Pandemonium

1987, vhs quality

Johnny's comments:

Another Australian Classic. Well...

Pandemonium is a 1987 movie and... I have no idea what is going on in this movie, after about 10 minutes my mind drifted and the rest is a blur, so much so that when I making the videos afterwards, I didn't even recognise some of the things that were going on. OK, I'll give it a go.

An unnamed dingo girl (Amanda Dole) arrives on a beach wearing only some improvised underpants and wanders off to a closed off building where she is spied by nutter Kales Leadingham (who else but David Argue) who follows her as she breaks into the building owned by wheelchair bound P.B de Woolf (Arna-Maria Winchester), who is angry that dingo girl is back in her life after abandoning her all those years ago. Her husband, E.B. De Woolf (Esben Storm), is a struggling filmmaker who is advertising for an actress to finish his movie when the dingo girl comes into his path and he become enraptured with her. Also boarding at the house are in sync twins (Kerry Mack and Rainee Skinner) who are incredibly horny and are desperate to be impregnated by their uncle Little Adolph (Ashley Grenville), a descendant of Hitler but he is fairly inadequate. There's also numerous others living at the building. Everyone becomes obsessed with dingo girl particularly when they find out she's a virgin but also possibly the second coming of Christ.

That'll do. The first thing I wrote had three mistakes in it so you can tell the brain fog set in early and never left. The first problem is that every character in the movie except dingo girl is incredibly shrill and highly annoying. Everything is designed to be controversial in one way or another but it's all very dull. Maybe it was more controversial in 1987 when Azaria Chamberlain was still very raw in everyone's memories but now it just seem like an awful lot of 'dingo got my baby' jokes mixed with "Hitler has one ball" and sexual inadequacy jokes plus plenty of Second Coming jokes. More and more characters enter the fray, no idea what their point is except that the movie becomes increasingly crowded, then there's actors playing more than one character, a more annoying character than the last one. Just a non-stop barrage of nonsense becoming more unwatchable by the minute until it ends like a gunshot to the head and finally bliss. The most unwatchable Australian movie I've ever seen; no wonder it didn't get a cinema release and no distributor would touch it. Just impossible to recommend in any way. I could say that at least Amanda Dole is plenty naked in the movie but I've got it all below so you don't have to watch the movie.

As always with VHS rips, the quality is lower than DVD but I have to say that this is the best VHS rip I have seen image wise, better than a number of DVDs I've capped. Very surprised at the quality of it particularly as the movie never really had a DVD release (except privately). I will say that there is a little popping in the audio, nothing too distracting but it isn't as good as the video. I doubt there'll be a better release as the movie was barely released and as I've hopefully made clear, is a tough sell at best.

Amanda Dole film clips (collages below)

Marcia Deane Johns film clips (samples below)

Kerry Mack and Rainee Skinner film clip (collages below)