What happens when out of touch Hollywood execs, desperate for a ‘today’ picture, take the advice of a clueless focus group? The Phynx happens. Every frame of the picture is insanity and you’ll certainly feel like you’ve lost your mind after watching it. The Phynx is an example of a film in which everything appears to have gone wrong.
The film is about the titular band who are a Monkees ripoff with an ‘amazing’ secret- they double as secret agents who are given the job of rescuing a group of celebrities who were kidnapped and taken to Albania. The Used-To-Be-All-Star cast appears to be everyone the film’s producers could roust from the Hollywood retirement home. These kidnap victims politely sit in carefully arranged chairs, providing no resistance to the kidnappers. While it was nice to see the producers throw some cash at these past their prime stars, they could have easily borrowed wax figures from the Movieland Wax Museum and nobody would have been the wiser.
The film had a very limited release, which meant that most of the celebrities were spared the embarrassment of anyone seeing them in this colossal failure. Relegated to the dustbin of history, the film would live on only in the memories of those who most likely suspected it was just a hallucination. Warner Brothers would eventually take the film out of its vault, releasing it on DVD in 2012.
