My World Of Flops is Nathan Rabin’s survey of books, television shows, musical releases, or other forms of entertainment that were financial flops, critical failures, or lack a substantial cult following.
KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park resembles a number of misbegotten spin-offs, as it represents the most embarrassing manifestation of a pop-culture touchstone. Like other bastard progeny—The Simpsons’ cash-grab effort The Yellow Album, the non-Beatles movie Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, the Atari E.T. home video game, and the Star Wars Holiday Special—it takes pop-culture monoliths in such unfathomable directions that the creators and fans of the corrupted landmarks try to wish these monstrosities out of existence through sheer force of will. (In the case of Atari’s E.T, the notorious video game was literally buried.) The red-headed step-children of these cultural milestones even call the integrity of their source material into question.
Although KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park is just as infamous as these other efforts, KISS never had much integrity to begin with. The television movie’s notoriety lies not in how it strays from what made KISS great, or at least fun, but rather in how it embodies the comic-book-crazed, monster-movie trash aesthetic of KISS’ Gene Simmons so purely that even he found it obnoxious. If you were to include a scene of Simmons deriding Frehley and Criss to a reporter that he’s also disparaging while receiving oral sex from a mother-daughter groupie team and counting a giant stack of $100 bills, then KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park would be a perfect reflection of Simmons’ sensibility.
The G-rated nature of KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park feels dishonest. These were debauched maniacs out to fuck your girlfriend, snort your cocaine, and crash your car into a brick wall, not kid-friendly do-gooders out to solve mysteries and defeat evildoers through their space magic. Simmons is much less interested in helping people out than in helping himself to other’s people money, something he’s quite gifted at acquiring. He’s less skilled at things like “music” and “being a decent human being.”
So KISS made a vehicle too cheesy and dumb even for a KISS project, which is remarkable when you consider that proud stupidity and cornball excess have long been core components of the band’s brand. In its tackiness, its crass opportunism, its low-budget B-movie drive-in vibe, KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park isn’t remotely off-brand for KISS, which may be why it has accomplished the impossible and proved an embarrassment for a band devoid of shame.
A Hard Day’s Night set the blueprint for rock ’n’ roll movies to follow (with perverse exceptions like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) but KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park diligently follows a much different model: Scooby-Doo. Instead of trying to be John, Paul, George, and Ringo, the gents were trying to be Fred, Daphne, Shaggy, and Velma. It comes about its Scooby-Doo vibe honestly. It is the product (and I do mean “product” in every form) of animation powerhouse Hanna-Barbera, whose tacky, lazily written and animated empire of beloved and non-beloved crap includes stuff like Yogi Bear and the various iterations of Scooby-Doo.
KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park has a Scooby-Doo setting (a struggling amusement park full of animatronic monsters) and a Scooby-Doo villain in Abner Devereaux (Anthony Zerbe), a scientist of the discredited but cinematically fruitful “mad” variety who has devoted his peculiar, prickly genius to creating robotic figures for an amusement park that are frighteningly realistic, more human than human. He believes the park should be a vehicle for his ingenious, wholesome creations rather than a venue for those lizard-tongued louts in KISS, who do not appear to share his love for old-timey barbershop crooning or hyper-patriotic ditties. Too thin-skinned and pure for this vulgar modern world, Abner can’t handle it when a group of cartoon greasers start antagonizing his freakishly realistic robotic ape and accuse the enraged scientist of having an inter-species relationship with his creation. The young hoodlums taunt, “What’s the matter with you and Magilla Gorilla? You got something going?!” (Magilla Gorilla is also a Hanna-Barbera production.)
KISS Meets The Phantom Of The Park begins with giant images of KISS juxtaposed over the Magic Mountain theme park where the action takes place. But after the opening credits, KISS disappears for a half hour so that Phantom can focus on what the filmmakers apparently really find fascinating: the conflict between pure science and the harsh demands of commerce as they relate to a struggling amusement park. Abner clashes with his boss and is fired despite his rather impressive ability to simulate life like some manner of contemporary Dr. Victor Frankenstein. For its first act, you could be forgiven for assuming that, despite its title, Phantom is a drama about a brilliant but disillusioned scientist in which an annoying rock band in clown makeup contributes a small cameo.