The weirdest, most transgressive movie musicals ever made

They sing! They dance! They name God the F-slur!

They’re equivalent twins who’re undoubtedly straight and who below completely no circumstances need to bone. They’re the celebrities of Dicks: The Musical, an acid-brained, NSFW riff on The Mother or father Lure from Borat director Larry Charles, who apparently will cease at nothing to make the wildest new midnight film on the scene.

A crudely made, sophomoric musical extravaganza, Dicks: The Musical looks like the reply to an age-old query: “What if Rodgers and Hammerstein acquired actually excessive and tailored Freddy Received Fingered?” This movie has every thing: graphic incest, Megan Mullally’s disembodied vagina, and two little gremlins referred to as Sewer Boys who stay in a cage and are fed ham straight from Nathan Lane’s mouth, like child birds.

The viewers response to one thing this consciously bizarre and transgressive will range, however it’s tough to not no less than reticently admire a movie that brings such wholehearted stupidity and fucked-uppery to the large display screen, notably within the candy, normally sanitized style of the film musical. Its launch looks like an applicable motive to dig into the movie-musical oddities that got here earlier than it — the tuners that waded so totally into WTF territory, they’d make even the folks behind The Rocky Horror Image Present and Hedwig and the Offended Inch scratch their heads.

So right here’s an inventory of the strangest, most transgressive film musicals in cinema historical past.

Phantom of the Paradise

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Earlier than dumping a bucket of pig blood on Sissy Spacek in Carrie or introducing us to Al Pacino’s “little buddy” in Scarface, Brian De Palma directed this weirdo glam-rock riff on The Phantom of the Opera. Its plot performs out like a type of Mad journal film parody, with a wronged composer disfigured in a report press, and a Faustian discount involving tunesmith Paul Williams as a Machiavellian report exec. However the true thrust of the 1974 film is the sheer gonzo chutzpah De Palma injects into almost each scene. That includes splendidly expressionistic costume and manufacturing design by Rosanna Norton and Jack Fisk, respectively, the movie is a visible smorgasbord — a Nineteen Seventies Tumblr web page festooned in glitter and scored by Williams’ electrical tunes. The movie’s major theme, “Faust,” might kick “The Music of the Evening’s” ass.

Lisztomania

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In 1975, Ken Russell showered Ann-Margret in an orgasmic bathtub of baked beans in his movie model of The Who’s idea album Tommy. Seven months later, although, he launched a fair larger cinematic freak present. Billed as “the movie that out-Tommys Tommy,” Lisztomania takes its title from the apparently very actual historic time period for the feverish fandom surrounding Nineteenth-century composer Franz Liszt. Framing Liszt as a horny pop star (performed by Who frontman Roger Daltrey), the movie options all of the acquainted beats of a music biopic: Boy rises to fame; boy meets lady; boy engages in an epic sci-fi battle with Richard Wagner, a vampire who additionally at one level turns into a Frankenstein model of Hitler with a machine-gun guitar. Outlandish, foul, and a superb watch, it’s actually the best film wherein Roger Daltrey sprouts a 10-foot erection and Ringo Starr performs the pope.

The First Nudie Musical

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A cheeky riff on the entire “we’re gonna lose the [farm, clubhouse, theater, orphanage, etc.] except we give you cash quick, so let’s placed on a present” model of musical, this early Cinemax staple facilities on a bankrupt manufacturing firm pressured to supply an all-singing, all-dancing porno with a view to save the studio. The 1976 film has a one-joke premise, although it doesn’t lack attraction. Actually, there’s hardly something salacious right here. Whereas there’s plentiful nudity, a refrain line of dancing and vibrating dildos, and a tango quantity titled “Lesbian Butch Dyke,” that is extra Easter Parade than 2 Women 1 Cup. Laverne & Shirley’s Cindy Williams stars, with an uncredited (and clothed) look by Ron Howard as a hopeful auditioner.

Popeye

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Within the late Nineteen Seventies, Paramount Footage head Robert Evans misplaced the bidding conflict for the movie rights to the musical Annie, and shortly greenlit the event of this live-action musical about everybody’s favourite spinach-eating comics/cartoon sailor man. The ensuing film, written by famed cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer, and directed by, of all folks, Robert Altman, is a baffling but fascinating piece of cinematic anarchy. Each a painstaking live-action re-creation of the aesthetics of comedian strips and an agonizingly aggravating expertise on par with Uncut Gems, 1980’s Popeye is among the most watchably unwatchable movies in existence. Robin Williams performs the titular incoherently mumbling sailor; Shelley Duvall is his scrawny, burbling love curiosity, Olive Oyl; and Harry Nilsson penned the songs. All of them sound like gremlins haphazardly singing nonsense over a light-weight jam session in purgatory, however highlights embody “I’m Imply,” “He’s Giant,” and, maybe better of all, “All the things Is Meals.”

