Jabberwocky

1977 fantasy

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A beamish boy stumbles his way into a quest to take a manxome foe--the Jabberwocky!

Really great timing with this one. RIP, Terry Gilliam.

I'd seen this as a youngster soon after watching Brazil, Time Bandits, and Munchausen and deciding that Gilliam was probably my favorite director. Always a little more lukewarm with Monty Python, I was disappointed that this was more like Holy Grail or Life of Brian. My memories of the thing were not all that positive, but although there are still some growing pains with Gilliam's first solo work, it's entertaining enough and foreshadows some of Gilliam's later and greater work.

Gilliam's always one of those fervently creative spirits, a guy with no shortage of ideas. Here, that's not necessarily a good thing. You almost wonder if he wasn't sure that he'd get another shot to make his own feature film and decided to try to use every single idea he had. Of course, restraining a mind like Gilliam's would have been foolish because a lot of the times, even the parts of this that fail are a lot of fun. There are really great set pieces featuring hints of that fantastical but grotesque imagery that he'll later be associated with. The whole film looks grimy, and it seems like the actors must have been absolutely filthy for most of the shoot. I always thought that I had watched a bad print of this or something the first time, but the Criterion release doesn't quite get rid of all that grime. It's not a flaw though--it adds a bit of authenticity to the proceedings.

A lot of Gilliam's typically askew humor almost works here:

Palanquin pissing contests
Some of the names of these characters, especially the royalty: Olaf the Loud, Bruno the Questionable, Fishfinger
Conversations like "I ate three toes off my right foot." "That ain't your right foot." "What are you a doctor or something?"
Wad Dabney, inventor of the inverted ferkin
A knight helmet with a ridiculous dog head on top of it
A Rube Goldsberg-esque blacksmith shop destruction
A jousting tournament devolving into a shiny game of hide and seek
That guy who depeditated himself
Multiple scenes where characters urinate on other characters, the kind of thing that's always a crowd pleaser

And the monster itself? Well, Gilliam doesn't show us a monster until the exact moment when he needs to. It's impressively non-impressively, perfectly so in fact. It's a director saying, "Hey, audience! Nobody wants to give me any money for this thing, so here's a monster that might be causing the makers of The Giant Claw to roll their eyes."

The most impressive monster action is right at the beginning, before the title screen if I'm recalling correctly, and that doesn't show the monster at all. Instead, you get a little monster-cam with a thrusting and swooping camera, close-ups of the poor foolish victim's face, and quickly shifting background foliage. It's very reminiscent of the demonic attacks in the woods in Evil Dead, but this movie predates Sam Raimi's work by four years!

I wish the movie had a little more depth. Gilliam pokes fun at both royalty and religious zealots, has some interesting ideas when priests and businessmen are arguing about the possible virtues of having the monster around, and includes some dialogue near the beginning about craftsmanship vs. business that could almost serve as some sort of personal cinematic manifesto. None of the ideas are fully realized though.

All in all, it's a fun debut that doesn't vary enough from the Python stuff or come quite close enough to the peaks of Gilliam's career. Fans will find something to love here.