When Dino De Laurentiis, producer of a thousand movies (well, 160), wanted to put together a big screen adaptation of the golden age sci-fi
space hero Buck Rogers Flash Gordon, the crazy Italian hired the director of Damien: the Omen II (Mike Hodges) and the
writers of the Batman: the Movie (Lorenzo Semple Jr.) and Enter the Dragon (Michael Allin) to bring that vision to
life. And to star in his big flashy neon epic? A guy named Sam Jones, who Dino's Italian momma saw on a game show while watching the boob tube one day... and like a baby with its asshole sewn shut, I ain't shittin' you.
Throw in one of the most memorable theme songs to come from Freddy Mercury's meat lovin' vocal chords and original music from a guy named Howard Blake, mix it all up with a variety of neon special effects and a wardrobe of the most colorful and bizarre costumes this side of Fat Tuesday (or a gay pride parade) and you've got more camp than Crystal Lake and packed with more cheese than the collective colons of Wisconsin. And, if you're like me, you just took an acid trip into the arms of Isis, baby.
Intergalactic despot (and retirement home drag queen) Ming the Merciless (Max "The Exorcist" von Sydow) has brought his regime
of tyranny from the stars knocking on Earth's screen door. And he's not knocking said screen door with his big fruity power ring, he's banging
it off the hinges with his natural disaster gun that blasts the globe with everything from earthquakes to typhoons (and stock footage), all
with the ease and convenience of a panel of well lit and clearly labeled buttons that an eight-year old could operate. Are you better at
planetary destruction than a fifth grader? NY Jets quarterback Flash Gordon (Sam "The Spirit" Jones) isn't too concerned by all the
"hot hail" and ominous laughter filling the raging sky, until the prop plane he and his love-interest-to-be and travel agent Dale Arden (Melody
"Dead & Buried" Anderson) are riding in gets shot down in a meteor storm. Crash landing into the secret lair of crazy denounced
ex-NASA scientist Dr. Hans Zarkov, the two are wrangled into his homemade rocket ship at gun point and the trio blast off into the wild blue
yonder. Don't believe all that "endless voids and balls of light" bullshit that scientists keep telling us space looks like, cuz here is where we
learn that the dimension beyond our ozone layer is one of (LSD induced) sights and sounds brothers and sisters. Not unlike the cover of a Yess
album. Real groovy like, daddy-o. Keep on truckin' and shit...
Flash and friends are immediately captured and taken to the presence of Emperor Ming and his court of outer space freaks and sideshow midgets
in weird helmets. Flash breaks free but gets his ass handed to him by big goons in red spandex when he realizes that just because he's a beefy
blond dude that doesn't mean he actually knows how to fight. Once he gets something green egg-shaped football thing into his hands though the
man suddenly knows 100-Yard-Fu and cleans house! His comeback is shortly halted though when the QB gets sacked, hog-tied and thrown into
prison. Ming then flexes his merciless muscles by taking Dale as his concubine, brainwashing Zarkov into service as one of his secret police Nazis
and torturing Flash (with a big freaky helmet that seems to serve no purpose beyond being a big freaky helmet) before popping him into the
gas chamber. Lucky for the hero it turns out that Ming's daughter Princess Aura (whose lips no doubt taste like every wedding tackle on Mongo)
has taken a shining to the beefcake and mastered a plan to help our hero conquer death itself, then smuggles the man out of Ming's palace right
under the Merciless One's own Fu-Manchu mustache. Where do you take a renegade hero from another planet when you're trying to hide from the
deadliest transvestite in the galaxy? Where men are not only men, but manly men... in tights!
Yes, Flash is taken to the Sherwoodian forest planet of Robin Hood Prince Barin (Timothy "Hot Fuzz" Daltin) and his merry
men, where macho posturing gets in the way of Flash's efforts to form an alliance with the oppressed folks of Ming's kingdom in favor of a
revolt. This leads to a whiptastic one-on-one between Flash and the second worst James Bond as the two duel with bullwhips Indiana Jones style
on top of a tilting spiked platform to see who gets to be the leader. Devo 3:16 says, "And there shall be a whipping". Flash of course wins so
now it's up to him to unite the tree fruits, the bombastic hawkmen ("DIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!") and whomever else will take up arms against Ming so
he can put a stop to cross-dressing Hitler before he forces Dale into the cruelest bondage of all: marriage!
Flash Gordon won't float everyone's boat, but nothing ever does and that's okay. As it stands, the whole movie is an opus to the
visual craziness that made the comic book magic of the '40s and '50s so much fun, combined with the cornball excess and sensory overload that
made the '70s such a beautiful thing. If you're into the Adam West Batman stuff or the colorful dementia of Rocky Horror (speaking of which,
Richard O'Brian himself plays Prince Barin's sidekick), this should be right up your bong-hitting alley. From the eyeball rattling costumes to
the mind-melting painted backgrounds to the toy space ships (that you half expect to see with wind-up keys and sparks shooting out of) to the
zany *ZIP!* & *PA-ZOOM!* sound effects to the dialogue that tastes like sharp cheddar to my ears, it's cheesy sci-fi done right and stands as
a model by which such movies should take a cue from. Flash Gordon is like watching Tommy and Star
Wars jerking off into a turkey-baster and impregnating Xanadu with it, only to have Flash Gordon ripping free from the womb 9 months later accompanied by an explosion of neon lightning bolts and Queen screaming "FLASH! AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! SAVIOUR OF THE UNIVERSE!" as it sails across the operating room and into our hearts. De Laurentiis is a fucking Saturday matinée genius and I wish he'd go back to producing stuff like this instead of a new Hannibal Lecter movie every 4 years...
Two last questions though: (1) Exactly how far is a Mongo Mile? (2) Is "hot hail" one of those code words you use in a rest stop toilet to
initiate a glory hole? Just making sure I don't accidentally start something I don't intend to finish the next time I'm on a bus trip. I hate to
disappoint people who had their heart set on getting their knob slobbed by a complete stranger in a public toilet...
