Flash Gordon / Life After Flash

Trash can be fun! Worshiping trash is rather silly.

From the bay of E, here’s the purchase link. Fair use.

Flash Gordon (1980). Grade: C. Life After Flash (2017). Grade: D

“Klytus, I’m booorrred.”

Fans of dumb fun everywhere know to buckle in for one of the very coolest opening credits in camp classic history. Evil space tyrant Ming The Merciless (Mung the Mildly Mean is his cousin) aims a pointy Space Scope at poor, defenseless Earth (as cloudless as in the old Universal logo). Cackling with glee, Ming lights up buttons that read EARTH QUAKE, HURRICANE, HOT HAIL. An ominous drum track thrums in the background. Then Queen belts out “Flash! A-AAA!” with the trademark subtlety that Queen was famous for.

A good time is had by all. Before too long the movie starts to drag; then it REALLY drags. But there’s usually something around to hold your interest or make you giggle. There’s a swamp-monster tree scorpion, winged centurions looking like their armor was bought cheap from the BBC I, Claudius set, Brian Blessed thundering like he’s pissed-off Augustus from the I, Claudius set: “is there ANYONE in Rome who hasn’t slept with my daughter???” (Except, this is PG, so Blessed thunders “Gordon’s ALIVE?” instead.)

There’s a very serious Timothy Dalton, and a guy in a cloak with a neat Mean Robot face mask, and they’re both madly in lust with Ornella Muti, an Italian model who looks like if you crossed Sophia Loren and Anita Ekberg and gave her the direction, “slink.” (Per Wiki, Muti once insured her boobs for $350,000, but the usually-reliable Wiki is completely bananas when it comes to everything/everyone surrounding Flash Gordon; I believe all and exactly none of it.)

There’s enough lamé in the costumes and set paint to permanently blind passing seabirds, mixed with no small amount of sexy leather & pointy prongs. A final laser battle scored in loud, synthy Prog Rock heaven (or hell!), and a death scene where the baddie’s eyeballs and tongue goopily ooze out in a way to make every 8-year-old boy whisper, “that’s sooooo cool.”

Essentially, this is peak Cocaine Hollywood, all in the service of a very silly children’s comic strip and 1930s movie serials based on that strip.

Serials were short films (about 20 minutes) that ran before the main movie feature, along with newsreels, cartoons, and trailers. (You got more bang for your buck with older movies, although quantity didn’t mean quality most of the time.) Each episode of the serial ended with the hero/heroine in perilous peril; you’d have to wait a week to find out how they survived.

George Lucas was in awe of these things as a kid, and wanted to make a Flash Gordon film of his own; but he couldn’t get the rights, so he made serial-inspired Star Wars instead.

Those rights were owned by Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis (he moved to America in 1976). De Laurentiis started out small, and became one of the biggest moguls in movie history — with one of the biggest egos, too! He produced over 500 movies, some on the cheap, some with ridiculously outsize budgets. His partial filmography includes junk knockoffs and exploitation flix like Barbarella or Mandingo; he also produced films by Bergman, Corbuzzi, Forman, Huston, Lynch, Raimi, Rossellini, De Sica… it’s a long list. (And not all of these directors were particularly thrilled with De Laurentiis’s oversight; the muddled production history of Dune is a classic example.)¹

De Laurentiis brought in/out various famous names to work on Gordon; Fellini, Leone, Nicholas Roeg; those directors wanted Gordon to faithfully reflect the kiddie comic strips! He eventually got Mike Hodges, known mostly for dark thrillers; the script was by Lorenzo Semple, who wrote the very dark The Parallax View.

But Semple also wrote most of the campy 1960s Batman TV series; he didn’t think comics should be taken seriously. (After the last 20+ years of mega-budget Marvel movies, it’s hard to disagree with him.) Semple wrote Flash Gordon to be goofy; Fellini’s production designer Danilo Donati made everything look very goofy; most of the cast plays it that way. Although Dino De Laurentiis may/may not have had half an idea it should be played straight, and…

Hence, chaos. Hence, the reason Flash Gordon is such a mess.

