Flash Gordon (1980): Camp, Queen, and the Best Bad Good Film

Flash Gordon (1980) should be a catastrophe. It has a leading man whose voice was dubbed by another actor because his own delivery did not work. It has dialogue that lands with a clang, a plot assembled from 1930s comic-strip cliffhangers, and a tone that veers from high-camp winking to total sincerity within a single scene. By every conventional measure of quality it fails, and it was treated as a flop and a joke by plenty of people at the time. And yet it is one of the most purely joyful films ever made, a delirious explosion of colour and sound that has outlasted a hundred more respectable pictures, because it commits so completely to its own absurdity that the absurdity becomes a kind of grandeur.

The story is the old Flash Gordon serial, dusted off and blown up to enormous scale. Flash, a star quarterback played by Sam J. Jones, and travel agent Dale Arden, played by Melody Anderson, are bundled aboard a rocket by the half-mad Dr. Hans Zarkov, played by Topol, and flung to the planet Mongo, where the emperor Ming the Merciless is idly destroying Earth for his amusement. Max von Sydow plays Ming as a suave cosmic tyrant, Ornella Muti is his sensual daughter Aura, Timothy Dalton is the dashing forest prince Barin, and Brian Blessed, roaring in a winged helmet, is Vultan, king of the Hawkmen. Flash has to unite Mongo’s squabbling kingdoms and save the Earth, mostly by being blond, brave and slightly bewildered.

Sincerity is the special effect

The reason Flash Gordon works where a hundred knowing pastiches fail is that it is played straight by people who mean it. This is the crucial thing to understand about the film, and it is easy to miss under all the glitter. Von Sydow, a titan of Ingmar Bergman’s cinema, plays Ming the Merciless with the full weight of his gravitas, and the joke is that he is not joking. Brian Blessed bellows his lines as though performing Shakespeare at the top of a mountain in a gale. The film never smirks at itself from a safe distance; it believes in Mongo utterly, and that belief is what separates genuine camp from the tired ironic kind. You cannot fake this. A cast winking at the material would have made something unwatchable. A cast committing to it made something immortal.

The design is the other half of the magic, and it is ravishing. The production designer Danilo Donati, a De Laurentiis regular, drenched every frame in saturated primary colour, in gold and scarlet and electric green, building a Mongo that owes nothing to the drab industrial future George Lucas had made fashionable three years earlier. Where Star Wars was used and grimy, Flash Gordon is a pop-art fever dream, all sequins and lightning and art-deco rockets, a comic-strip Sunday supplement come to life. Mike Hodges, the director who had made the stone-cold British crime classic Get Carter a decade before, brings a surprising discipline to the chaos, keeping the storytelling clear even as the film threatens to drown in its own spectacle.

And then there is Queen. The band’s soundtrack is one of the great marriages of music and image in cult cinema, a pounding, theatrical rock score that swells and stomps under the action, the title anthem with its chanted “Flash! Ah-ah!” burned permanently into the memory of everyone who has heard it. The music does something specific and clever: it tells you the film is a rock spectacle, a piece of high theatre to be enjoyed at full volume, and it lends the silliest scenes an operatic momentum they would collapse without. Queen understood the assignment perfectly. This is arena rock for a space opera, and it makes the whole enterprise feel enormous.

The lineage: the serials, the Batman camp, and the sincere-spectacle shelf

Here is where the collector reshelves the film. Flash Gordon descends directly from the 1930s movie serials, the Saturday-morning cliffhangers of Buster Crabbe’s original Flash, and its whole DNA is that of the chapter-play, all cliff-edges and last-second rescues and villains who monologue instead of finishing the job. But its immediate tonal ancestor is on television: the screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr., who scripted Flash Gordon, was the man who developed the gloriously camp 1960s Batman series, and you can feel that show’s straight-faced absurdism in every scene. Semple knew exactly how to write a line that is ridiculous and sincere at the same time, and that skill is the film’s secret engine.

Its cult cousins are the other great sincere-spectacle films, the ones that flopped by trying too hard and were loved for exactly that. It belongs on the same shelf as Brian De Palma’s overheated rock opera Phantom of the Paradise and its Faustian rot, another film that fused pop music and outrageous design into a theatrical fever, and as John Boorman’s magnificent misfire Zardoz and the case for watching it anyway, a science-fiction folly so committed to its own strangeness that its failure becomes fascinating. All three are films where excess and sincerity fuse into something no cautious production could reach.

Its closest spiritual sibling, though, is another gorgeous, silly, wholehearted 1980s genre picture that flopped and then found its people. Set Flash Gordon beside Big Trouble in Little China and the hero who is the sidekick and you have two films that treat pulp adventure with total conviction and zero embarrassment, and both learned that a movie which is too unashamed of its own joy for the box office can become permanently beloved on the sofa.

Why “so bad it’s good” undersells it

The lazy label for Flash Gordon is “so bad it’s good”, and it is worth arguing against, because that framing misses what the film actually achieves. “So bad it’s good” implies an accident, a film that entertains through incompetence, and Flash Gordon is not that. It is a film that chose its register, camp maximalism played with a straight face, and executed it with expensive precision. The dubbing and the wooden line-readings are real weaknesses, and a viewer allergic to camp will find it exhausting. Those flaws are genuine and I will not pretend otherwise.

But the design, the score, the pacing and the casting are the work of serious professionals at the top of their craft, deliberately building a beautiful, ridiculous thing. The film knows precisely what it is. Calling it “so bad it’s good” is a way of enjoying it while refusing to admit it earned the pleasure, when the truth is that its joys are constructed, chosen and controlled. It is a good film about being silly, made well.

The verdict: it is the high-water mark of sincere camp spectacle, a film whose absurdity is its greatness rather than its failing, and one of the most re-watchable objects in all of cult cinema. Come for the Queen anthem. Stay for the most wholehearted silliness ever committed to a very expensive screen.

Where to find it: it streams on the major services and has a beautifully restored physical release. Watch it loud, watch it with people, and let Brian Blessed’s laugh do its work.

Spoilers below

The plot resolves exactly as a 1930s serial would, and part of the film’s charm is how little it tries to modernise the beats. Ming the Merciless intends to destroy Earth and to add Dale to his harem, and the film’s central alliance-building sees Flash win over the two kingdoms he needs, Barin’s forest realm of Arboria and Vultan’s floating Hawkmen city, both of whom initially distrust or fight him. The famous set-piece is the ritual on Vultan’s sky-city, where Flash and Barin are made to fight to the death on a tilting platform studded with spikes, a sequence staged as pure comic-strip peril.

The climax is the assault on Ming’s palace during his wedding to Dale. Flash, having rallied the Hawkmen, flies the recovered rocket-ship War Rocket Ajax directly at Ming’s tower, and the film’s most gleefully absurd image is Flash piloting the ship like a lance, its sharp prow aimed at the emperor. Ming, wielding his ring of power, is finally impaled on the rocket’s spike as it crashes into the wedding, killed by his own spectacle, and the tyrant who toyed with a planet is undone by a football player in a rocket.

The last shot is the film’s cheekiest promise. Ming’s ring, lying in the rubble, is picked up by an unseen hand, and a familiar cackle rings out over the credits, telling us the merciless emperor may not be as dead as he looks. It is the serial’s oldest trick, the villain who survives to menace another chapter, and Flash Gordon deploys it with a wink that is somehow still sincere, closing on the pure comic-strip pleasure it has served up for two hours and promising, against all box-office logic, that there is more where that came from.