Flash Gordon (1980)

Posted on August 20, 2020 at 3:11 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Watching the interviews and reading the essays included in Arrow Video’s new deluxe Blu-ray edition of Mike Hodges’ Flash Gordon (1980), I’m struck at how poorly received the film was on release. At the time, I was too young to be aware of critical reactions, but I embraced the film well enough; there were, after all, rocket-ships and aliens and clearly defined roles for the good guys and the bad. I was also too young to understand the concepts of camp or irony, the abundance of which in Flash Gordon having apparently left such a bad taste for many viewers. The film has earned a stronger reputation over time, in part, I think, because it’s so different from more fashionable modes of fantasy or comic book filmmaking. There’s nothing gritty or realistic to be found here. Star Wars, the film whose success allowed Flash Gordon to happen, went to great lengths to make its fantasy world feel lived-in and convincing; modern superhero films make a point of showing how their comic book counterparts might arise organically from our contemporary setting, Iron Man suits and all. Producer Dino De Laurentiis, hot off his King Kong remake, couldn’t conceive of Flash Gordon being a straight-faced film; the most compelling supplement on the disc is its look at what might have been, had original director Nicolas Roeg (The Man Who Fell to Earth) and writer Michael Allin (Enter the Dragon) been allowed to pursue their much more serious adaptation of the Alex Raymond comic strip. Instead, De Laurentiis, who had originally envisioned this as a Fellini spectacle, commissioned a rewrite from Lorenzo Semple Jr., writer of the Batman TV series, and replaced Roeg with Mike Hodges, the Get Carter (1971) director who didn’t have much interest in science fiction or superheroes. Queen provides the soundtrack, including its immortal title track. A football player with no acting experience, Sam J. Jones, plays the lead. All tongues are firmly lodged in their respective cheeks. In retrospect, it may actually be that Roeg would have made the more commercial film. De Laurentiis, with visions of Fellini still swirling in his brain, produced a pop artifact so delirious and outré that it couldn’t connect with most critics and audiences of 1980. Wrong movie, wrong moment. But nowadays, if you’re going to sit down to watch Flash Gordon, you don’t want anything remotely realistic. You want gold lamé costumes, an amazing cast delivering ridiculous dialogue, a PG-pushing fixation on sex and bondage, eye-popping sets, chintzy bluescreen, and Freddie Mercury wailing about Flash saving every one of us.

Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow) and his mysterious henchman Klytus (Peter Wyngarde).

So my appreciation for this movie, which I hadn’t sat down to watch for ages, has evolved. As a kid, I only cared that it provided nonstop imagination fuel for my still-developing brain. As a young adult, I found the comedy – in particular, that impromptu football game in Ming’s court – too much to stomach. And now it feels like the follow-up to Barbarella and The Rocky Horror Picture Show that I didn’t know I needed back in my life. (Rocky Horror‘s Richard O’Brien has a role as a pipe-playing member of the Arborian Treemen, as though to give the film his “future midnight movie” stamp of approval.) Alluringly, all the shots of the skies are optical effects in the style of psychedelic-60’s liquid light shows, giving everything a cosmic, lysergic feeling. De Laurentiis brought in Italian production designer Danilo Donati, who had worked with Pasolini, Zeffirelli, and Fellini, to create highly stylized sets, from the blood-red palace on Planet Mongo to the Hawkmen’s city in the sky, with its ceremonial combat platform of retracting spikes wobbling above some kind of atmospheric vortex. Donati also designed the costumes, which are color-coded and often barely-there, exposing the hairy bodies of the virile Hawkmen and the sinuous limbs of moist-lipped Italian actress Ornella Muti, playing the nymphomaniac Princess Aura. Flash Gordon for much of the film just wears a tee-shirt that says “Flash,” which sums him up. He’s a quarterback for the Jets and he wants to stop the Earth from being destroyed; that’s about it. (Due to some behind-the-scenes drama with first-time actor Jones, in the end product he’s dubbed, though honestly it doesn’t make much difference.) Melody Anderson, primarily a TV actress, appealingly plays Dale Arden as an old-fashioned American girl who can deliver lines like (during a heated battle), “Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!”

