impossible. And as always, that kills the movie. And that's sad.

Apart from the people that actually suffer the condition in which they are sexually attracted to dead bodies, we will all frown upon the idea itself. What makes this movie beautiful and special is the fact that it explains the feeling as reasonable, shows you the origin as understandable, makes you accept the unacceptable, and actually creates a romantic feeling in the viewer while he or she is looking at a young girl making love to a corpse, all that without promoting it as the way to go. Made in nice soft colors, small, quiet acting and perfect casting; it changed me in some small way that can never be changed back

This film hit me like a lightning bolt. It brought tears to my face and almost restored my faith in the human race. It tries to tell us that even the unthinkable can be done if we accept the combined power of feelings and imagination. We see people struggle with age old morals, their youth and upbringing. We can almost taste the bitter loneliness of the adapted transsexual as we can actually feel the pain of the struggling rebel that (almost) cannot accept the discrepancies between memory and perception, between love, lust and friendship, between what's done and not done. The actors make it all believable and enjoyable. They live the parts that show true bravery in crossing holy borders.

This is pure horror at its cheapest. All the basic ingredients are there: small, deserted island, dark tower, mysteriously lost people, ritual killings, dark caves and hints of a monster. The movies could have been made by a machine. But for the close and appreciative observer there are small gemstones of scary genius inbedded in the cheap scenery and bad acting; the soft, eerie whistle every time something really bad & scary is about to happen, the long slow walks through unlit caverns, the grande finale and the unexpected dramatic family ties at the end. It'll never win any awards, had to be renamed three times to try and make a small profit and most of the time seems to be a lecture on bad acting. But at some points it really, really scared me and gave me the shivers; each and every one of the 5 times I watched it.

Although the film has some very beautiful & erotically tense scenes, the little & few dialogues, combined with moody glares, make even some of the completely silent scenes very threatening. It's a little like listening to the rumbling of a live volcano, not being able to run and wondering if, and when it will erupt.