For better or worse, Danishky Esterhazy’s The Banana Splits Movie is one of the most unusual productions of 2019. We live in an era where fans demand their nostalgia be vacuum sealed and placed on a golden pedestal, and here comes a movie based on a beloved kids series in which the cuddly animal rock ’n’ roll band comes to life and murders everybody in the audience.
It’s bold, it’s subversive, and it must be noted that as far as branding goes it’s damn near apocalyptic. Hanna-Barbera’s Banana Splits are a gory, R-rated horror franchise now. You’d have a lot of trouble putting them in an innocuous kids show now that the target, wholesome demographic can also see Fleegle saw someone in half and celebrate as their guts fall out.
That anarchic attitude towards a pop culture institution helps rescue The Banana Splits Movie, because without its premise it wouldn’t be a particularly noteworthy horror movie. The kills are satisfyingly gross and the cast is uniformly adequate, but watching someone get bludgeoned to death with a cartoonishly oversized hammer isn’t nearly as intriguing as watching a popular childhood icon do it. The Banana Splits Movie offers a satisfying sequence of slasher slays but the film relies so much on cognitive disconnect that it never feels like more than an ironic kill count.
The Banana Splits Movie takes place in an alternate reality where The Banana Splits was so popular that it’s been on the air for 50 years (as opposed to, in our reality, a mere two seasons). The live-action series about a group of animals who play beneficent rock music and do obstacle courses with their studio audience is a cultural institution but not a very cool one, and fans of their innocent antics are generally viewed as, for lack of a better word, dweebs.
One such kid is Harley (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong), a young Banana Splits mega-fan who just got tickets to see a live taping for his birthday. So his underappreciated mother, Beth (Dani Kind), his jerky father (Steve Lund), his burnout brother Austin (Romeo Carere) and Zoe (Maria Nash), a friend from school, hightail it over to the studio.
The script by Scott Thomas and Jed Elinoff (The Jetsons & WWE: Robo-WrestleMania!) wastes no time introducing a bunch of other fodder – sorry, “characters” – who will mostly meet gruesome ends. Overbearing stage parents, selfish TV executives, adult Banana Splits fans who stream everything on Instagram: they’re all on site to watch what we soon discover will be the last episode of The Banana Splits. The studio is under new management and the Splits, even though they’re a cultural institution, aren’t cool anymore.
And if you think that’s bad, wait until you find out that the Banana Splits aren’t actually people in suits but life-sized, super strong animatronic robots whose faulty programming demands that the show must go on. Always. Even if they have to kill everyone in the studio.
The Banana Splits Movie delivers in the gore department, with lots of gross kills that completely, playfully undermine everything the original show stood for. The decision to film the majority of them with muted tones, telegraphing all the horror to come, probably does the film’s raison d’être a disservice, since it always looks like we’re watching an ultraviolent movie with the Banana Splits in it and never like we’re watching a Banana Splits episode with ultraviolence in it. Instead of feeling unwholesome, which is baked into the premise, The Banana Splits Movie feels a bit like a foregone conclusion.
Except for the protagonists the characters almost all exist only to be horrifically murdered by childhood icons, so it seems a calculated effort has been made to make most of the victims either terrible people or at least annoying enough to make us happy they’re finally off-camera. That’s par for the course in a slasher movie, but it’s just another example of The Banana Splits Movie relying on its premise to overcome the limitations of the story.
But that strategy mostly pays off. The Banana Splits Movie is too thinly constructed and simplistic to hold up against the best of the genre, but in the straight-to-video landscape where standards are a little more lax, it’s an amusingly ghoulish feature. It doesn’t overstay its welcome, and it doesn’t deny us any images of people getting ripped to pieces by animatronic robots wearing cutesy costumes. It’s a functional, watchable horror movie that would probably be totally unremarkable if it didn’t have The Banana Splits in it.
But it does have The Banana Splits in it, and that’s just enough novelty to make The Banana Splits Movie a modest, and slightly freaky little flick.
