[6.1/10] *Phantom of the Paradise* isn’t a good movie exactly. It’s frantic and sweaty, and in places downright nonsensical. It’s a living cartoon that infrequently grasps at profundity at platitude about life and fame and the purity of *art* man, but more often than night finds itself mired in technicolor muck. Whatever points it wants to make, tunes it wants to spin, and stories it wants to tell soon become lost in the cinematic sinkhole of random plot beats and eleventh hour supernatural angles that threaten to swallow the movie whole.

But it at least has the decency to be a bonkers, unrestrained, colorful version of a silver screen car crash, which gives it a certain charm. I can’t pretend I’m going to be racing to rewatch this movie, in all its overblown glory. And yet, it feels like the perfect movie to cue up with a group of friends at half past midnight, laugh at its scraggier parts, enjoy its ambitious parts, and appreciate the sheer, unrelenting camp that infuses every frame.

Writer-director uses that backdrop to throw *Phantom of the Opera*, *Faust*, and *Picture of Dorian Gray* into a blender, along with a jukebox from a 1970s club, to create something that is, at a minimum, unique. The result of that mixture is more a jumble than a picture with any clarity of purpose, but it at least produces some of the noticeably weird and eye-catching.

It tells the story of a young musician, Winslow Leach, who has his musical life’s work stolen by evil music producer and star-maker, Swan. When crusading to right that wrong, Leach runs into Phoenix, a young singer who’s perfect to belt out his tunes, but soon he finds himself disfigured during his vengeance-fueled rampage. What follows is multiple deals with the devil, a half-baked love story, and a drug-fueled explosion of a third act climax.

Taken as melodrama, or a fable about the cruelty of the music world, *Phantom of the Paradise* hits nothing but sour notes. The supposed romance among Leach, Phoenix, and Swan has all the sturdiness of cotton candy in a downpour. Likewise, the heightened tale of the fickleness of showbiz has nothing but tired clichés, even when they’re dressed up in a goofy smorgasbord of the unreal.

Producers are unscrupulous. Perfection breeds jealousy. True greatness goes unrecognized. Fans are sheep. And so on and so on and so on. It’s all surface-level, 10th grade notebook-level observations.

Despite that superficiality, it is a gleefully unhinged film, turning everything up to eleven from the jump with color and light and over-emoting at every turn. The title character pops up in steel teeth, crazy eyes, a flowing cape, and a giant bird mask. He gets boarded up in an enveloping recording studio where his mechanical tunes are processed into sweet melodies. He kills an interloping frontman with a stage prop lightning bolt. DePalma cuts and stitches together tons of impressionistic, loony montages where mugging characters interpret the music or scream or dance or do some other set of wild activities in quick succession.

It all plays like someone’s deranged fever dream, but in a colorful, oft-fun sort of way. While this isn’t my cup of tea, it feels tailor-made for someone to enjoy with a few chemical enhancements. That leaves sober-minded folks like yours truly a little more bewildered by the parts of the story that...well...make no sense. But at the same time, even the staunchest teetotaler can appreciate the wild and surrealist energy that runs through the film like an electric shock.

Rest assured, there’s not a lot of what you would call “acting” amid all this psychedelic bric-a-brac. Most of the performances veer somewhere between emotional outbursts you could get from the cheap seats and background actors in an Applebee's commercial. But the high volume, rough-and-tumble style suits the rest of the movie, so most of it isn’t too tiresome outside of those rare pauses when the movie tries to get serious.

Thankfully those moments are few and far between. More often than not, *Phantom of the Paradise* opts for a more tongue-in-cheek comic feels, replete with plunger-smooshing homages to *Psycho*. That silly scene features Beef, the peak of the film’s more ridiculous characters, a preening glam rocker who definitely knows what type of movie this is. His exaggerated shenanigans soothe the audience through some of the film’s more operatic swings and misses, with his amusing theatrics.

It all culminates in a combination of a grand guignol performance at the titular Paradise concert hall. The film climaxes with a goth rock showdown, a hastily-cobbled together wedding and assassination attempt, a last minute rescue, a weirdly shot and exposited reveal of the *Dorian Gray*-esque twist, a supernatural tragedy and instance of mutually assured destruction, and a pair of unmaskings to reveal the scarred beasts and human beings that lie within.

To try to ascribe a point to all of this mishegoss would be a fool’s errand, but damnit, it has spirit. If you squint, you can perceive some commentary on the obliviousness of the young and fanatical, cheering on faux dismemberments and ignoring real deaths so long as sex, drugs, and rock and roll continue to be sold. But really, that’s picking up patterns in static. The totality of the film, but its third act especially, plays like an excuse to put on a show and go as big, bold, and absurd as possible in whatever space can fit all of that craziness.

In that, *Phantom of the Paradise* isn’t good, but it is entertaining. It fails mightily in much of what it tries but goes for broke in every attempt. That’s all I ask for from bad movies, and it’s that clamoring vigor that’s forged a cult for this Phantom ever since he and his cohort first burst from the balcony. The film imparts a valuable lesson for its all, both in its text and in its very existence -- if you’re going to be a failure, at least be a loud and garish one.