Flesh Gordon

When I was a kid one of the cinemas in the Isle of Man would have special late night showings in the summer season. It would alternate between soft core films and kung fu films.

Flesh Gordon would be wheeled out each summer, I think it promises more than it delivers.

A spoof of early Flash Gordon serials. Earth is hit by sex rays from outer space sending people into a sexual frenzy. When an aircraft carrying Flesh Gordon and Dale Ardor is hit by sex rays, the plane crashes as everyone starts having an orgy including the pilots. Flesh and Dale escape by parachute and land near the laboratory of Flexi Jerkoff who has a plan to stop the sex rays which emanate from outer space.

They travel to the planet Porno in Jerkoff's phallic rocket. They crash land in planet Porno ruled by Emperor Wang and he intends to marry Dale while Flesh is taken by Queen Amora as a sex slave. Somehow Flesh needs to defeat Wang but he faces rapist robots, lesbian pirates, a penisaurus, and giant monster called the great god porno.

Flesh Gordon has some really good stop motion animation, an obvious tribute to Ray Harryhausen. The film itself parodies the 1930s Flash Gordon serial rather faithfully.

However in its heart this is a campy softcore parody with some bad puns and wooden acting from Jason Williams who plays Flesh. As the title implies there is a lot of flesh on display and it has a few inspired smutty scenes. I do remember some lads at school had seen a pirate version of this movie and thought it was hilarious.

However what would had been classed as daring in the 1970s is now tame and lot of it is dull as well not helped by the poor quality of the video. It works as a piece of naughty kitsch.

Which is worse: A cheesy porno flick or one of those old off the wall sci-fi swordfight potboilers?

Answer: How about a crossbreed? A sci-fi swordfight porno flick!

This is an interesting parody of two awful genres, played not against each other, but played INTO each other, dreadful writing and acting parodied by deft writing and clever acting.

Not a family flick (of course, not everything needs to be family fare) but an interesting play on the line of "can we make it so bad it is good?"

Hey, I like good, sleazy fun, so I thought I couldn't go wrong with renting Flesh Gordon, which I have heard about for years without really knowing much about. The movie itself is mildly amusing, but what's really wonderful abut this disc is the commentary track, which is TEN TIMES more interesting than the movie itself.

The Movie We open with a LONG title about how this is a tribute to the adventure serials of the 20s and 30s… we find out on the commentary that this was added to avoid a lawsuit, because they were unaware that their writer had taken an episode from Flash Gordon and reproduced it nearly exactly. Anyway, so it seems that the good citizens of Earth are suddenly bombarded by the sex ray, which makes them crazed to have sex with the first person they see (and I wonder: what would David Cronenberg make of this?). This is a big problem, so Flesh Gordon, who soon meets Dale Ardor, are going to travel to the planet Porno to find out what's going on. They meet Flesh's pal Flexi Jerkoff (one of those jokes that, the more you think about it, the more absurd and funny it gets), who has a spaceship that oddly recalls the shape of a penis, and they take off. By now you will have noticed the radical differences in quality and apparent budget from scene to scene. For example, later in the film we have some very nice, nearly-academy award nominated stop-motion animation, and yet when Flesh and co. are on the plane at the beginning, it's quite clear that the walls are made of stapled-on packing material.

So Flesh and pals travel through the moronosphere to the planet Porno, where they crash land. Meanwhile, the evil Emperor Wang has noticed their presence, and sent out guards, who obsequiously refer to him as "Your Protuberance," "Your Sickness," and "Degenerate One." The guards go after our trio who are having their own problems with the Penisauruses, which are giant stop-motion animated uncut penises with horns and one vertically-blinking eye. This affords viewers the sight of the comely Dale being rubbed all over by a dickhead the size of a hippo. They escape, and are soon awarded the power pasties by someone or other, which will give them the decisive edge.

