Not to put too fine a point on it, but Michael Jackson cultivated a reputation for leaning into the eccentric side of existence. On a visual level, that was never made clearer than the absolutely unhinged 1988 anthology movie Moonwalker.
Existing somewhere between a cinematic experiment and a nightmarish fever dream, we’d be underselling the 93 minutes of madness drastically by saying the only way you’d be able to create something similar within the recesses of your own mind would be with the help of some seriously powerful hallucinogens.
Sure, there’s a career retrospective and some concert footage spliced in to add some semblance of normality to the proceedings – and the “Smooth Criminal” section is a classic whatever way you want to cut it – but that’s barely even scratching the surface of a $22 million vanity project that threw everything at the wall in the hope that even the tiniest sliver would end up sticking.
With that in mind, Redditors have been coming out in force to reappraise Moonwalker through a modern lens, and wouldn’t you know it – there’s a lot of entirely accurate observations that it’s weird as sh*t. If you ever wanted to see Jackson team up with a stop-motion anthropomorphic rabbit, dive through the surrealist “Leave Me Alone,” catch Joe Pesci and Clancy Brown swinging by for cameos, or witness whatever the hell that robot segue is all about, then be sure to prepare your brain accordingly.
Those not entirely enamored by the late King of Pop best stay away, though, because it’s one for the purists.
