Phantom of the Paradise, 1 star

Here is a movie that was either going to get one star or five. By what I refer to as the Ebert standard, judging a film by whether it succeeds at what it attempts to do, this movie is a resounding and unequivocal success. Unfortunately, what it attempts to do is show us Brian de Palma's take on a musical horror-parody incorporating elements of Faust, Dorian Gray, Phantom of the Opera and Queen. Why anyone would think such a venture was worth undertaking in the first place is beyond me.

The plot concerns a songwriter who has his face mangled in a record-pressing machine (don't ask. no, really, don't) and succumbs to an offer from an evil music producer to sell his soul in exchange for a successful songwriting career. Somehow this manages to be both too much and too little plot for the film to handle. De Palma's technique here seems to be to throw as much as possible onscreen, and so we are confronted with insanely lavish and decorated sets, men wearing belts covered in antlers, blatant references to Psycho, a man having his teeth replaced with steel ones for no apparent reason other than their interesting appearance on camera, and bombastic and slightly catchy music by Paul Williams. Williams also plays the Faust/Dorian Gray character and seems to have reserved all his energy for the songwriting. The pacing of the film is all over the map. For a while it will seem as if events are happening at breakneck speed and the viewer struggles to remember them all. (Relief sets in when it becomes apparent that we will not need to remember 3/4 of what we have just seen.) Then suddenly the film will become deathly slow while a character spells out in agonizing detail everything that has just happened in the entire film.

Phantom of the Paradise reminded me of nothing so much as The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It is a relic of a time when cult classics were made, not born, and when filmmakers were not so overcome with self-consciousness that camp was still possible. The bad acting, overbearing music and threadbare plot are all hallmarks of a very particular kind of 1970's cinema that seems impossible to resurrect. In its own mind it is an utter success; I just hope I never have to see anything quite like it again.