Put a lot of naked women into an episode of Ren and Stimpy and you pretty much have this, Rob Zombie’s first animated film. Based on a comic book series he also wrote, it doesn’t so much tell a story as simply string together a few hundred references to old horror and exploitation movies. It starts, for instance, with a recreation of the opening of Frankenstein (1931), in which an actor warns the audience to be prepared for a shocking experience. What it has to do with any of the rest of the movie, I couldn’t tell you. The title character is a celebrity superhero of some sort in a Mexican wrestling mask who stars in porno movies. When a stripper he fancies is kidnapped, he enlists the aid of his sister, Suzi X, and her giant sex-crazed robot in rescuing her from the clutches of Dr. Satan, who plans to use her for…well, it goes on and on like this. There are a lot of self-parodying songs, none of them written or performed by Zombie, including one scoring a catfight scene in which the singer assures us that “It’s all right to jerk off the cartoons/The Japanese do it every day.” (One hopes this was written for the benefit of the viewer who will be watching this at some future date on DVD and not the guy sitting next to you at the theater.) It’s energetic and colorful, and animation fans can be grateful to see that someone is resisting the movie to do everything with computers. If only it were funny, or even more than sporadically witty. As it is, it’s a movie that no parent would ever buy for their 13-year-old son, but which millions of 13-year-old boys are going to trade in their Christmas gift cards for on December 26. It will have one screening at 10 pm this Saturday night at the McKinley Mall Cinema in Hamburg.

—m. faust

Watch the trailer for The Haunted World of El Superbeasto