(1978)
2.5
Fred Beldin
With bikers and mad scientists losing favor at the box office as the Me Decade progressed, exploitation director Al Adamson abandoned the subjects that had made his drive-in reputation and cast about for new, more marketable themes. Cinderella 2000 took him to the smarmy world of sex comedies (a genre he had explored a few years earlier with a pair of raunchy stewardess films) for a musical adaptation of the classic children's fable augmented with naked ladies, bawdy gags, and garish color. Adamson had no doubt taken notice of the adults-only fairy tales that were currently doing good business and cross-bred the idea with the sci-fi fad Star Wars set in motion. He was reportedly unhappy with the final result, but Cinderella 2000 wouldn't have been funny in anyone's hands. The jokes are broad, obvious, and delivered with leaden timing, the performances are either overblown or amateurish, and the cardboard sets are at high-school play level. Luckily, the oft-nude cast is frequently bursting into song with a ridiculous collection of disco-flavored numbers that help transcend the rather routine burlesque of the script and provide some wonderfully stupid pleasures. A group of robots perform calisthenics to a tune about mechanical sex, the wicked stepfamily clumsily prances to the abstinence anthem "Doin' Without," and actors in rabbit costumes simulate coitus during the Fairy Godfather's big number "We All Need Love." There isn't much originality to the story line's paranoid vision of a fascist future world devoid of pleasure, and there's nothing remotely erotic for the smut-minded, so only very dedicated junk cinema devotees and Adamson completists should investigate this bizarre failure.
Cinderella 2000 on AllMovie
Cinderella 2000 (1978)
