Fun in Balloon Land

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.

A diaper-wearing kid falls asleep, and dreams of something called Balloon Land, which amounts to some gigantic balloons in a pedophile's warehouse/ garage. There is a bit of piano music hear in these scenes, but the piano music is clearly being performed live, by someone sitting behind the camera, as it is obviously live, and drowning in echo. Someone is blowing bubbles on the audio tracks, crew members can clearly be seen moving the balloons around, and the end of the so-called stage can frequently be seen, along with a bit of lighting equipment, before the film pads out its run time with footage of an unidentified parade filled with gigantic balloons, and an unidentified female narrator, who can't seem to decide if she is narrating a kid's movie, or doing a porn flick. It frequently shows the audience reacting to the balloons in this parade, and they look as bored and confused as the few people who have ever seen this probably looked.

How was this ever made, and by who? Was it ever screened publicly, and if it was, how many people saw it, and what was their response to it? Its production history is a complete mystery, no cast or crew received any screen credit. Aside from its title, and 1965 copyright date, nothing is known of its origins.

In reality, this was most likely done by Gigantic Balloon co, Inc., just to promote themselves, and make use of some leftover balloons, the original footage was probably filmed in one morning, and on one take, with the parade footage filmed the same evening, and on absolutely zero budget, guerrilla-style, and the people who made this are likely in prison.

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.

This was obviously a parade that was shot so it could be shown on television, only it did not stop there. No, instead, we get a strange story thrown in to balloon this up to a nearly one hour show. So, if I had to guess, I am thinking they needed to fill an hour time slot on television so they padded this thing so it would fill said time slot using a very creepy story and basically a review of what had just happened. I think they should have simply condensed down the parade footage so that they could simply fill a half an hour slot and just do a Christmas special for the other half hour.

The story, hm, that's a tough one. First you get a song singing about balloon land before switching to a mother reading to her son. He gets up and sticks his nose in the corner and we are off to balloon land where they make no attempt to really make balloons do much and instead have children running around on different sets. The most disturbing being the young boy running around in a golden diaper. Then you watch the average cities Christmas parade which is like every parade...BORING! Seriously have yet to figure out the point of them. Finally, we get a recap of what we saw...

The most crazy thing about the film was the host of the parade who would shout as the balloons went by and describe them in some absurd way. She definitely sounded as if she had a few drinks too as she announced how gay everything was. I realize gay back then was used to describe a happy person, but seriously, she still used it way too much! Get a thesaurus!

So this is not really a film in the truest sense. Just a parade filmed and padded so it could fill the allotted time period. I saw this thanks to the guys at Rifftrax and they made watching this 'film' entertaining as even they were perplexed by exactly who would be watching this thing. So if you want to watch a very strange boy walking around and looking at big balloons and people shouting from a distance as if they were talking, a parade hosted by a tipsy woman and a pointless recap of what you have just seen, this is your movie!

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.