Flash Gordon (1980)

Ever so slightly mad scientist Dr Hans Zarkoff (Topol, who like Prince and Madonna only needs one damn name, thank you very much) is convinced that the series of seemingly natural catastrophes hitting earth is caused by alien forces. As your do, he has built a rocket in his own, large, shed, to prove it and save Earth, too, but it turns out to find co-pilots willing and able to push down one foot pedal lest one’s rocket explodes is rather more difficult than you’d expect. Fortunately, said (un)natural catastrophes do lead to a plane crash right into Zarkoff’s rocket barn. On board the plane are football star Flash Gordon (Sam Jones) and his instant love interest Dale Arden (Melody Anderson), and they are easily convinced to help out with the Earth saving when threatened with a gun.

Once the trio is in space, Zarkoff turns out to have been perfectly right. Evil space Emperor Ming (Max von Sydow) of the planet Mongo is trying to destroy Earth for his entertainment. Fortunately, Flash turns out to be a proper, pure-hearted hero in the Captain America-mold, so Project: Save Earth just might proceed eventually.

As anyone who knows me or has been reading this blog for a bit will probably know, I’m not a fan of camp at all, nor of that most horrible of all sins a movie fan can commit – liking things ironically. So my deep and abiding love for Mike Hodges’s certainly very campy Flash Gordon doesn’t really fit my usual viewing habits. But then, I don’t love this film ironically but with all of my heart; and the film’s camp sensibilities seem mostly to consist of allowing itself to become as artificial and strange as possible, the people involved finding the point where even the strangest shit becomes joyful.

Mike Hodges (much beloved around here for Get Carter, Croupier and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead) seems like a strange choice of director for an adaptation of a classic movie serial/comic strip, and you’d certainly not approach making a science fiction adventure movie as he does today, but he clearly brought a wild visual imagination and a sense for goofy joy to the proceedings his other films (you might exclude Pulp) weren’t the place to demonstrate. Hodges also turns out to be a master of how to pace this sort of crazy space adventure, which is breathlessly and with something exciting happening every single second.

Aesthetically, in design and and stylistic approach, the film has something of the fever dream of a pubescent boy (that’s a compliment) mixed with a bit of LSD, as realized via special effects that often seem to consciously point back in the direction of the Flash Gordon serial, and others that have their basis more in stage special effects than what you’d expect any typical effects crew of a 1980s film to come up with. If you can get rid of that pesky idea of realism, the things the film has to show, its series of increasingly bizarre costumes, its multi-coloured liquid skies, the pantomime style creatures, are true wonders to behold, and look like nothing you’ll see in any other SF movie. Well, I suspect some of the SF films of Alfredo Brescia would have loved to look like Flash does, yet never had the money or the craftsmen, but that’s about it. If you always imagined your space operas to look like a dream of adventure and space rather than an attempt to mimic reality, this is the film for you.

Adding to this very special sense of wonder is a soundtrack by Queen I am contractually obliged to describe as “ass-kicking”. It also happens to be true. Queen, much like Flash Gordon, were of course masters at being absolutely sincere in their campiness, overblown in a way that’s meant to build an exciting dream world simply bigger and more interesting than reality, and therefore the perfect fit for the things their guitars, synths and Mercurys accompany.

But that’s not all what I love about the film. It also doubles down on the kinky aspects of the material it adapts to a nearly ridiculous degree, so much so that I have not the faintest idea how a film featuring Ming mindwhammying Dale to a public orgasm or Ornella Muti’s Princess Aura sticking her tongue into whatever male mouth available, and which clearly thinks that slightly (or very) weird sex stuff is simply fun did get a PG rating at the time. Sure, there’s a deplorable lack of nudity, but much of the film seems so sexually overheated in various kinky manners that undressing anyone just seems like overkill. I would be very surprised if Hodges and the scriptwriters hadn’t studied Flesh Gordon quite extensively, is what I’m saying.

