97. Flash Gordon

Mike Hodges, 1980

"Gordon's alive?!"

This was a big, big movie for me growing up. I must have watched this movie at least once a month throughout much of my youth. As a lad, I found it flash and exciting. Today, I find it campy as all get out, and delightfully so. Cast from the same mold, in many respects, as Barbarella, Flash Gordon is a traditional sci-fi action story focused through a camp lens. The story, adapted from the old movie serials and Alex Raymond's beloved comic strip, Flash Gordon is the story of a sports hero turned astronaut who, along with the pretty Dale Arden and nutty Russian, Dr. Hans Zarkoff, travel to the planet Mongo where they must ally with the native Mongons(?) to defeat Ming the merciless. So, it's a pretty odd story to begin with. As far as the film itself is concerned, I absolutely love the production design. The scenery and costumes are lush with bright, primary colors, much more garish than any real comic page. They are all large, flashy, and, in many respects, operatic. Take, for example, the bright red, billowing cloaks, completely with high, head encompassing collar, worn by Ming himself or the bizarre, patent leather uniforms worn by his henchmen, many of whom resemble a sort of weird fusion of Broadway and an S&M club. Further, many of the designs are lifted right from the old serials, including cylindrical rocket ships and, my personal favorite, hawkmen with large, intentionally fake looking wings that, even in flight, don't flap. In the 80s, it seems like most film futures and alien worlds, like those seen in The Road Warrior or Aliens or, for that matter, Masters of the Universe, were bleak, black and gray dystopias. Thus, from a visual standpoint, Flash Gordon's completely excessive, over the top look is really alone in its time and really unlike the look of any other movie I know, which is certainly part of why I love it. True, the film's look begs comparison to other camp classics, like The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but there is something about putting it in space that makes it work better and allows for greater extremes. After all, Priscilla, and most other camp films are somewhat limited in that the camp characters or camp elements are limited, surrounded by and confined by the normal world in which they work. To continue using Priscilla as an example, our cross dressing heroes may be fabulous and outrageous, but the contemporary Australia in which they operate is, by necessity, that is by the constraints of the contemporary or even real world Earth setting, is normal, bland and unremarkable. With the planet Mongo, on the other hand, one has the distinct advantage of a wholly alien planet and culture. There is no need for Mongo to conform to Earth norms in any way, thus the filmmakers have complete freedom to make their world as garish and operatic as they wish, which the makers of Flash Gordon do to great, strangely beautiful effect.

Despite the visuals, though, the film simply would not work if the actors involved were not willing to camp it up themselves and play absolutely larger than life. Thankfully for us, most of them do. The cast is made up of primarily familiar faces. The only real exception is a woman named Ornella Muti, who plays Ming's exotically beautiful daughter to vampish extremes. Otherwise, we have Topol playing Dr. Zarkoff as an absolute nut ball, the great Max Von Sydow somehow managing to combine an utterly regal presence with great over the top megalomania as Ming, Timothy Dalton using the same Errol Flynn impersonation he uses in every film, see The Rocketeer for more of this, as Prince Barin, and my personal favorite, Brian Blessed, for those of you who don't know him, think poor man's John Rhys-Davies, as Prince Vultan, lord of the hawkmen. It's amazing, but in a cast comprised entirely of people over acting to their hearts content, Blessed really distinguishes himself, almost literally gnawing on the scenery. Every line is shouted with a strange faux Shakespearian accent, his face a mask of utter delight in the part. Really, and this applies to most of the cast and Blessed in particular, you just don't often see actors having this much fun on film. Oddly, the only exception is a rather dull, conventional performance from Sam J. Jones as Flash. Still, I think this movie's a lot of fun and, of course, it's utterly ridiculous.

Music by Queen.