Ornella Muti as Princess Aura.

Topol of Fiddler on the Roof fame is wonderful as the benevolent mad scientist Dr. Hans Zarkov, and is granted the most dimension, unexpectedly, when his tragedy-laced past is tortured out of him in a frenetic montage. Brian Blessed receives the definitive role of his career as the boisterous, winged, mace-wielding Prince Vultan. British TV star Peter Wyngarde dons the Doctor Doom-like mask of Klytus. Timothy Dalton plays an intense, humorless Prince Barin with the same humorless intensity as his James Bond – and is made up to resemble Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Deep Roy plays Aura’s “pet.” And then, of course, there’s Max von Sydow as an oversexed, incestuous, tyrannical Ming the Merciless with his trademark booming voice. The character’s “yellow peril” origins are somewhat defused by both the casting of the most famous Swedish actor in the world and a parodic Orientalist costume and makeup that suggests some extraterrestrial cultural appropriation, as if Ming only found about China while researching how best to upset it with earthquakes, volcanoes, and “hot hail.” There’s no racist potency here, not when everything points back to Alex Raymond’s original as though to say “this is what comics back then were like.” Which perhaps explains why so many genre fans took offense, misinterpreting the message as, “this is what all comics are like.” At the time, when there were so few comic book adaptations, fans were eager that comics be taken seriously.

Dale (Melody Anderson) and Dr. Zarkov (Topol) escape Ming’s clutches.

But in fact there was already a precedent for Flash Gordon, and it was the eerily similar parody Flesh Gordon (1974), which treated the material – not just the comics of course, but also the popular Buster Crabbe serial – with the same mix of nostalgia and loving send-up, albeit with a bit more sexual content. One of the many odd choices of Hodges’ Flash Gordon is that it’s almost as hot and bothered as that X-rated movie. Apart from the fixation on whips and chains, the story can’t quite pull free of the tractor beam gaze of Muti’s purring Aura, who invokes Prince Barin’s sexual jealousy by lusting after Flash. At one point she hops into Flash’s lap while he’s piloting her rocket (ahem), and is about to initiate him into Planet Mongo’s version of the Mile High Club before he reluctantly rebuffs her. (The fact that he’s also psychically linked to Dale when he complains that Aura’s turning him on adds just a touch of ménage à trois kink.) Further testing the film’s PG is a tongue-protruding, eye-popping death for Klytus; I didn’t notice all the sexual innuendo when I was a kid, but that left a mark. Gluing all these extremes together is Queen’s score (assisted by composer Howard Blake), in particular the two songs, “Flash’s Theme” and “The Hero,” both written by Brian May, and which nudge the movie in the direction of rock musical. Here, again, the Star Wars lead is ignored – nothing aping John Williams here, just a pulsing beat, squealing guitars, and Mercury’s operatic histrionics. Arrow’s new Blu-ray package has me appreciating that Flash Gordon is really a rock ‘n’ roll movie, a glam spectacle in which, hell yes, even some impromptu palace football is allowed.

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The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

