LABYRINTH (1986) I wonder how many quote-whores at the time said "You'll be aMAZEd!"? Whoa, trippy! There's just something about kids' movies which look like they were made under the influence of 'shrooms. Jennifer Connelly stars as - stop, stop right there. During filming, she was maybe about fifteen years old - lookin' good, but paws off, buddy, you could go to jail. Besides, she wasn't fully, uh...full yet. The best was yet to come. So if you're desperate for a Jennifer Connelly fix, be advised that she hadn't quite crossed the line between cute and hot at this point. Okay, now that that's out of the way...Jennifer Connelly plays a teenaged girl who can't stand her harpy stepmother and likes even less her constantly crying baby stepbrother. Bringing new literalness to the term "drama queen", she takes an invocation from a favorite book and invokes goblins to take the baby away, which of course they promptly do. The goblins' king is played by David Bowie (who demonstrates some pretty impressive not-quite-juggling skills), and he tells her that if she wants the kid back, she's going to have to his castle and get him. That castle is on the other side of, yes, a big labyrinth. Labyrinth is like a big Jim Henson vanity project, working in every kind of puppet imaginable, from the high-tech (the opening CGI effects must've been impressive in 1986) down to a bunch of hands making hand-faces and talking (pretty damn cool scene if you ask me). There are some neat optic tricks where otherwise innocuous objects, seen from the right angle, take on the form of a recognizable face. Some of these creatures are funny, some are scary until they're funny (all these faces in the walls moaning "Bewaaaaare..." until they're told to shut up, and they whimper "I'm just doing my job..."), and a couple are pretty annoying. Unfortunately, it's the two most prominent ones which are annoying. There's Hoggle, a midget with a fully animatronic goblin head, who never seems quite lifelike and is a bit of an ass throughout the movie. And there's Ludo, a big hairy "gentle giant"-type monster, you know, the kind of big idiot whose grasp of English seems to begin and end with grunting "FRIIEEENNND???" But I did like Sir Didymus, the little dog-like guy who rides a dog, a real dog in some shots. No, no, there's nothing sexual about it. Making friends like these along the way, the girl faces a number of tests in her trip through the labyrinth. Some are classic logic puzzles ("One of us always tells the truth, one of us always lies"), some are tests of character. I was particularly intrigued by one scene where she's briefly taken back to her bedroom at home, and a rummaging goblin woman seems to attempt to distract/bribe her by overloading her with dolls. She passes the test by rejecting the toys as being just things, but I detected a more critical undertone here - after all, this girl's at about the age where this many dolls (and there are a lot) seems childish, and nobody wants to be seen as childish less than a teenage girl (unless, of course, it suits her when she's trying to get out of trouble, ha ha). It seemed like the goblin woman was trying to mock her as much as bribe her. I liked most of Labyrinth, but there's something that bothered me about it. That something would be three godawful musical numbers provided by David Bowie and a whole bunch of muppets. David Bowie musical numbers, I can theoretically handle after enough drinks. David Bowie as a fantasy movie villain, sounds like a good idea. But both in the same movie? Holy shit, just what kind of 'shrooms were these people doing? I can imagine that Ronnie James Dio might be able to get away with playing a singing Goblin King (hasn't done it yet but I bet he could), but David freakin' Bowie, wearing leotards and showing off his package at every opportunity? Even if I could get past this disconnect - I mean seriously, a movie where the villain provides the soundtrack isn't necessarily a bad idea, but it is if David Bowie is the villain - those musical numbers just get worse. That first one all right, because one has to take amusement at the spectacle of the baby in the midst of a musical number with Bowie and about a hundred baby-sized goblin puppets. What a profoundly bizarre experience that must've been for the baby. The second one is somewhat interesting in the way it plays with the common girlhood "belle of the ball" fantasy, but believe me, for us guys, it's snooze city (though Connelly does briefly cross the line into hotness for it). The third one, gah - bluescreened flamingo-chicken muppets. That's all I've gotta say. There's a "You have no power over me!" ending too. I hate those endings. Speaking of endings - the DVD I watched this on got to the final scene, up to the point where Connelly reaches for the doll on the bed, and it wouldn't play any further. I doubt there's much beyond this, but anybody who knows is invited to let me know. (addendum - I've been told. Thanks!) BACK TO THE L's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE