Phantom of the Paradise (1974, Brian De Palma) (Patreon)

My earliest moviegoing memory, as noted in this Cinephiliacs interview. (It's Labuza's standard opening question.) Dad, not the most responsible of young parents (he was 29 at the time), took me (age 6) and my two younger brothers (4 and 3) to see it during its original theatrical run, and we all found the Phantom terrifying. Not even sure we stuck it out to the end; our crying may have forced an early departure. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'd deliberately avoided it ever since, but I certainly didn't seek it out, despite loving Paul Williams' work in Bugsy Malone. (First soundtrack album I ever owned).

Turns out Phantom of the Paradise isn't even remotely scary to anyone with an age in double digits (though Finley's left eye bulging out of the mask still freaks me out a bit). For a while, I found its campiness rather charming, if never quite laugh-out-loud funny; performance styles are all over the map—Finley and Graham hamming it up, Harper embodying a generic ingénue (but cutting endearingly loose during her big solo number), Williams splitting the difference by allowing his diminutive stature to be the joke—but De Palma modulates them well. As a musical, however, it just didn't connect. A few days later, I can't even recall the titles of Williams' songs, much less their melodies. And the "book," if you want to call it that, underlines how shallow De Palma's magpie sensibility has always been. It's one thing to openly riff on The Phantom of the Opera; it's another to toss in elements from various other high-school reading assignments (plus the obligatory Hitchcock reference). Final straw for me was when the Faustian bargain metamorphosed into The Picture of Dorian Gray. Does this man have no original ideas? Hardly surprising that Mamet wrote my favorite of his films (and even that was a rehash). 

Ultimately, I feel much the same way about Phantom as I do about Rocky Horror (though O'Brien's songs are far superior, imo): mildly fun, but barely memorable apart from its sheer transgressive excess. I've never seen either one with an audience, however (despite having lost my virginity to a Janet!), so one could credibly argue that my viewing conditions were a long way from ideal.