Posted on August 14, 2020 at 3:56 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a deeply strange blend of genres and styles, a film of raw imagination and improbable swagger that somehow escaped to theaters in 1984. Director W.D. Richter (who had written the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers and would go on to write Big Trouble in Little China) tangled with the head of the production company, a man who believed a hero should never wear glasses (Buckaroo got to keep his, barely) and that the film shouldn’t look as good as Blade Runner (DP Jordan Cronenweth was inexplicably fired). Yet the end result is just as weird and cluttered as Richter and screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch (New York, New York) wanted it to be. Building upon the renewed interest in serialized pulp following Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark – the trend was the only reason this film was greenlit in the first place – Buckaroo Banzai acts like the umpteenth chapter in an ongoing Doc Savage-style saga. Just before dropping us right into Banzai’s latest experiment to drive his jetcar through a mountain and into the 8th dimension, some scrolling text explains that he’s a brilliant, half-Japanese neurosurgeon, martial arts expert, particle physicist, and rock ‘n’ roller, always accompanied by his companions, the Hong Kong Cavaliers. That the whiter-than-white Peter Weller cannot possibly embody all these requirements is one of the film’s many droll jokes. Most of the time he doesn’t need to do much but stand there, look Zen, and say things like “Wherever you go…there you are.” Relaxed style and cool amidst the blatantly insane is what Buckaroo Banzai is all about. Most of the cast, be they human or alien, never receive proper introductions, but have a unique wardrobe and a memorable name. Therefore, watching the film is like crashing a party where you don’t know anyone there. The party goes on with or without you; the film knows it will find the ones who “get it.” And if you’re indifferent, well, one of the Black Lectroids makes the film’s position clear when he closes Buckaroo Banzai with, “So what? Who cares?”

Dr. Emilio Lizardo/Lord John Whorfin (John Lithgow) gets an electric fix.

All this is to say that the film was a big flop at the box office, and found its audience over home video and TV airings. I did see it in the theater, though I was 8 and the story was incomprehensible to me. I caught up with it on VHS when I was a teenager, and the story was still incomprehensible to me. Now I can watch it and follow the story more or less, which is not to say that the story is told particularly well. I’m not sure how much that matters; I mean, it does, but I’m not sure how much. This is a film of characters and moments. My favorite scene, the introduction of Ellen Barkin’s Penny Priddy, is stylistically divorced from anything else in the movie. In a nightclub of blue neon lights, Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers, with a generous sax section, are rocking an instrumental on the stage. Then Banzai interrupts the act because he hears (somehow) a woman crying – much to consternation of the handsome Cavalier named Perfect Tommy (a very funny Lewis Smith). Banzai, in a somewhat insensitive moment of sensitivity, asks that a spotlight be turned on the woman in the audience: Penny, mascara running, who confesses to the awful day she’s had, unaware that she had a twin sister who was once Banzai’s lover before she died but-never-mind-the-film-will-get-to-that-later. Banzai pays tribute by sitting at the piano and crooning “Since I Don’t Have You,” a romantic moment undercut not just by the onstage dialogue (Perfect Tommy is still grousing) but by the sight of Penny pointing a gun at her head. An oblivious waitress accidentally knocks the gun away just as it’s fired, and all the Hong Kong Cavaliers onstage immediately pull guns on the audience. After this, it’s hard for Banzai to get any better. But this movie also has Jeff Goldblum.

New Jersey (Jeff Goldblum) introduces himself to Reno Nevada (Pepe Serna) and Perfect Tommy (Lewis Smith).

Goldblum’s character, a surgeon named New Jersey, is perhaps as close as the story comes to providing an audience surrogate; after all, he joins the gang through the course of the story, has to earn the Cavaliers’ trust, and goes goggle-eyed when he sees one of the extraterrestrials shed its human skin (no one else reacts). But he’s also very familiar with Buckaroo Banzai, being an avid reader of the Buckaroo Banzai in-universe comic books. He dresses as a cowboy because he thinks it’s going to be that kind of adventure. “Congratulations!” he greets his hero. “You drove through a mountain!” Soon he’s riding along with Banzai in his tour bus, which is actually crammed with computers and gizmos to assist the Cavalier’s investigations. The latest involves a rock retrieved from the 8th dimension which has made them the target of the evil Red Lectroids, all of whom are named John and have chosen from the most interesting faces of our planet’s character actors: Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli, Dan Hedaya, and John Lithgow. Lithgow is actually an Italian physicist, Dr. Lizardo, whose transdimensional experiments left him possessed by the Red Lectroid leader John Whorfin, a being leading his race on a breakout from the 8th dimension. They were banished there by their enemies the Black Lectroids, who are played by black actors: Doctor Sleep‘s Carl Lumbly, as a Rastafarian, and The Omega Man‘s Rosalind Cash. Meanwhile, the Secretary of Defense (Matt Clark) teams up with Banzai’s group to investigate the Red Lectroid infiltration of a defense contractor. See? Not that incomprehensible after all.