Anyway, so it goes on, even going so far as to include an intermission and cliffhanger as tribute to the original series. Later our heroes are menaced by giant robots with spinning drills where their dicks would normally be, and finally Dale (whose bush is the size of Nebraska, by the way) is taken by this giant monster to the top of a tower, in an unlikely tribute to King Kong. Things go on and soon they end.

This movie is clearly part of the mix that resulted in the Austin Powers movies, and it has a similar effect as so many of the jokes are so juvenile and moronic that eventually they become kind of funny. I was especially laughing at the guards saying things like "Right away, degenerate one" to Emperor Wang. The problem is that NO ONE in the movie is attractive, so although there's lots of randiness and softcore excitement going on, there was no one I was really interested in.

The Commentary I popped in the commentary while I was assembling some furniture, really just wanting to know WHAT the director could possibly have to say about this piece of work. What I got was a totally fascinating tale of low-budget grindhouse film-making in all its glory. The producers made porn films, and that was all. But at this time, some porn films were getting shown in legitimate theaters, so they decided to make a porn film that had more to it than sex, and hired various people and got started. One of the interesting aspects of the whole story is that the producers have no idea what the screenwriter or special effects people are doing while they all work separately. These were people with absolutely no experience in making a film, suddenly trying to do it. They face associates baldly trying to cheat them, police harassment, a few rounds through the judicial system… it's an incredible story. For a while the director is followed by the police until they locate the set, then the police confiscate the film, and then the director has to prove in court that the film is NOT pornographic, which helped determine why this movie came out as a softcore comedy "tribute" to the old serials, instead of a real porn film as was originally intended.

Remember how I said that some of the special effects are very good? Well, turns out that a then-unknown Dennis Muren, who would later become the lead man at ILM and win academy awards for Star Wars, E.T., Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, you name it, worked on this film (and had such a bad experience he didn't want his name on it). Since there were only two other films that year that HAD special effects, this one was almost nominated for an Oscar—but the Academy decided not to have the category that year instead of even considering this film.

The film itself I worth seeing, at least for a quick fast-forward, but if you're interested in the behind-the-scenes of low-budget and porn film-making, but the commentary here is one of the most interesting stories of low-budget film-making you'll ever hear.

--- Hey, check out Cinema de Merde, my website devoted to bad and cheesy movies. You can get the url from my email address above...

The filmmakers of Flesh Gordon spent so much effort lovingly recreating the look and feel of the original Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s that they actually created a soft porn movie with real (if very modest) cinematic worth. In fact, it's in some ways superior to the original Gordon flicks - particularly its special effects - with an extensive and surprisingly good use of stop-action animation.

Fortunately, sub-par acting is common in both porn and the old serials and this adds to the authentic feel of this parody. But there is also some genuine acting going on too. The best actors in the movie deliberately over-play their roles to wonderful effect. Emperor Wang and Dr. Flexi Jerkoff brilliantly recreate the essence of Emperor Ming and Dr. Zarkov. Craig T. Nelson gives the voice of the monster a kind of laid back (yet lewd) sophistication. It's a voice that reminds me of Bing Crosby, which makes the scene just plain weird.

What makes this film work is that instead following the usual porn formula of using the plot as a mere device to show sex, Flesh Gordon uses sex as the fundamental source its humor, enthusiastically blending the rather banal soft-core porn of the seventies with the hackneyed storylines of the thirties. The sex takes the hackney out of the story, and the story takes the banality out of the sex scenes.

Is this movie a masterpiece? Clearly... OBVIOUSLY... not. But it is distinctive and original. Flesh Gordon is an unusual case where the quite good and the very bad somehow manage to complement each other and average out to make a very entertaining movie.

There is so much to see in this movie (besides the nekkid people), Great special effects, weird sight gags, penisaurs, robots... Many images are indelible, The black swan spaceship of the lesbian queen, the great claymation monster saying "My AAAsss!", robin hood seducing flash gordon (those aren't the character names but you get the idea...), oh yeah, and emperor Wang's cheerleaders.

Not a great movie by any means, but really odd. And so much better than the Dino DeLaurentiis version that came later.