"Prepare to insert nourishment"
Last week it was Flash Gordon, this week it's Barbarella, next week it'll probably be The Rocky Horror Picture Show... I'm on a swing through for campy fruit salad sci-fi goofball shit lately and I don't know why. I wish I could explain it, but I prefer to think that some things are better left unanswered at a time like this, so let's jump straight into the movie! Yes, I said "straight", so keep it movin' people.
Based on a French comic character that was the estrogenical equivalent of Buck Rogers (only with a lot more nudity... which is a relief since the word "nudity" should never be used in conjunction with Buck Rogers... though I'm sure there's been a "Buck Naked Rogers" parody thrown out there somewhere down the line), Barbarella came to the big screen when the drug-addled hippie love-fest known as the '60s were winding down. It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that the flick, like the aforementioned Flash Gordon, is a Din De Laurentiis production. After all, eccentric sci-fi fantasy movie loaded down with more cheese than a fondue pot and more innuendo than the word "innuendo" itself (you know, cuz it kinda sounds like "in your end-o"?), all based on a long running comic strip? Bingo. Oh yeah, little trivia drop: David Gilmour (yes, the Pink Floyd David Gilmour) actually lent his guitar playing to Barbarella's score. Remember that in case you're ever on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"... no, I think it's still on, only now it's a daytime show and it's hosted by Meredith Vieira... personally I've been keeping my fingers crossed that someone will bring back "You Don't Know Jack" complete with Paul Reubens as the host, but it's been 6 years and my fingers are really starting to hurt... I blame Al-Qaeda... and Donny Osmond...
Everything starts off promisingly enough as Barbarella ("Hanoi Jane" Fonda herself) does a zero gravity (except for her rebellious hair which apparently carries a gravity all it's own) striptease for everyone, shedding her spacesuit after her most recent mission... we all know that she's just rolling around on a piece of Plexiglas (you can see the reflection in the glass a lot), but the flying opening credits that fly around her are fun to watch... plus the fact that it's JANE FONDA DOING A STRIPTEASE!... you gotta love the fact that you could see full Fonda titty action in a PG movie 40 years ago... and not from Henry or Peter...
When I said Barb had just finished her latest mission, I mean that the lovely lady is an intergalactic agent for the Earth, centuries into our future where universal pacificism is common, peace and love reign supreme, and concepts like war are blasphemous tools of the ignorant... if only Jane Fonda had put her hand down George Bush's pants instead of Ted Turners the world might actually be a better place now. Anyway, a brilliant scientist named Durand-Durand (yes, this is where they got their name from) has invented a weapon called the Positronic Ray and gone rogue, so it's up to Barb to use her vast arsenal of feminine "weapons" (and a few laser guns on loan from a museum) to find the madman and destroy his zapper before harm can befall the universe's peace and quiet.
Not remembered so much for it's epic storytelling or high drama, Barbarella is better known as one big psychedelic journey through the weird and unknown (with an equally funky soundtrack) that lives up to the "it's about the journey, not the destination" cliché. The
fun of watching the movie doesn't come from the climax (har har), but the crazy people and places our heroine discovers on the way to finding Double D in her big gay spaceship (or maybe he's just really British?). Barb goes water/ice skiing with creepy gibberish speaking children (as
pulled along by a smiling manta ray thingy); gets attacked by a posse of flesh eating dolls; meets the wacky Professor Ping and a labyrinth of depressed space emos; fights whip swinging leather robot men; brave the hedonism of the futuristic Sodom and Gomorrah called SoGo; a multiple choice suicide chamber; a lake of magnetic Crystal Pepsi that feeds on evil thoughts; threatens to melt the face of some unicornian she-despot called the Black Queen; gets attacked by a cage full of brightly colored peckers (birds, not phalluses); takes a "hair raising" kind of ecstasy; chills with an opium den full of fetishists smoking "essence of man" (which looks to be wet farts from an oily looking guy in a giant fishbowl); turns energy cables into "faggots"; gets herself wrapped up in a three-way (huh huh huh, "three-way") global political power struggle; practices her angel CPR; survives a planetary Armageddon; changes outfits six different times; and still has time to have sex with a blind angel (John Phillip Law of Diabolik and Space Mutiny!), a guy in leather stockings named after a sex toy, a high-tech death harpsichord, and the hairiest man since Robin Williams. I told you, De Laurentiis equals craziness and lots of it.
It’s all good and fun and if you expect anything more than a 90 minute roll through shag carpeting, a little LSD, and a hundred or so thinly veiled references to “doin’ it”, you’re in the wrong neighborhood Ray-Jay. Barbarella is one of those dumbass flicks that puts me in a better mood whenever I watch it because it’s just fun. The special effects are cheap (it was the ‘60s, give ‘em a break) and the writing is far from award winning (unless you’re talking a Razzie), but I reiterate, have fun with it. Laugh with it, laugh at it, whatever you do you’ll be fine if you just laugh. Get the stick out of your butt Maestro, down a few spoonfuls of sugar (unless you're Diabetic, in which case we don't need to get sued) and put on a happy face… just don’t be an asshole about it.