I picked up Life After Flash to see if it had any juicy stories about this crazy production; unfortunately, the documentary is all but useless for that. It’s mostly cast/crew remembering how they kind of enjoyed themselves. Particularly Blessed, and the always-likable Topol. Peter Wyngarde, who played the guy behind the robot mask, was something of a major British style/gay icon who wasn’t pleased being stuck behind a cheesy robot mask; he could barely breathe in the thing. Brian May of Queen (who has an actual astrophysics PhD, not an honorary one) talks about how he came up with the memorable theme, and that’s cool.

The documentary has a LOT of fanboys (plus the occasional fangirl) gushing about how much they absolutely loved Flash Gordon and how much they still love it today. One collector practically has a shrine dedicated to various props and costumes; he drools over one which has Timothy Dalton’s sweat stains on it.

Hey, I understand. One of the reasons that Star Wars held such a place in the imagination of many kids my age is that we had the toys, and played with them while making up whatever storylines fit our imaginations. We made the plot and characters more meaningful in our minds then they were in the original films. And I stayed a Star Trek fan well into adulthood, until J.J. Abrams crapped all over it; I still like the older stuff quite a lot. So I grok geekdom, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

But the worship of this particular movie as, perfection! is a bit much. At one point someone talks about how great the effects still look today. Well, they’re terrible! (Star Trek II looked a lot better with half the budget.) And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that! Roger Ebert wrote, “at a time when Star Wars and its spin-offs have inspired special effects men to bust a gut making their interplanetary adventures look real, Flash Gordon is cheerfully willing to look as phony as it is.” Absolutely. I don’t WANT any new Doctor Who to make the Daleks look like they don’t have a toilet plunger for an arm; that’s how they should look!

What’s really off-putting in Life After Flash is actor Sam Jones, who played the 1980 Gordon. The DVD box says it’s about “the aftermath of when he went up against one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood.”

Hogwash.

Jones’s agent told him to pressure De Laurentiis for more money near the end of shooting. Jones’s agent was a fool, and Jones a bit cocky/naive to trust such dumb advice; De Laurentiis just fired him. They used a voice imitator and body double to finish the last few things.

Today, Jones is a super-fundie with a spooky half-shaved flat-top hairdo. We see him yelling at teenagers setting up a Flash Gordon convention; they put his booth in the wrong spot, don’t forget, he’s the STAR! He blames his former agent and demands our sympathies for his addictions and serial adulteries; I believe in forgiving people, but not when they’re rude and arrogant today. Apparently, he got into running “security operations in high-risk environments, primarily Mexico.”

Well, that doesn’t sound shady at all! I’m surprised he hasn’t been named Minister of Information yet. Give him time.

Anyhow, if you enjoy the goofy sloppiness of Flash Gordon, you won’t get much from that documentary. And if you never saw Flash Gordon… well, I’m not gonna tell you you should. You can, it won’t do any permanent damage, but you probably would get more out of making a nice soup. Besides, somebody always uploads the best part to YouTube, here’s the current iteration:

He’ll save every one of us! How awfully democratic of him.

Incidentally, the 2010 edition we got from the library has the original first 1936 Flash Gordon serial episode included. It’s fairly dull, but gives you a good idea how serials worked. The first episode was always a bit longer and set up the basic plot; subsequent episodes were shorter and continued the same story. It’s surprising how actually close the 1980 movie is to that first serial!

1. The documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune is a pretty interesting account of one early production that fell through. As for the new film versions… well, if you loved Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, then run, don’t walk to see It Manchild Timothée Hal Chalamet in Dune, and Dune2, and the forthcoming Dune3-D and Dune: The Revenge. Your mind will be blown and your senses fellated and whatthefuggever.