Flash Gordon
1980
Director Mike Hodges’ Flash Gordon (written by Lorenzo Semple Jr.) is a straight cult, camp romp through the four-color, cliffhanger world created by Alex Raymond in the "Flash Gordon" newspaper strips so many decades ago, in a completely different world. Buster Crabbe brought the comic-book hero—a football hero turned swashbuckling pulp outer-space warrior—to serialized life in old 1940s chapter plays, wielding a sword and a two-fisted, can-do, all-American fighting spirit alongside Dale Arden and Dr. Zarkov, and against giant reptiles bluescreened against desert backgrounds, where shoebox rocket ships on fishing line with sparklers in their tails set down to do battle with the forces of the Mephistophelian menace Ming the Merciless, who vaguely resembles Anton LaVey. Which, on the whole, makes perfect sense.
The four-color fantasy land set on Mongo, a planetary planet that jets around the galaxy, destroying planets for Ming’s amusement (he has a special dashboard whereby he can send meteors, thunderstorms, and typhoons careening down the pike at whatever he targets), is brought to life here by matte paintings in an era before CGI. It’s gloriously bad 1980 cinematic second-rung Star Wars, and some of the sets and outré costumes (baroque spandex combos of strange headdresses and even a few hooded characters in Dr. Doom masks) look as if they may have been recycled by Dino De Laurentiis a few years later for David Lynch’s Dune.
Flash (Sam J. Jones) and Dale (Melody Anderson) are on a plane together when a world cataclysm brings the plane down in the vicinity of Dr. Zarkov’s (Israeli singer Chaim Topol, best known for Fiddler on the Roof) secret lab, wherein he’s been building a rocket ship that his morbidly obese assistant (William Hootkins) refuses to fly on. At any rate, they all eventually end up up and away, and of course crash-land on Mongo, the planet-destroying-planet Death Star ruled over by the vaguely leftover Oriental-stereotype pulp-fiction villain Ming (Max von Sydow, very much playing Max von Sydow), and his hot daughter Princess Aura (Ornella Muti), who wants Flash as much as she does Prince Barin (a pre-James Bond Timothy Dalton), who lives on one of Mongo’s presumably traveling-with-it moons, Arboria (a forested place not unlike Endor, as opposed to the bird moon ruled over by Vultan the Hawkman, [played by Brian Blessed]).
Flash, Zarkov, and Dale are brought in to be seen by Ming, who orders his minions to whoop up on Flash. Dale cheers him on from the bleachers while he brings a little of the ol’ gridiron God down upon the heads of all and sundry.
I would be remiss here if I didn’t take a moment to comment upon the fact that Princess Aura leads a little dwarfish clown around on a leash whose name is “Fellini.” I think that speaks volumes about what the director was trying to say, personally—although it is a known, indisputable fact that Federico said he was bigly influenced, growing up, by Raymond’s "Flash Gordon" comic strips. It’s all that visual excess and fairy-tale settings in space.
Zarkov gets brain-drained by the evil psycho space queen General Kala (Mariangela Melato), and then escapes, along with Flash, who ends up sticking his arm in a tree trunk so it can be bitten by a scorpion monster on the Mongo moon of Arboria, while Prince Barin torments him; then they all get with the Hawkmen, led by the bearded, presumably flatulent stock-character hero Vultan, and they lead an army of Hawkmen on fishing line in a slo-mo battle with Ming’s forces that seems very slow-moving, and then Flash and Ming have a battle to the death.
It’s all more fun than anyone should be allowed; pure Saturday-morning serial, cartoon, comic-book adventure from another era, updated for the Eighties era, but still a gloriously high-camp romp for audiences of 2026.
Get those decoder rings ready, kids—ITZ ON.
(Mongo.)
My book: Cult Films and Midnight Movies: From High Art to Low Tarsh Volume 1 (Ebook)
About the Creator
Tom Baker
Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com
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