Fun in Balloon Land

I have to write a review of this as part of my therapy program. I landed in therapy as a direct result of this film.

In order to confront my fears now I must face this film. As a warning I suggest no parent ever subject their child to the acid trip known as Fun in Balloon Land.

There really is nothing to spoil, but if you watch this movie and start seeing the ghostly spectre of a tiny boy in gold lame shorts while holding hands with a lobster, I can recommend a good therapist.

The film is what I can only assume passes for fun in hell. Oh and it's set in Balloon Land.

I felt many emotions while on my egregious odyssey through the horrors of balloon land, but "fun" is definitely not an adjective I'd be comfortable with using to describe the tedium and mind numbing insanity inflicted on me while staring into the abyss of this oddly transgressive and borderline creepy "movie" that's really just a very annoying home movie that washed up onto the shores of hell. I swear to all living/breathing beings that enjoy films that I'm not exaggerating when I say this is honest to god the single worst movie I have ever seen in my life. It's so tedious, annoying, poorly made, and irrelevantly ridiculous that it exceeds new levels of badness I didn't even think were possible. I laugh when I hear friends of mine say how bad The Last Airbender or Green Lantern are and take so much solace knowing they'll never be subjected to the IQ dropping levels of stupidity found in Fun in Balloon Land.

F-

-1/10.

So if a movie was filmed, edited, released, and seen by more people than just the director and his mom, it gets an entry on IMDb? You learn something new every day!

Literally everything about this thing is wrong. The lighting, the acting, the sound, the camera, the music, the writing... everything. And I don't even know if I can consider this as a film, because 70% of this thing is filled with stock footage from a Thanksgiving parade. There's barely any plot, most of the balloons look lackluster, the begining and ending song is terrifying, the poster is just a still from the "movie" with a generic logo slapped in it. If this thing was ever shown in a theater, I'm pretty sure it was just some local centre from wherever this was filmed. (I think it was Pennsylvania?)

Anyways, this thing is just the bottom of the barrel when it comes to filmmaking, alongside Santa's Christmas Elf (Named Calvin), Dingo Pictures, After Last Season, and any other amateur thing that I've probably never heard about yet. Please don't watch this movie, unless you wanna see how bad it is.

Fun in Balloon Land is not so much a movie, in the conventional sense, as it is a series of semi connected events that happen to take place mostly in front of a camera. There is no plot, no logic, no real acting or actors, and no explanation for why such a thing should exist.

The "story" (if it can be described as such) is that little Sonny falls asleep while his mother reads him bedtime stories, then dreams of various adventures in the magical word of Balloon Land, which is filled with giant balloon animals and fairy tale people. What we actually get is Sonny and other unnamed children wandering around a warehouse and interacting with strange balloon people, plus unrelated footage of a balloon parade, narrated by a crazy woman.

One of the first things you notice, aside from grotesque the balloon people are, is that whenever Sonny talks to them, it takes an awkwardly long time for the balloons to mumble something back. Much of this dialog is completely unintelligible, and it's obvious that whoever's voicing the balloon people is just shouting from offscreen. No effort is taken to hide the fact that the "set" is just a warehouse, and at several points workers, set lights, or the end of the stage are clearly visible. Throughout this section the camera moves so rarely that I suspect there was no actual cameraman.

The parade section is somewhat better, insofar as we can tell what's going on, and aren't worried about the safety of the children involved. Sadly, this is mostly offset by the dismal appearance of the balloons, and the extreme length and slowness of the parade. The one source of entertainment Is the woman narrating all this. She's oddly animated, unreasonably excited about each and every lackluster balloon float, and keeps insisting against all evidence that the bored, shivering children love the parade as much as she does. I'm not sure if she's seriously overcaffeinated or just trying way too hard, but either way it's kind of surreal.

So is the whole movie for that matter. Surreal, bizarre, baffling, and utterly incompetent on every level. So incompetent that it makes Ed Wood and Tommy Wisaeu look like real directors by comparison. The only possible reason for its existence is as an extended advertisement for its creators, Gigantic Balloon Parade co, which makes it a strong contender for the worst commercial ever released.

I hesitate to call this the worst movie ever made, because it's not nearly as grating or cringy as some of the other "worst ever" candidates, and aside from a pair of unbelievably racist balloons, there's little that's outright objectionable. That said, it is probably the cheapest, most pitiful excuse for a movie I've ever witnessed, and I can't imagine watching it without help from Rifftrax.