A film by Julie Taymor (pre Lion King), made for American Public Television. Never released on video.
Beta vcr recording of TV broadcast.

Film in general is visually quite dark, making for a difficult to record video quality, with lots of visual noise. So quality is not great.

From Fright Site
An excellent American Playhouse production written and directed by Julie Taymor, adapting the Edgar Allan Poe story “Hop Frog.” Blending fantasy and surrealism, this is an eye-popping mini-masterpiece enhanced by the Taymor’s effective use of puppets and miniatures.

“Hop Frog” is one of Poe’s meaner tales, a compact and nasty account of a dwarf jester who enacts a hideous revenge on his corrupt superiors at a costume ball. In stretching the story to an hour’s length, Julie Taymor includes selections from Rableis’ GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL and a number of Lynchian dream interludes.

Taymor seems destined to be remembered for her Broadway production of THE LION KING and the features TITUS (1999) and FRIDA (2002); FOOL’S FIRE deserves a place on that list, being the unprecedented achievement that it is. David Lynch regular Michael J. Anderson (who appeared in MULHOLLAND DRIVE and FIRE WALK WITH ME, and played TWIN PEAKS’ “Man From Another Place”) is the dwarfish Hop Frog, who, in a stunningly audacious touch, is presented as the only human in a kingdom of puppets. Correction: there is one other non-puppet character, in the form of fellow dwarf Mireille Mosse (THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN) as Trippetta, Hop Frog’s true love whose humiliation inspires his apocalyptic revenge.

The Story
The diminutive Hop Frog is a sensitive Jester trapped in a kingdom of monsters (literal and figurative). One morning the practical joke-obsessed king orders Hop Frog to come up with a trick to be played on the guests of an upcoming costume ball. Before he can properly decide on an appropriate gag, a young woman locked in a giant birdcage is wheeled in. It‰’s love at first sight between Hop Frog and the “freakish” Trippetta, but when the King and his minions torment Hop Frog, events take an ugly turn. Trippetta, trying to halt the bullying, breaks out of her cage and gets doused with wine for her efforts. This in turn sends Hop Frog over the edge, and later that night he frees Trippetta from her cage to assist him in carrying out his plans for the costume ball.

His conceit is a strange one, but the King and his men readily accept it: they’ll be covered in fur and pretend to be apes connected by a lengthy chain and, most appealing to the King’s sadistic nature, scare the you-know-what out of everybody. The night of the ball arrives and the plan is carried out; the illusion is a flawless one, so much so that none of the guests complain when Hop Frog lowers a rope down from the ceiling, hooks it to the chain connecting the beasts, hoists them into the air and sets them all afire. He and Trippetta then escape into the air on a makeshift flying machine as flames slowly spread through the kingdom.

TV rip to Beta VCR
XVID, 29.97 fps, 640x480
data rate 2242 kb/s
MP3 Stereo, 48000 hz, 128 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/B3A26F1D6EE818A/FoolsFire.avi

https://rapidgator.net/file/72e17fc8abb62b2291c5bab70b627058/FoolsFire.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Julie Taymor – Fool’s Fire (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.