You think ‘Joker: Folie á Deux’ is bizarre? Here are 10 of the oddest musicals in movie history

As the eagerly awaited sequel “Joker: Folie a Deux” maniacally chortles its way into theatres, fans of the blockbuster original seem to be caught somewhere between cautious optimism, rubbernecking curiosity and outright hostility.
Why the mixed feelings? Ever since it was revealed that director Todd Phillips was taking the unexpected approach of fashioning his followup as a dark and twisted musical, folks haven’t known whether to expect a triumph or a train wreck. After all, the film, which pairs returning Oscar-winner Joaquin Phoenix with series newcomer Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, doesn’t seem like an obvious candidate to receive the razzle-dazzle song-and-dance treatment. Which actually puts it in some very good — or at least very interesting — company.
Take a look at these 10 movies, some of the most bizarre musicals ever made.
Before he would vault onto the A-list with “Midnight Express” and “Fame,” British director Alan Parker attempted to cross-pollinate a Depression-era gangster noir with an old-school Hollywood musical. And if that wasn’t risky enough, he decided to populate the movie with baby-faced child actors, who all spoke with the tough-guy (and deadly dame) patter of jaded adults. The thing is Parker’s strange experiment actually works if you approach it in the right frame of mind. Jodie Foster and Scott Baio, both 13 at the time, head up the pint-sized, Tommy gun-toting cast.
Fresh off his star-making turn on the ABC sitcom “Mork & Mindy,” Robin Williams signed on to play the famous spinach-eating sailor in Robert Altman’s musical riff on the classic comic strip. With a spot-on Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl and a blustery Paul L. Smith as Bluto, the dreamlike movie looks like a zillion bucks. Then, unfortunately, the singing starts. “Popeye” was mostly panned by confounded critics at the time, although Vincent Canby of the New York Times charitably called it “an appealing mess of a movie.” Surprisingly, it’s been reclaimed in recent years as a sort of misunderstood masterpiece. That seems like a stretch.
Menahem Golan, the Israeli shlockmeister responsible for the infamous B-movie studio the Cannon Group, stepped behind the camera to direct this head-scratching sci-fi fantasia about a pair of young wannabe rock stars from Moose Jaw, Sask., who get seduced and then spit out by the ruthlessly amoral music industry embodied by a villain named Mr. Boogalow. The late ’70s and early ’80s were lousy with embarrassing disco musicals (see “Xanadu,” “Can’t Stop the Music,” and “Thank God It’s Friday” … or better yet, don’t), but this one takes the bedazzled cake in terms of pure unwatchability.
With Francis Ford Coppola back in the news thanks to his latest big-swing cinematic folly, “Megalopolis,” it’s worth going back and revisiting one of the director’s earlier disasters. Arriving on the successful heels of “Apocalypse Now,” this intentionally artificial-looking, Vegas-set confection stars Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest as thinly sketched lovers who break up and engage in brief flings before finding their way back to each other. At the time, the press seemed hell-bent on taking the ambitious director down a peg or two, slamming the eye-candy musical’s emphasis on style over substance. And just as with “Megalopolis,” bad pre-release buzz doomed the film before it ever had a chance. But even now, four decades later, “One from the Heart” remains just as airless and inert as the critics said it was.
Before he made a killing and snagged an armful of Oscars for his epic “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Peter Jackson was a young indie auteur in New Zealand churning out sick, splatter-filled cheapies renowned for their aggressively bad taste (in fact, his first feature was called “Bad Taste”). Which brings us to this profane, handmade musical starring a misanthropic menagerie of foul-mouthed puppets singing about their STDs and the sleazier side of showbiz — that is, when they’re not engaging in blood-soaked ultraviolence. If Quentin Tarantino ever decides to make a Muppet movie, this is what it might look like.
Speaking of bad taste, after the indie success of “Hairspray,” the Pope of Trash, John Waters, attempted to break into the pop-culture mainstream with this ’50s-set musical about a high school good girl (Amy Locane) who defies her mother by dating a leather-clad, motorcycle-riding juvenile delinquent (Johnny Depp, then still in teen-idol mode). “Cry-Baby” wants to be a camp-infused homage to “Rebel Without a Cause,” but it’s a one-joke movie that proceeds to beat that single joke senseless for 85 minutes. Ricki Lake, Iggy Pop and erstwhile porn star Traci Lords all turn up in supporting roles. Even weirder, Waters’ film would become a splashy — and, gasp, respectable — Broadway musical in 2008.
As the rest of the world nervously approached the millennium, merry pranksters Matt Stone and Trey Parker brought their crude, construction-paper animated TV show to the big screen and it was … actually fantastic! Third-grade troublemakers Kyle, Stan, Cartman and Kenny sneak into the latest R-rated movie from their vulgar Canadian idols, Terrance and Phillip, and get in a heap of trouble after repeating its salty language. Their parents and teachers, of course, respond by blaming Canada. The madcap plot is all over the place (in the best way), with the kids visiting Satan and Saddam Hussein in Hell, while the musical numbers are hilariously offensive. Stone and Parker (and composer Marc Shaiman) would even end up getting nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar.
Following the commercial success of 1996’s “Breaking the Waves,” Danish enfant terrible Lars von Trier launched into this unorthodox musical starring the Icelandic pop star Bjork as Selma, an Eastern European immigrant to the United States who is slowly losing her eyesight. Working in a depressing assembly-line job at a tool factory to make enough money to pay for an operation for her son, Selma only manages to find joy and escapism in musicals. It’s a bizarre premise, to be sure, but von Trier and his fearless, heavenly voiced leading lady pull off a small miracle of desperation and hope.
Unlike the stellar 1986 British TV miniseries of the same name, this ham-fisted adaptation of Dennis Potter’s masterpiece is a sprawling disaster. Robert Downey Jr., still in professional limbo between his hard-partying days and his Marvel renaissance, plays a bitter writer with a terrible skin condition who lays in a hospital bed and loses himself in his hard-boiled, song-and-dance daydreams. The cast is jam-packed with big names (Robin Wright, Mel Gibson, Katie Holmes, Adrien Brody, Alfre Woodard, etc.), but the film they’re all desperately trying to bail out sinks from its own self-important weight. It also looks like it was shot on wax paper instead of celluloid.
Experimental French director Leos Carax tackles a script from the equally experimental art-rock duo Sparks (brothers Ron and Russell Mael), telling the story of a pair of Los Angeles lovers — he’s a provocative and annoying insult comic, she’s an angelic opera singer — who never seem to be unaware that they’re in an experimental movie musical. As played by Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, the beautiful couple have an arc that goes from romance to misery and, at times, feels like “A Star Is Born” remade by a semiotics professor. Driver handles his singing chores with surprising skill, but the film, which features a puppet as the couple’s titular child, is a pretentious slog.