Ellen Barkin as Penny Priddy.

The Lithgow scenes, in which he slowly becomes more and more like Mussolini and keeps mispronouncing the last name of Red Lectroid John Bigbooté (Lloyd), encapsulate Richter’s directorial approach to Banzai: cram the film with talent, let everyone do their thing, and no half-measures. The actors, almost all of them ringers, clash pleasingly. Even a pre-Breaking Bad Jonathan Banks is here, as one of Lithgow’s security guards at the asylum. No one, with the exception of Lithgow, can get quite enough screen time, which perhaps might help explain the famous ending credits, in which we get to watch all of the good guys, living and dead, walk/dance/strut through the concrete culvert of the Los Angeles Sepulveda Dam. (Wes Anderson later paid homage to this in another movie featuring Goldblum, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.) Something might seem to be missing, particularly on early viewings. The plot, for all its frenetic moments, can seem inert, many of the characters just types. But like Terry Gilliam’s films, there is so much detail that on each revisit you’ll probably notice some new delightful prop or bit of non sequitur dialogue, or come up with new questions to ask, like “Why is Vincent Schiavelli pouring honey on Ellen Barkin’s arm?” or “What is that watermelon doing in that machine?” And it is endlessly quotable (“Laugh while you can, monkey-boy”). “Cult film” gets thrown around a lot, but Buckaroo Banzai helps define the term. Each time you watch, the enigmatic coolness begins to slip away, and the innocent goofiness becomes more obvious. You can only crash a party once, after all, and Banzai gets more welcoming as it ages.

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The Vampire and the Ballerina (1960)

Posted on August 7, 2020 at 1:29 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Renato Polselli’s L’amante del vampiro (The Vampire’s Lover, 1960) – released two years late in the U.S. as The Vampire and the Ballerina, on a double-bill with Vincent Price’s Tower of London – represents Italy’s newfound embrace of Gothic horror, which would flourish by the mid-60’s. I vampiri, directed by Ricardo Freda and reportedly completed by his cinematographer Mario Bava, opened the gates to this style of Italian filmmaking upon its release in 1957, and Bava himself was soon to map this territory thoroughly, beginning with La maschera del demonio (aka Black Sunday, 1960). Polselli’s film, which I’ll call The Vampire and the Ballerina since that’s the title of the Shout Factory 2018 Blu-ray release, confidently embraces the iconography of both the Tod Browning Dracula and, in particular, the more recent Terence Fisher for Hammer. Yet this isn’t a period piece. The characters are young dance students (foreshadowing Suspiria) who are preyed upon by the vampire living in the seemingly abandoned castle in the neighboring woods. Polselli foregrounds the sex, with overflowing cleavage, flimsy negligees, and a barely-subtext theme of vampirism as a carnal, sadomasochistic hunger, and only departs from the Dracula model by making his monster a prune-faced, shaggy-haired, lumpy-fleshed creature that looks like it might have crawled out of a radioactive pond.

Dance practice.

Despite the broad cast of students, the story quickly narrows its focus to just three girls. First there’s Brigida (Bava Sanni), seen in the opening sequence fetching water from a roaring waterfall before being stalked by a shadowy, cloaked figure. She returns with a neck bite, over which a Van Helsing-like professor (Ugo Cragnani) and a skeptical doctor (Giorgio Braccesi) argue: vampire, or merely the scrape of some thorns? Then there’s Luisa (Hélène Remy), the vivacious lover of mustachioed, barrel-chested dance teacher Giorgio (Gino Turini, billed as John Turner). Finally, we get to know Francesca (Tina Gloriani), Luisa’s friend, who frets that her boyfriend, the professor’s grandson Luca (Isarco Ravaioli), might have a wandering eye. During a picnic, the girls frolic by the waterfall before Luisa and Francesca spy a funeral procession. It’s actually for Brigida, and in a marvelous scene, likely inspired by Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), we see through the glass window of the coffin the occupant’s eyes open and look about in panic. The camera takes her POV as she passes beneath the cemetery gates and between the tall cypress trees before being lowered into the ground, the flung dirt covering the glass. All of this is impressively dream-like, which might be a more polite way of saying that there is no reasonable explanation for why her friends would be ignorant of her funeral, or why none of the casket bearers happens to notice that the woman they’re carrying isn’t dead. The style and effective sense of a waking nightmare is all that matters. As night falls, Luisa, Francesca, and Luca take shelter in that castle, and are soon surprised that it isn’t abandoned at all.

