I'm not going to lie to you, its rubbish but its utterly watchable rubbish nonetheless (Flash Gordon (DVD))

Member Name: huggy2009

Product:	Flash Gordon (DVD)
Date:	27/05/09 (14 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Its fun, colourful and you'll remember it

Disadvantages: Possibly for the wrong reasons

This is a classic of the superhero genre, in so much as its awful B-movie stuff, but very much like the original television series in the fact the hero is awfully wooden and the sets look like they could fall over at any moment, created in 1980, by Mike Hodges, it tells the story of All-American hero Flash Gordon (Sam Jones).

Whats it all about:

The film is about a mad Mongol by the name of Ming the Merciless (Max Von Sydow) who plans to destroy the Earth, the Earth has one hope and transports Flash, his companion Dale (Melody Anderson) and a scientist to the planet Mongo to stop Ming the Merciless. We follow our hero as he meets a ragtag band of different inhabitants of Mongo who want to stop Ming, from Brian Blessed and his bird men to Timothy Dalton as Price Barin. We see Ming take Dale to be his bride and Flash then has to save the girl as well as the planet, will he do it? Well the Queen song might give something away!!!

Whose in it:

Sam Jones looks like a chisel jawed model who was chosen for the part without allowing him to speak, he is wooden and absolutely out of his depth, thankfully this just makes the film even better, he and Melody Anderson as Dale are so awful they are brilliant. Max Von Sydow has fun stroking his long moustache as the villainous Ming, Brian Blessed has a great time yelling as the king of the Birdmen and Timothy Dalton looks like he wants to be anywhere but in this film, it is poorly scripted, badly acted and an absolute classic of its kind as there is no other film quite like it. It really has the feel of a dodgy Italian B-movie.

My View:

I love the film and have done since when I was a kid, its so colourful and the set pieces are great fun, it does all look a bit cheap for some reason, but Mike Hodges fills the film with humour in a tongue in cheek way, the Queen song, Flash Gordon perfectly fits the film and the dramatic finale, I love the special effects they are so cheap you can almost see the wires holding up the birdmen. This is a particularly camp film with lots of bondage type outfits and bulging muscles, unfortunately very few of these bulging muscles are in peoples heads. I hope they never try to remake this film as it's a one of a kind, awful acting, dodgy looking sets, even dodgier scripts and an action packed plot which you can't help buy love. It is a rubbish film I am not going to lie to you, but something about it makes it watchable and I'm more than happy to watch it again every six months or so, its just a fun rubbish film.

DVD is available for £2.98 on Amazon and includes trailer and photo gallery amongst the extras.

Summary: A classic of its kind