On DVD: 5 Musicals That Haven't Lost Their WTF-ness

This week's extras-laden Blu-ray releases of Moulin Rouge! and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (both from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment) spotlight how quickly the shocking can become acceptable. Rocky Horror went from being a scandalously successful and polymorphously perverse midnight movie that, 35 years later, can now be performed in an only slightly sanitized version during the family hour on Glee. (It's also the subject of remake rumors, but that's just too disheartening to contemplate.)

As for Moulin Rouge!, remember how insanely overwhelming the editing and song overlapping seemed when it first opened? And how quickly it became a steppingstone to even faster editing and more elaborately mashed-up musical moments? As Mick Jagger once noted, "Americans are a funny people. First you shock them, then they put you in a museum." But here are five musicals -- good and bad ones alike -- whose inherent weirdness is still more than Mr. Schuester and New Directions can probably handle:

The Apple

Set in the "future" world of 1994, this 1980 curio is one of a troika of oddball movies that year -- alongside Xanadu and Can't Stop the Music -- that assumed that the 1980s were going to be just like the 1970s, only more so. Thus, this ridiculous but compulsively watchable musical's vision of 1994 involved beard glitter and giant Mylar shoulder pads rather than the torn-flannel-shirt aesthetic that emerged instead. Filmed in Berlin but trying to pass for America, loaded with songs about drugs and corporate slavery -- oh, and it's a Biblical metaphor, too -- The Apple feels as bonkers now as it did when audiences hooted it off the screen three decades ago.

8 Women

Visionary filmmaker François Ozon (Swimming Pool) teamed up with an octet of legendary actresses (including Catherine Deneuve and Emmanuelle Béart) for a musical that involves hit French pop songs, sumptuous costumes, and an all-female cast. Oh, and a murder mystery that involves everyone being snowed in at a country house where the lord of the manor is found dead in bed, and all of the titular ladies have motive and opportunity to have committed the crime. It's hard to imagine an American filmmaker grafting together song-and-dance onto a whodunit -- call it the lingering legacy of infamous Broadway flop Moose Murders -- much less as successfully as Ozon does.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies

Rather than rely solely upon its marquee-busting title to stand out among 1964's slate of monster movies, this legendary fiasco -- at press time, it was #54 on IMDB's Bottom 100 -- was sold to unsuspecting audiences as "The First Monster Musical!" The fact that people weren't competing to make The Second Monster Musical should give you some idea of the impact that film had upon release, although decades later it does stand out as perhaps the most entertaining movie made by the singularly inept Ray Dennis Steckler (who also stars in this film under his screen name "Cash Flagg").

The Phynx

There have been vague rumblings that Warner Archive might actually liberate this little-seen but infamous dud from the vault, but let's not hold our breath. The plot involves a government agency recruiting five doofuses to form a rock band that will become popular enough to send them into Albania, where American pop culture icons (mainly 1930s movie stars, plus Xavier Cugat and Colonel Sanders, all playing themselves) have mysteriously vanished. The band performs bizarre ditties like "What is Your Sign?" (this was 1970, after all) and "The Feeling Too Good Today Blues," two of the lesser works from legendary songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The Phynx is one of those movies that's so awesome in its awfulness that you can't look away from it. Chase down a bootleg if you must.

Zero Patience

If you thought protest musicals went out with the 1970s, check out this example of early-'90s agit-prop from Canadian director John Greyson (Lilies), in which the infamous "Patient Zero" comes back to life to clear his name as the guy accused of bringing AIDS to North America. Greyson throws a lot of ideas (and songs) at the wall, and while not everything sticks, you have to admire the chutzpah of any movie that includes songs about HIV (sung by the virus itself) and bathhouses, as well as a duet between two men's... um, not-mouths. It may take at least another 35 years for Glee: The Next Generation to take this one on.