OK. A while ago, as some sort of horrible personal challenge, I added unto my netflix queue every movie I could think of that there was no way I would ever willingly watch it if not for the obligation not to perpetuate my netflix turnover efficiency. Well, OK, not EVERY movie. Just the ones that I wouldn't watch because they were too traumatic (either by what little I had seen or just reputation). Anyway, I keep these on the bottom of the queue, so I only see one if I forget to add anything for a while, and one bubbles up from the murky depths. Previous instances of this included Brazil (not too bad at all in the right mindset), Videodrome (which in addition to being traumatic has no plot at all and is crazy boring) and today's horror, the infamous Fritz the Cat. Behold my running commentary.

OK. The art sucks. It's like... School House Rock with less attention to detail. And they're coloring outside the lines, that's just lazy... the dialog though, that's really bugging me. There's this mumbling slurriness to it... it seems somehow familiar. The last time I've heard such sloppy disinterested voice acting in an animated movie it was... it was... NO! No it can't be!

"Directed by Ralph Bakshi"

NOOOO! I hate Ralph Bakshi so much. Everything he has ever done is so very terrible that the mere mention of his name sends a shiver down my spine and yet SOMEHOW I seem to have seen every single horrible thing he has ever created! Because there's never sufficient warning! Anyway, yeah, it's actually starting now.

OK, so, "It's the 60s, man!" I believe that was an actual quote just now when I was getting distracted going off on Ralph Bakshi. So here's our main character. He's some sort of general deadbeat loser. OK. He's hitting on girls, and failing, because they're into black guys. One very racist deluge of stupid comments later, this guy doesn't dig them, so Fritz blathers at them about faux-philosophy until they agree to follow him to his friend's bathtub and he can sleep with them all. So they're all in a bathtub and naked and... no, this really isn't particularly shocking because you took so long establishing it and the art is so simplistic and bad that adding red circles to their chests isn't really a problem. So is the audio going to make up for it? No, not really, and now the tub is blocking it all out, and all that's really shocking is the premise of this scene, which well, really isn't what with the buildup it's had. I've seen much worse, in other stuff by the same director even, as a small child.

So now everyone else notices and joins in and this scene has actually become simplified to a pink version of the traditional Fight Dust Cloud. My biggest problem here is that someone is bragging about being an aarvark, because we've already had people talking about being black and being jewish so we're clearly using animal forms as metaphor for various ethnic groups and/or professions, not separate species, so what the heck. They're also all smoking POT! Oooh! How scandalous!

So now some cops bust in and beat everyone up so they have Xs for eyes, except Fritz who steals a gun, shoots the toilet, laughs at his awesome accomplishment, and that's about it for this scene. Now he hides from the cops in a synagogue and we're just kinda being weirdly anti-semitic for a while... and the cop who isn't jewish thinks they're puerto rican hippies... yeah. So this doesn't really go anywhere and is kinda Warner Bros. Cartoony for a bit, with another totally arbitrary nipple.

Now Fritz is just muttering to himself and having some sort of dream/metaphor deal going on with a boob-hallway in it, which, OK, that's slightly scandalous but South Park totally did that in an episode I saw just this week just because they were really effectively spoofing Heavy Metal as a drug use metaphor... and you know? Fritz kinda sounds like Dr. Loveless. That bugs me. And... he arbitrarily ends up setting the building on fire, which just leads to... the abrupt end of the scene.

So now he's in a bar full of crows/black people and we are REALLY REALLY REALLY badly mixing our metaphors here in addition to being racist, seriously, PICK ONE. So anyway, he's hanging out with this random mobster looking crow and they're really really poorly exploring black culture. Oh hey, here's some arbitrary male nudity, from one of the cops showing up again and somehow losing his pants in a crow church... and wait a minute. How does that one even work? We've kinda established Warner Bros. rules by now, where nobody at all has been wearing pants, just shirts. Heck, the main character was walking around with his hands in his non-pockets earlier, this is just weird man.

And now a really offensive stereotype is shoving a bunch of joints down his throat, resulting in a black boob hallway hallucination for all of 5 seconds and... bongo drums. OK. Yeah, we're officially getting really offensive here, but totally not in the way I was warned about. OK, finally, here's some offensive poorly drawn nudity, combined with profound racism. Yeah, this is bad. This is really really bad.