The Apple

Picture: Cannon Movies

The place to look at: Tubi, Pluto TV

1980’s Xanadu is commonly referenced as one of many worst film musicals ever made, however it may hardly maintain a candle to this sci-fi catastrophe launched the identical 12 months. Set in a dystopian model of 1994, the place the music of alternative is (after all) disco, The Apple locations the Adam and Eve story into the context of a Eurovision-esque music contest lorded over by the satan, as a result of why not? The aesthetic is THX 1138 as per the Village Folks, and the messaging is everywhere. “Companies are evil,” says the movie, “however so is train?” There’s a powerful anti-individualist message, but additionally, the heroes wind up being a bunch of hippies who rave in a cave till the rapture comes. Throughout this quantity, a person in a golden speedo wielding a large apple sings the immortal phrases, “It’s a pure, pure, pure need / Meet an precise, precise, precise vampire,” at which level a vampire seems and does jazz arms. Y’know… regular stuff.

Meet the Feebles

Picture: Wingnut Movies

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Lengthy earlier than turning into the cinematic grasp of Center-earth, Peter Jackson was greatest identified for a set of low cost, crude, darkly humorous, gleefully violent B-movies. Maybe the strangest and most perverse one is his second function, a 1989 puppet musical a few troupe of animal performers who act as a type of Darkish Facet model of The Muppets. Aggressively grotesque, but nonetheless oddly charming, this vomit-and-expletive-ridden bacchanalia has every thing from puking rabbits to interspecies romance. That features a nightmarish flashback to the Tet Offensive starring a bunch of frogs, and a mass capturing carried out by a busty hippo whereas a fox sings about sodomy. It’s sufficient to make you surprise how the hobbits didn’t wind up extra pervy.

Cannibal! The Musical

Picture: Avenging Conscience

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This movie is arguably the closet one on this checklist to the spirit and feeling of Dicks: The Musical. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone made this 1993 musical retelling of Alferd Packer’s Nineteenth-century journey from Utah to Colorado, throughout which, for causes that have been by no means totally clear, Packer wound up consuming his touring companions. Whereas Parker and Stone went on to additional discover the musical kind on display screen in South Park: Larger, Longer & Uncut and Crew America: World Police, and on Broadway in The E-book of Mormon, this stays so far their solely live-action film musical. It’s crudely made and sophomoric, as South Park followers would count on, however it’s additionally a major Rosetta stone for the duo’s mixture of lighthearted showmanship and schoolboy satire. Parker and Stone star, with Parker additionally writing the tunes, which embody gems like “Shpadoinkle,” “Once I Was On High of You,” and “Let’s Construct a Snowman!” (Notice: This was a full 20 years earlier than Frozen.)

The Happiness of the Katakuris

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This violently absurd 2001 horror-comedy musical from director Takashi Miike begins as the story of a down-on-their-luck household whose mountain-based visitor home appears cursed, given how many individuals die there. Because the household tries to cowl up these deaths, the film goes off of about eight completely different rails concurrently: There are zombies! An energetic volcano! Somewhat claymation demon that emerges from a bowl of soup and rips out a girl’s uvula! Miike references every thing from Daybreak of the Lifeless to The Sound of Music to karaoke music movies. Relying on viewer mileage, the result’s both a delightfully hallucinogenic curler coaster, or simply exhausting.

Annette

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The place to look at: Prime Video

The newest entry on this checklist is Leos Carax’s and Sparks’ 2021 rock opera a few child pop star (performed by a puppet) who battles for company in opposition to her opera-diva mom (Marion Cotillard) and faltering insult-comic father (Adam Driver). On its floor, it’s a grand train in shitposting, a elegant sung-through multimillion-dollar joke that includes Driver singing whereas consuming Cotillard out, and a fierce little marionette lady headlining the Tremendous Bowl. However beneath its meme-ready floor, it deepens right into a full-throated celebration of efficiency, storytelling, and absolutely the pleasure and simultaneous ridiculousness of committing to the bit 100%. (Significantly, the place’s Simon Helberg’s Oscar nomination?) All of the whereas, Carax and Sparks slyly spin a darkish fairy story about how mother and father can weaponize their kids in opposition to one another, and so they stick the touchdown with probably the greatest ultimate scenes of the last decade thus far.