Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #77 Rock & Rule (1983)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
One of the great joys of this column is getting paid to experience freaky-ass shit I might never have watched if I were not professionally obligated to do so. Now I like to think I have seen a LOT of freaky shit in the forty three years I have been alive. It’s kind of my thing. Let others waste time with quality and prestige: I’m all about shit that is crazy, shit that is bad, and shit that is so crazy-bad that it’s actually mind-blowingly awesome.
But this column is a wonderful reminder that even for a dedicated student and enthusiast of freaky shit like myself there is still an entire universe of profoundly, transcendently bonkers motherfuckery that has escaped my attention for one reason or another.
I am talking about cult treasures like Nelvana’s 1983 dystopian animated mind-fuck Rock & Rule, which is so unrelentingly trippy and psychedelic I half expected the credits to reveal that it was somehow written and directed by drugs, and that drugs also did all the production design and wrote the script and handled voice direction and music and casting and pretty much made this movie in its entirety.
It’s going to be a challenge to do justice to the surreal dreamscape anti-logic of Rock & Rule with a recently blown mind but to reduce it to glib pop culture shorthand the Canadian cult classic suggests what The Apple might look like if it were a Canadian animated musical directed by Ralph Bakshi with a Satanic Mick Jagger/David Bowie/Frank R. Furter figure as its villain.
Why has it taken me so long to finally see Rock & Rule? Heavens knows I saw the Rock & Rule VHS box enough in my video store days but it did a singularly bad job of selling the movie to someone who should be its ideal audience: a rock and roll movie fanatic who loves Cheap Trick and Lou Reed and Debbie Harry, not to mention crazy cult movies and stoner Canadian cartoons.
Rock & Rule lets you know right off the bat that it will be a crazy fucking movie with an opening crawl reading,
“The War was over…
The only survivors were street animals: dogs, cats and rats. From them a new race of mutants evolved.
That was a long time ago.
MOK, a legendary superocker
Has retired to OHMTOWN. There
His computers work at deciphering
an ancient code
which would unlock a doorway between
this world and
another dimension
Obsessed with this dark experiment
MOK himself searches for the last
crucial component
a very special voice
Now I like to think that I am a pretty open minded individual. I am a Juggalo after all. But reading and listening to that opening crawl I found my brain shutting down. It chose to flat out reject what it was seeing. It said no the new races of mutants combining the DNA of humans and rats, cats and dogs. It said no to Mok the superocker with the super-computer with Demonic capabilities. It said “thank you very much, Rock & Rule, but that cannot possibly be the premise for an actual motion pictures, particularly one animators slaved away at for a period of years, so you’ll have to do better than that and tell me the ACTUAL plot of your film.”
Amazingly, however, that IS the actual plot of Rock & Rule. If anything, that undersells the weirdness to come.
The film takes place in a post-apocalyptic dystopia where humanity has been replaced by animal-people with the bodies and faces of humans and the noses and ears of mice or cats or dogs.
Mok suggests what would happen if the Fascist and Satanic poses David Bowie and Mick Jagger struck during the most provocative periods of their careers weren’t poses at all and they genuinely were evil on epic, even apocalyptic scale.
In Rock & Rule Mok wants to open a portal to an evil dimension and unleash a world-destroying demon as retribution for his waning popularity. Not even Morrissey is that petty.
Mok is larger than life in every sense. He shares the Thin White Duke’s impossibly lanky, elegant frame, Mick Jagger’s massive, sensual lips, the sharpened fangs of a vampire and Frank R. Furter’s rapacious, avaricious, pansexual sexual aggression.
Mok’s speaking voice is provided by Don Francks but his singing voice is handled by David Bowie’s greatest proteges, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop while the singing voices of our plucky hero and heroine are handled by Robin Zander of Cheap Trick and Debbie Harry of Blondie.
Zander provides the golden pipes of Omar, a cocky, rebellious young rocker in love with bandmate and co-lead-singer Angel, a dog-hybrid who in the grand tradition of animation, is roughly four thousand times sexier and more attractive than she really needs to be.
The nefarious rock and roll super-villain needs Angel’s croon, the “very special voice” of the opening crawl/prophecy in order to unleash hell of earth so he invites her, Omar and their bandmates Dizzy and Stretch to his ominous estate, which is a cross between Dracula and Frank R. Furter’s respective castles.
Mok, whose original last name was Swagger before a certain Rolling Stones’ frontman’s legal team insisted on a change, drugs Omar, Dizzy and Stretch with a powerful, mind-fogging hallucinogen called an Edison Ball so that he can be alone with Angel.
Mok kidnaps Angel and takes her in his sinister blimp to Nuke York, a post-apocalyptic lampoon of the Big Apple featuring attractions like Carnage Hall so that she can perform at a “concert” whose real purpose is to serve as a summoning of the demon who will punish humanity for Mok’s sluggish merch sales.
The band travel to Nuke York to help their fallen bandmate but Mok captures them and brainwashes them into a state of infant-like naiveté.
As its opening crawl betrays, Rock & Rule has a lot of plot but none of it particularly matters. The plot is just an excuse for a dazzling parade of trippy imagery and wild ideas gorgeously, surreally executed.
Rock & Rule is a testament to the extraordinary work young animators can do if you give them creative freedom and access to powerful psychotropic drugs. It’s a vivid and unforgettable illustration of just how wonderfully weird and unique hand-drawn animation can be.
Rock & Rule is the truest kind of head film, a movie so psychedelic that just watching it makes you feel not just high, but absolutely stoned out of your gourd.
Rock & Rule is not a movie you watch, it’s something you experience with your whole soul and all of your senses.
Watching Rock & Rule a funny thing happened. After my stupid rational brain stubbornly refused to accept Rock & Rule’s premise on the basis that it was too insanely convoluted and dumb to possibly be authentic I almost immediately reversed course and gave myself over completely to Rock & Rule.
The rational, objective part of my brain took a much needed break and was replaced by the part of my mind that appreciates mood and sensation, spectacle and eye candy, freaky ass shit and bold cinematic visions.
There are a lot of great rock and roll movies out there but as far as I am aware Rock & Rule is the only one to take place in a post-apocalyptic dystopia ruled by anthropomorphic street animal-hybrids and center on a Mick Jagger-like rockstar’s plan to unleash a powerful monster from hell to punish humanity for his sagging tee-shirt sales.
Rock & Rule rocks and it rules. Even in the druggy world of stoner animation and roll and roll movies it stands out for being a particularly mind-boggling, senses-scrambling, mind-expanding journey.
Submit completely to the overpowering, intoxicating, wonderfully disorienting madness of Rock & Rule and enjoy the ride. I sure did.
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