Because that’s still not enough, Hodges also manages to often turn a film made of the stuff of dreams, plain weird shit and basically anti-realistic special effects into a thing of great excitement, turning out big “fuck yeah” moments again and again, even if his hawk men carry the most un-flightworthy wings imaginable and his hero happens to ride an improbable silver air/space scooter. The film’s just shamelessly going with it all, and you’d be a sad old coot not to enjoy it.


The actors sure seem to enjoy themselves, too. Sam Jones – probably fortuitously – is the eternal heart on his sleeve straight man to a whole horde of scenery chewers doing their spirited best, with Brian Blessed doing his Brian Blessed thing to a blessed degree, while von Sydow, sporting some of the most gloriously absurd costumes imaginable, achieves astonishing feats of BIG GOOFY YET SERIOUS EVIL BORN FROM BOREDOM. And that’s only the most obvious two in a horde of actors all tuning into exactly the same frequency. Even better – nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, in the cast seems to come to the material from a position of superiority. Instead, everyone digs into the absurdity of much of what’s going on and treats it like it was Shakespeare, treating the often wonderfully bizarre dialogue to the most incredible line readings. It’s glorious and wondrous to behold (and hear), but then, so is everything else about this film.

In short: The Rocketeer (1991)

This comic-based homage to serials, pulp and the late 30s (or rather, to the pop cultural ideal of what that time was all about), is about the only Disney film produced in the 90s I'm willing to watch repeatedly.

Our hero of the day is a slightly hapless but pure-hearted air race pilot named Cliff (Billy Campbell), who stumbles upon an experimental rocket-pack (that's a 1930's jetpack, bub), and decides to use it for a bit of peaceful monetary gain, but of course turns into a hero called the Rocketeer during the course of the movie. There are various factions looking for the rocket-pack - its inventor Howard Hughes (Terry O'Quinn) and his FBI goons, a group of Mafiosi lead by Paul Sorvino working for British Hollywood star Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton) who of course harbours a dark secret, and the faction Sinclair is working for.

Soon enough, Cliff and his fatherly mechanic friend Peevy (Alan Arkin) are on the run from everyone, Cliff's girlfriend, the aspiring actress Jenny (Jennifer Connelly) is kinda pissed at him and threatened by the romantic talents of Sinclair, the Nazis (you didn't expect them not to be in the movie, right?) are being nefarious, a zeppelin makes an appearance, and the course of history rests on Cliff's shoulders.

The Rocketeer is director Joe Johnston's training ground for the same sort of mood he'd later - after quite a few utterly dreadful movies - so successfully create in Captain America. I don't think it's quite as great a film as that later one - it gets a bit too nostalgic from time to time when it does things like cast Howard Hughes (even if he's as sympathetically played as here by O'Quinn, whom I'm certainly not going to tell what he can't do) as a combination of the real Hughes, a good mad scientist, and Father Christmas, is perhaps a bit too Saturday matinee harmless, and is not always as funny as it thinks it is.

On the other hand, more often than not, The Rocketeer's idealized pulp version of the world is just plain fun to watch, sending a semi-bumbling hero from one contrived situation into the next, with the mandatory daring escapes, threats to innocent people and kidnappings of girlfriends.The film also gives a very fine cast opportunities to chew scenery in various attractive and entertaining ways. Especially O'Quinn, Arkin, Dalton and Sorvino's teddybear-ish mafia boss are just great fun to watch, while Campbell is as bland as one expects of the hero in this sort of thin. And then there's Jennifer Connelly, who is not just being young Jennifer Connelly but also clearly having fun with a character that is neither as superficial, nor as incompetent, nor as helpless as pulp tradition and the expectations of her surroundings prescribe, and seems to revel in that, as do I.

It makes me quite nostalgic for the times when this film's co-writer Danny Bilson wasn't a suit in videogame companies, but working as excellent writer of films in a pulp mode, like this one, Trancers or the wonderful "Sergeant Rock and aliens versus Nazis" movie Zone Trooper.

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