Honourable Mentions – Pandemonium

This is an Australian flick, directed by Hayden Keenan and released 1988, and… well it is just difficult to know where to start. This is absolutely surreal, an antipodean dreamscape with lashings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show – at least in the campy atmosphere/performances.

The film begins with the escape of Kales Leadingham (David Argue) from a lunatic asylum. He evades the warders, scales a wall and sits by a girl at a bus stop – at which point he commences to tell his tale. A tale of his younger days when, to make ends meet, he was a surveyor. His job took him to a ‘disused’ movie lot, where he was supposedly surveying the property for owners EB (Esben Storm) and PB De Woolf (Arna-Maria Winchester).

Around this time the Dingo Girl (Amanda Dole) came back to civilisation – via Bondai Beach it seemed – and headed to the studio. Being a Dingo Girl she spent much of the film in various states of undress. The de Woolfs were her parents – though EB mistakes her as an aspiring actress and tries to have his way with her. PB recognises her as the girl she abandoned in the desert (at God’s urging).

The studio is home to many a strange creature/character including a pair of incestuous Nazi lesbian twins (played by Rainee Skinner and Kerry Mack), whose reason for being there is to look after a Hitler clone named Little Adolph (Ashley Grenville). Most of the occupants find a reason to need Dingo Girl and in this case, as she is virginal, the twins want to breed her and Little Adolph.

Of course Kales falls in love with her and also realises that the studio is at an aboriginal dreaming spot. In the meantime the viewer is left wondering just what is happening. We get a wide range of weird characters thrown at us from the moose, which is EB with a moose head stuck on his head for a large chunk of the film, to the vampire cited below.

So... the vampire character... This is the Count (Henk Johannes) and, when we first see him – for about five seconds, he is sucking blood through a straw. We do get references to vampires later, including a line that suggests that “Behind each door (of the lot) lurked blood sucking fiends”. If the film had kept his appearances at this I think we might have had too little even for a honourable mention.

However, he makes another appearance later, for a minute or so when he decides she (Dingo Girl) has the ‘secret of sacrifice’ (no, I didn't get that either) and fights accountant turned ape man Kong (Pete Smith) for her as a bride. The fight uses guitars as a weapon of choice (as clubs and not instruments) and we do not see the conclusion, as such – just the aftermath of Dingo Girl in bed with Kong.

As a side entry to this we should mention Morticia (Mercia Deane-Johns) a witch, it would seem, who is trying to create a formula to remain young and has discovered that she needs to use a foetus not born of man – there was a degree of the Erzsébet Báthory to the character, at least a smidgeon.

Really odd stuff and, trust me, what I have mentioned doesn't even touch the weirdness of the finale. The imdb page is here.