Now Fritz is inciting the crows into mob violence directed at the cops who have wandered by again. I'd like to stress that I'm not skipping anything here. This is just something he spontaneously decided to do, out of the blue, for the heck of it, partway through the previous dialog free scene. So yeah. Violence arbitrarily occurs, and one of the cops shoots our new mobster crow friend and he has a long drawn out death scene with a bad metaphor to it. And now there's circus music. WTF. So anyway, more cops come and WHY DO THE CROWS HAVE RED DEMONY EYES AND TEETH NOW! COME ON! So, after one oddly detailed cop getting shot, Fritz runs and... fighter plains drop a bunch of bombs on the area destryoing everything. WTF again! Time did not elapse here even!

So we suddenly switch to a totally unrelated scene in a dignified black and white area. Fritz is talking to some female friend asking if he's famous yet. He isn't. He hurls abuse at her a bit, then she proposes they move to san francisco and get married. Road trip montage! With some more blatant racism in the background... and OK. This no longer qualifies as a montage, this is just not bothering to draw backgrounds for 5 minutes straight. They stop at a Howard Johnson's, then proceed finally to california I guess.

Oh hey, here's our first swastica! And second, and third, and forth, on the jacket and motorcycle of this bunny in the desert. yeah, we just kinda and now for something completely differented into a nazi biker bunny going to drive off somewhere before his topless hippo girlfriend reminds him he forgot his heroin needle. End of scene.

Meanwhile, back in our attempt at an actual narrative, they get a flat tire. OK. Aside from establishing that IT'S THE 60S! and being racist, dialogue in this movie really just serves to pad out the running time, because nobody has had anything resembling an actually scripted conversation about anything ever. So anyway, 5 minutes of a poor attempt at slice of life dialogue, Fritz has come to the conclusion that his stereotypically jewish girlfriend is annoying, and she's spitting green slime as she nags him to go get some water for the radiator.

Meanwhile, hippo lady gets her own hippy love song sequence while her boyfriend nazi rabbit just sits there looking drugged out, like usual for him really... and wow, our plotlines suddenly converge. Fritz meets these two, says he's bored, and they take him to... the cemetary. Where a badly animated monster opens a door to- oh to reveal he's wearing an evil wizard robe, and I guess he's some sort of gorgon because that's a snake tail, which doesn't really work as a cartoon animal. So... what are these people? We've got a nazi, an evil wizard, and some sort of orc-lizard girl in bad fantasy lowlife scum goon tunic, meeting in a church to plot something? With skulls everywhere... and they're kinda just generically evil, and bunny is beating hippo with a chain, to which Fritz says "hey guys, that's not cool, don't do that" in his usual mumbled non-committed fashion, and... they just kinda beat her up for a while. Fritz mutters some hippie BS at her, then wanders off to drive somewhere with lizard-orc-brown-tunic-girl... and they're going to blow up a powerplant for "the revolution" which Fritz is saying is bad despite advocating it like, 30 seconds ago? So now he's muttering how this is a bad thing to do while laying dynamite and quoting beatles songs. So he eventually decides yeah, I shouldn't do this, and stairs at the dynamite saying he shouldn't plant it until the fuze burns down, stops, says "Far out..." and then we have... a bad stock footage real life explosion and burning cacti.

Now here's hollywood! It has a big billboard of a naked girl in it. Here's someone in red robes going to visit Fritz in the hospital, and those 3 girls from the beginning also visiting him. He's in standard cartoon bandages and traction. Oh, it's hippo girl in the red robes. That makes sense I guess. He's muttering more faux-hippie BS. Really ever word out of his mouth is insultingly pointless drivel. It's disgusting. It'd be a good parody if they didn't think they were actually being deep. So anyway, apparently these are his dying words... and spontaneous orgy, not really on screen. A new cop, outside goes "Poor Fritz, he was a good man, wasn't he." End credits.

Oh hey, here's some sepiatone photos of people... who I guess the movie maybe might be indirectly based on by way of an underground comic based on the people the author new... but no wait. I happen to have the arbitrary knowledge that said author was just a creepy weirdo going for shock value because he's in some other weirdo's authobiographical comic.

So uh... that was awful. It wasn't even NOTABLY awful. I mean, remember when I gave that blow by blow of Devilman Woman? That was pretty awful, but at least it had the dignity to be hilariously frelled up so I could say amusing things about it after! This is just really really dull, forgettable, pointless, and again, racist. The only notability it would have is being a terrible animated movie from America in the 1970s for "adult" audiences that WASN'T made by Ralph Bakshi... except it WAS made by Ralph Bakshi! Wizards is significantly more offensive, with the bonus of being highly memorable for its disjoint pasted in nazi stuff. This just sucks in a GENERIC fashion. I'm actually disappointed by something I was watching as an exercise in self-torture. That's just SAD.