Picasso: Once we cross this canyon, we'll be in Gondwanaland.
Pixie: What's that land?
Picasso: Well, for you it'll be a bit like Alice going through the looking glass. Wonderland combined with paradise, Aboriginal Dreamtime, Japanese horror movies and various cultural interpretations of heaven and hell.
Tommy: Cool.
Picasso: Time and space do not exist here as you know them. Salvador calls this place the land of special effects.
Tommy: Cool! Stop motion! Men in suits! Stock footage! Digital animation!
Picasso: All that and much more. This place may look like a cultural junkyard, but don't be fooled. Everything here is real.
It seems to me that it's some kind of collective unconscious -- like Neil Gaiman's Dreaming, for example -- where pop-culture runs wild. The metaphor runs fairly well to the internet, too, amazing collection of the bizarre that it is. But perhaps it's even more meta than that: I'm not sure that any group mind that I'm a part of is full of roving Harryhausen-esque monsters, but might Mora's mind be? Hence that other quote, about them all being figments of Salvador's imagination...
At any rate, that passage is the best part of the movie. With it recorded, I'll never feel the need to watch it again. ;)
Dead Man on Acid
A Native American magic-man named Salvador Dali curses Dick's wife Pixie to turn into a pterodactyl: a strange premise, to be sure, but the title had already given it away; it's the follow-up that's genuinely unexpected. There's no gruesome b-movie monster gore -- for that, see 2005's all-too-serious Pterodactyl. Instead, the neighbourhood ladies association worries about declining property values (except for one, ecstatic over the effect of mineral-rich pterodactyl droppings on her garden). Strangest of all, Pixie's transformation serves to revitalize her sex life; the less said about that particular scene, the better...
It's not a good film, except in the "so bad it's" sense, but it wins laughs by sheer scattershot insanity. Bad, yes, but still interesting. The story opens with Salvador Dali because Mora aims for, and achieves, a kind of surrealism. The weirdness of the plot is exacerbated by distorting fish-eye lenses and, later, a strange digression into Gondwanaland, which Dali's friend Picasso describes as "Wonderland combined with paradise, Aboriginal Dreamtime, Japanese horror movies and various cultural interpretations of heaven and hell." Or, as Salvador puts it, "the land of special effects." (Take him at his word: he chases off a dinosaur with a cry of "Get out of here! God damn stock footage!")
It's this Gondwanaland sequence that saves the film from utter mediocrity. Not only is it comparatively clever, it's reflexivity pardons some of the movie's many flaws -- the ludicrously bad special effects, for instance.
By "cult favourite" I imagine they mean "stoner favourite", but it's decent. Worth watching with friends.