Weird movie musicals

A salon makeover turns furry visitors into participants in California nightlife. The affectionate lead performances and song-and-dance sketches give this alien encounter an easy party atmosphere.

For your group: Sexual humour and a few overextended sketches; the silliness is entirely deliberate.

The record-company story makes ambition and temptation exceptionally literal. Choose it for a group that likes discussing costumes, choreography and the precise moment a pop allegory leaves ordinary reality behind.

For your group: Broad moral symbolism and earnest songs; it is an especially concentrated dose of camp.

The family guesthouse gives each musical eruption a practical problem to interrupt. The mixture of hospitality panic, dark comedy and changing visual techniques keeps the night unpredictable.

For your group: Deaths, grotesque imagery and abrupt tonal shifts; the family warmth coexists with macabre business.

Gilbert and Sullivan meet eighties pop romance in a particularly curious swashbuckling package. Its competing musical approaches make it useful for friends who enjoy theatrical oddities as much as pirate action.

For your group: Romantic montages slow the adventure, and the lead performances are uneven.

The black-and-white space western builds its own social rules, then interrupts them with unexpected musical performances. Choose it for a small group comfortable with deadpan non-sequiturs and unexplained rituals.

For your group: Deliberately opaque and sexually eccentric; it is not a conventional singalong space adventure.

Painted sets and cabaret performance turn a basement doorway into an entire unruly dimension. The musical numbers and Susan Tyrrell's presence are stronger invitations than the deliberately flimsy plot.

For your group: Nudity, bondage imagery, racial caricature including blackface, and abrasive jokes require an informed adult audience.

Legal organ repossession gives the gothic family melodrama an immediately outrageous setting. Anthony Stewart Head's singing supplies an anchor amid a very busy collection of inherited grievances.

For your group: Gore and dense, nearly continuous musical exposition. The cramped theatrical style is a major dividing line.

The haunted fast-food restaurant gives the songs a setting already built for bad taste. This is for a group that actively wants the musical to become a sustained gross-out assault.

For your group: Extreme splatter, sexual material and offensive humour. Its abrasive approach is the whole proposition.

A child’s anxiety about piano lessons becomes an enormous architectural fantasy. Choose it for viewers who want remarkable sets and storybook strangeness without the adult splatter of the shelf’s harsher entries.

For your group: The musical numbers and patient storytelling can slow the journey; the elaborate visual world is the main invitation.