Long before The Nightmare Before Christmas, Danny Elfman composed music for 1980’s Forbidden Zone. This film, which can currently be streamed on Tubi, is more of a proof-of-concept than anything else but is still an exercise of unhinged creativity that is worthy of your attention for a number of reasons. Originally created to highlight the musical abilities of the Los Angeles theater troupe, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, Forbidden Zone marks Danny Elfman’s composing debut and has some serious bangers on the soundtrack that still hold up to this day.
The absurdist musical fantasy Forbidden Zone, the theatrical composing debut of Danny Elfman, is streaming on Tubi.
Forbidden Zone mostly takes place in the Sixth Dimension, which is accessed through the septic tank below the Hercules family’s house. When Frenchy Hercules stumbles upon the access point, she is quickly kidnapped by the short-stature King Fausto and his queen, Doris.
She is locked up in Cell 63 by their frog servant, who is just a man in a frog suit, and is held indefinitely because that’s where King Fausto keeps his favorite concubines.
Back in the regular dimension, Forbidden Zone establishes the rest of its story. Flash, who is a senile elderly man wearing a propeller hat, recruits Squeezit to help him rescue Frenchy, and they wiggle their way through the plumbing to enter the Sixth Dimension after singing the alphabet song along with a Tommy-gun wielding teacher at their elementary school.
The film itself was meant to serve as a transition from Oingo Boingo’s cabaret style to the new-wave/ska that Danny Elfman’s band was known for throughout the 80s.
Squeezit is captured by Satan (Danny Elfman), and we’re introduced to The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo in their purest form. Through a series of blistering song and dance numbers, we learn what’s at stake (at least we think we do), and we’re thrust into a world full of pitchforks, deception, nonsensical incantations, and strange creatures that inhabit and rule the Sixth Dimension.
Forbidden Zone will have you hitting “pause” several times as you watch in disbelief and try to reconcile the foreground with what’s going on in the background.
We’re going to stop right here and give you a little bit of a history lesson. Not only does Forbidden Zone mark Danny Elfman’s composing debut, but it also marks Richard Elfman’s transition from working on music full-time to working on films.
The film itself was meant to serve as a transition from Oingo Boingo’s cabaret style to the new wave/ska that Danny Elfman’s band was known for throughout the 80s.
Through Forbidden Zone’s fearless storytelling, cardboard set designs, offensive imagery, off-beat soundtrack, and use of human chandeliers, we’re met with a film that makes very little sense but offers an alarming amount of insight into the minds of the Elfman brothers. Forbidden Zone subverts every expectation and should be viewed as more of an unhinged piece of artistic expression rather than a traditional movie.
Upon its release, Forbidden Zone was critically panned but has since become a cult classic that often gets midnight screenings to showcase its absurdity to loyal fans all around the world. Back in 1980, however, Richard Elfman was bankrupted by this movie, and he even lost his house. Despite Forbidden Zone’s resounding failure upon its initial release, Elfman maintains that he’s still glad he followed through with this vision.
Critically speaking, this odyssey into the Sixth Dimension currently sits with an 83 percent critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. Among the positive reviews, Forbidden Zone is praised for its musical numbers and its fantastic visuals.
Visually, there are two versions of Forbidden Zone to consider. The original 1980 release was shot in black-and-white. The 2008 version, however, was colorized by hand, making the entire viewing experience feel like a sleep-paralysis-induced fever-dream.
If we had to venture a guess, the colorized version of Forbidden Zone is more in line with Elfman’s original vision but could not be pulled off when it was originally released due to budgetary restrictions.
Forbidden Zone will have you hitting “pause” several times as you watch in disbelief and try to reconcile the foreground with what’s going on in the background.
There is no true way to categorize Forbidden Zone, and it’s one of those movies that you’ll have to see for yourself to believe it. If you appreciate this movie for what it really is and go into viewing it with zero expectations, you will have your world rocked by the onslaught of insanity that is presented. But if you think of this movie as one of your favorite band’s demo tapes before they found their true sound and image, you’ll understand why it needed to be made.
In other words, Forbidden Zone is the proof of concept that eventually led to Danny Elfman’s iconic and decades-long career as a composer, and it’s this foray into the Sixth Dimension that made it all possible.
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