Ziggy Played In A Maze!!
I wanted to watch this movie because I only seen 10 minutes of it, when I was a kid, and I was intreged. It's unbelieveable that until now I wasn't able to see it, but what do you expect with a 80's movie that's probably only a cult film?
One day, this girl named Sarah is playing some weird fairy tale type thing with herself and her dog Merlin when she realizes she has to rush home. Sarah, is played by some actress, named, um...let me check my notes...Jennifer Connelly. I dunno if she went on to do anything else since this movie. The name rings a bell. Anyway, Sarah rushes home because her dad and stepmother want to go out and they are making Sarah babysit her baby brother, Toby. Sarah doesn't like Toby a lot. In fact, Sarah isn't that much of a likeable character. So that means at the movie's end she's gonna learn her lesson. Sarah wishes some goblins would come and take Toby away, and you'd think that 99 times out of a hundred, someone would say such a thing and it wouldn't happen. But, by luck, some goblins DID take Toby away and The Goblin King shows up.
The Goblin King is played by David Bowie. Yes, THAT David Bowie. He also wrote all the songs and music used in this movie. The Goblin King, named Jaredth (Everyone in this movie has weird ass names), says thanks for the kid, Sarah. Sarah changes her mind and wants Toby back, but it isn't quite that easy. The Goblin King says if she gets through his labyrinth (hence the title, in case you were wondering) and gets to his castle in the center, in 13 hours, she gets the kid back. They are magically transformed to the start.
Sarah makes her way, first meeting Hoggle, a really old short goblin dude who hates fairies and kills them. He's suppose to be working for Bowie, but Hoggle, who has a big heart deep down inside, refuses, and helps Sarah out whenever he can. Sarah whines her way around the labyrinth, meeting odd creatures here and there such as:
This old Wiseman who has a buzzard for a hat, who offers Sarah confusing advice on which way to take.
Helping Hands, which are, well, hands, in a deep hole and they hold Sarah, making her fall into something called a You-Glee-It. Inside that thing she encounters the False Alarms, which are giant faces inside huge rocks that talk like James Earl Jones and they all say "DO NOT GO ANY FARTHER!" Hoggle assures Sarah they say that to discourage people.
Hoggle, one of the many times he strays away from Sarah, is visited by the King (no not Elvis, but that would be cool) and says if Hoggle helps Sarah anymore, he'll go into the Bog of Eternal Stench, which is like a swamp, but smells about as bad as if Rush Limbaugh ate nothing but Mexican beans for 17 months straight in an airtight room. Hoggle says if you even take one step into the Bog, you'll stick forever, hence that name.
Sarah hears loud roaring and finds a huge hairy Ape type-being being hung on a rope while Goblin Patrols (The Goblin Police if you will) tease and torture the poor thing. Sarah helps this ape guy out, named Ludo, and frees him. They become the best of friends.
Sarah and Ludo then find two doors with giant knockers (No they weren't female doors. Ha-ha.) and, along with everything else in this maze, the knockers talk. One has knockers in his ears so he cant hear anything and the other one has it in his mouth, so he can't talk. The one in his mouth says to open his door, which Sarah does. They find themselves in a jungle, Ludo falls down a hole, and Sarah stumbles upon weird creatures who looks like Animal from The Muppets (More on that later) called the Fireys, and they dance and sing and have the ability to take their body parts off and on at will. Kinda strange. And I'm not gonna go where you think I'm gonna go on that whole taking body parts off part. Use your imagination. Hoggle saves Sarah from these creatures, but they fall into the Bog of Eternal Stench, where Ludo is also. They find a bridge, but it's guarded by Didymus, a small dog, who uses a bigger dog named Ambroslus as a horse. Didymus fights Ludo, then when Sarah asks permission to cross the bridge, they do so. Sort of like that one scene in "Monty Python & The Holy Grail".
Hoggle again goes his own way and he runs into Bowie again, and he tells Hoggle to give Sarah this peach. Hoggle eventually does, but he feels bad about it, because she said she considers him a friend, and, well friends don't give friends strange fruit from a strange guy who use to go around calling himself Ziggy Stardust.
Sarah bites the peach and she gets, like, so high man, whoa! She ends up in this little bubble where a ballroom party is going on. There is a 10 minute sequence of Sarah and David Bowie ballroom dancing. This is all suppose to mean that she's suppose to forget why she's on her mission, which she does. She breaks the bubble and lands in a landfill.
Sarah meets some Garbage Lady, who tries to trick her by giving Sarah her own stuff, which is kind of weird, but whatever. Sarah, finally, remembers what the hell she was doing and gets the hell away from the garbage lady. She, Ludo, Hoggle, and P. Didymus stumble upon the gates of the castle! Yay!!
Aw crap. They gotta fight this big ass robot thing. To anyone who ever played "Sonic The Hedgehog 2" on Sega Genesis, and they got ALL the way to the final level when Sonic goes into space and he had to fight Dr. Robotnik, but Robotnik went into this giant robot thing to fight Sonic...THAT'S what this robot in this movie looked like. Maybe they inspired each other.
By the way, it took me a week and a half to defeat Robotnik.
Hoggle, who finally grows some backbone, defeats the giant monster (It was just some small goblin inside it, just like SONIC! Whoa...) and they get inside the castle FINALLY!
But Bowie isn't gonna give up that easily. He placed Toby inside this maze inspired by Escher, which takes about 20 minutes to figure out. Sarah confronts Bowie, recites some passage and....
She and Toby return home. Was it all a dream? Did it happen? Why did the filmmakers feel the need to put Bowie in a leatard so his "stuff" is just out in the open like that? You can all come to your conclusions, but I for one didn't like the ending that much.
Alright, ready for some name dropping? Here ya go.
Directed by Jim Henson, produced by George Lucas, written by Terry Jones FROM Monty Python (Maybe that bridge thing wasn't a coinicidence), and puppetry from Brian Henson,Jim's son or brother (Not sure really) and Frank Oz, among thousand other puppeters.
The movie had good moments, and everyone was pretty good. I'm unsure how old Jennifer Connelly was at this time, so I'm not gonna comment about how hot she was back then. Damn, I just did. It was hard to believe that years later, she's gonna play a drug addict who ends up with a double ended dildo in her ass. In a movie. I never really seens David Bowie act, so he did a teriffic job, and the only thing I ever seen Jim Henson direct was The Muppet movies. It really was a sad thing that Henson died. Who knows how many more cool movies he could've done.
3 stars.
"Labyrinth" on IMDb.com:
www.imdb.com/title/tt0091369/