Pandemonium

I'm fairly confident that Haydn Keenan's Pandemonium is the most bizarre film of the 1980s and quite possibly the strangest movie of all time, even outdoing the most challenging films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Takashi Miike or José Majica Marins.

Unfortunately, Pandemonium is also virtually unwatchable... complete and utter moronic drivel from start to finish - even worse than the dreadful 1982 horror parody of the same name.

Featuring coke-snorting Nazi dwarfs, punks, monsters, a dingo man, full frontal nudity from both sexes, a diminutive führer with a big nose, impromptu songs, a giant cockroach, incest, dancing koala bears, roller-skating, and lesbian twins, the film strives hard for cult status, but with such a relentless onslaught of incomprehensible weirdness, performed in a very strange manner by all involved, it just winds up being irritating in the extreme.

1/10. How the hell did this ever get made?

The obvious stylistic (if that's the word) influence on this fiasco is the Troma school of low budget schlock but the level of talent on display is more that of the monumentally untalented Edward D. Wood Jr. The screenplay quickly loses its way through the absurd plot lines and just piles scene on scene in the hope that it will somehow work. It doesn't. The plot threads involve such inanities as Nazi lesbians, dingo girls, and a wheelchair bound megalomaniac harridan. To have any chance at all of raising a laugh it needed a director with his tongue firmly in his cheek. Haydn Keenan instead had his head firmly up his ass and we end up with about a dozen sniggers and not one laugh.

Male lead David Argue gives easily the most embarrassing performance of his career, but can perhaps claim it as a crime of passion since he was reported at the time to be romantically entangled with female lead (and Australian Playboy Playmate) Amanda Dole. Her acting career came to a screeching halt with this performance. Towards the end of the film she was crucified which turned out to be good preparation for the reviews.

Given the title, and the subject matter, I cannot believe that anyone would take this movie seriously... It is the story of a DINGO GIRL. That should be a bit of a clue to the farcical nonsense that is to follow. The first five minutes set the tone. It was obviously not meant to be logical. It was meant to be ridiculous. Which it is... I guess it would only be Australians that get the whole "Dingo Girl" reference. And being an issue that somewhat divided the country, some may find the references somewhat distasteful. If you are going to take offense at that issue, then there are plenty of other issues in the movie to take offense at as well. All in all a funny movie...with a playboy model in a lead role. That does not happen everyday.