Luisa (Hélène Rémy) explores the vampire’s castle.

This Gothic abode is actually the home to the Contessa Alda (Maria Luisa Rolando), with a Corman-esque portrait hanging on the wall depicting her likeness from centuries earlier. When questioned why she is wearing the same vintage clothing from the portrait, Alda says, “I don’t care for the world you live in. It’s not my world…I don’t approve of it.” Very soon after arriving, a wandering Luisa is waylaid by the vampire, whose bite sends her into ecstasy. Returning to her companions shaken, they decide to quickly leave the castle which they’ve described as a “labyrinth,” but not before Alda whispers to Luca that he should pay her a visit after his girlfriend’s gone to bed. He strokes her hand and promises he will. This relationship comes out of nowhere, but equally surprising is the vampire’s subsequent graveyard visit to Brigida, whom he stakes right after promising her Alda’s castle. “I am now and forever will be master of my world!” he declares, echoing Alda’s earlier demarcation of different “worlds” – that of the living and that of the dead, the latter wrapped cozily in the cobwebbed past. Soon enough, following a failed assignation between Luca and Alda, we learn more of the relationship between the two castle-dwellers. According to Alda, he pretends to be her servant while actually dominating her entirely; and she submits to his depraved games, allowing him to drink her blood to regain, however briefly, his youthful appearance. (Though he also taunts her with “Only I can preserve your youth!”) Almost as startling as this back-and-forth, blood-swapping S&M coupling is the revelation of the vampire’s true name: Herman. Alas that the words “Count Herman” never cross anyone’s lips.

Brigida (Bava Sanni) is betrayed by the vampire who made her.

Luisa’s Lucy Westenra-like transition to the dark side is revealed in a scene lifted directly from Hammer’s Dracula, as she prepares her neck for biting as Herman manifests at her window. Polselli, however, pushes the sexualized nature of the encounter to such a degree that it may no longer be metaphor: with a lingering close-up of his clawed hand becoming that of a young man’s once again, the fingers digging into the linen, it’s implied that’s what’s just off camera is a bit more than a bite. Events lead inevitably toward a castle confrontation between vampires and their would-be slayers, all told with Polselli’s strangely collage-like assemblage of ideas and iconography, which, again, could be generously called dream-like. A writhing vampire victim chained to a dungeon wall anticipates Jean Rollin’s Requiem for a Vampire (1972). Francesca explores and is pursued within the castle’s labyrinth of corridors before a door swings shut behind her. Vampire hunters Luca and Giorgio use candlesticks to form crosses as protection. A confrontation above the castle, as the sun rises, is the most interesting, exposing the vampires’ fraught relationship as they double-cross, plead, rapidly age and then disintegrate, Christopher Lee-style, into piles of dust. But what lingers in the mind is the film’s saucy, censor-flaunting sensuality, from Contessa Alda’s center-frame naked legs as she lures Luca to her bed, to the woodland dance institute’s impromptu erotic dances. The showstopper of the latter begins with Giorgio playing a piano melody on the theme of “vampire,” which eventually incorporates what sounds like theremin while the young women writhe before the fireplace, and finally transitions into a swinging big band jazz number. When the professor explains the allure of the vampire, this fetching bunch hang on his every word, before one concludes that a vampire is “like a Prince Charming, then.” They’re eager to be bitten.

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