Like most human measures of time, Jheri Curl June is intimately tied to the cycles of birth and death. The month opens with the birthdays of two of jheri curl music’s greatest architects, Prince and Jimmy Jam, and closes with the anniversary of the death of its most anointed practitioner, Michael Jackson. So, since we began this year’s festivities with a retrospective on Prince’s 1984 movie debut Purple Rain, it’s only right that we bookend it with a piece on 1988’s Moonwalker: the first full-length feature film dedicated to the music of Michael Jackson.
First, a word of warning. If you’ve been paying attention to my Jheri Curl Cinema series, you’ll have noticed one thing that these films all have in common: judged by conventional critical standards, they’re just not very good. And Moonwalker, quite frankly, is the worst so far. To get an idea of how “not-good”–one might even say “Bad”–Moonwalker is, please note that the film’s distributor, Warner Bros., cancelled a planned Christmas 1988 theatrical release in the United States over financial concerns; just under two years later, however, they apparently had enough faith in Prince’s filmmaking nadir, Graffiti Bridge, to inflict it on cinema audiences worldwide. When your film is considered to have less commercial potential than Graffiti Bridge, you know something is amiss.
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