Sorry it’s been so long since the last post. There’s been a lot going on in my life recently, this year was probably not the best time to start this blog, but since I can’t change anything about that, there’s no use worrying about it. And as for you, constant reader, there is nothing for you to worry about w/r/t me either. So with that brief apology aside, time for the review.
A good friend and fellow blogger has been telling me to watch this move for I think a few years now and I’ve finally gotten around to it. It is, if these things can be calculated, his second favorite movie. It was not mine. “Phantom of the Paradise” is an Avant-Garde Horror Musical in a similar manor as “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” but without the comedy. It’s about an “evil” record producer that steels a young composer’s music and uses it to open his club, a rock palace called “The Paradise.” The plot borrows devices from: Faust, the Phantom of the Opera, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and maybe some other classic pieces of literature.
The film is admittedly arty, but that is not at all the problem with it. The problem is 5 percent acting and 95 percent the music. William Finley, playing the composer lays it on a bit too think for my taste, but had that been the only problem I would have been able to overlook it, and rank this movie much higher.
The music is the major problem, it was way to 70’s for my taste, way too dated and not a good kind of dated, and despite that the music was not even remotely catchy. Had the movie been made a decade later using 80’s new wave synth pop, this might have been one of my new favorites. Had the movie used less music, then it would have been much more salvageable. But as it is the movie consists of almost 80 percent music.
All and all I would rate this movie at 3.5 out of 5. There were some pretty great scenes, the orgy scene was real arty, and there was another scene where the Phantom puts a time bomb inside a prop car and the clock on the bomb ticks in time with the rhythm of the song being played, plus the director uses two separate shots side by side to show what is happening on stage and behind the stage, pretty great scene really, and there are other scenes like that throughout the film which makes it both watchable and even to a degree worth watching. I’m glad to have seen it, but I probably won’t watch it again.