Monsters & Mullets: Homecoming

Why is Gandalf such a jerk.

February 28, 2019

It began as a modest effort…

to watch and review 'every' high fantasy film from the 1980s I could find. It became a geek-culture monstrosity, dipping its sticky fingers into everything from 70s art-house porn to puzzlingly belated film adaptations of bombastic stage musicals. It lived as it died: long-windedly. It was Monsters & Mullets, and like Spider-Man, it's back. Again. Initially, Monsters & Mullets was a series of essays which reviewed and analysed 80s high fantasy films like Hawk the Slayer and Beastmaster. But man cannot subsist on 80s high fantasy alone, so it wasn’t long before I branched out: if the film contained a monster or a mullet, irrespective of its decade of origin or its genre, I considered it fair game for review. Thus films from Caligula to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to The Phantom of the Opera entered the M&M canon.Today, this broad inclusivity will continue... and likely enbroadenate further. What is a monster, really? What makes a mullet? Let's go on this journey of discovery together.This is how it works: 

I'll pick a film and recap it. And this is going to be a real recap; there will be no namby-pamby tiptoeing around spoilers. In Monsters & Mullets, everything is fair game. I'll enliven things with a dusting of trivia, toss in some cut-rate analysis and tie it all together with a lot of swearing and all-caps yelling. There will probably be oversharing, and there will definitely be cat jokes.We’ll kick off in style with the greatest Monsters & Mullets film of them all: 1982’s Conan the Barbarian. It’s going to be awesome.In the meantime, you can catch up on the archives here. Below are a few highlights from past reviews:Flash Gordon (1980)

[Ming the Merciless] has the power to control minds and bodies; he's facing off with Flash on a floating palace that happens to be covered in spikes and also hovering over a swirling vortex of doom and instead of using his power to make Flash throw himself off the flying palace or even just onto the spikes that are right the fuck there he returns to his own ship to blow up the palace from afar BECAUSE THAT IS OBVIOUSLY THE BEST AND MOST EFFICIENT WAY TO KILL HIS ENEMY.

The Hobbit (1977)

And then there's Gandalf. Seriously, he shows up at the beginning all "I'M GANDALF, BITCHES!"; buffaloes Bilbo into going with the dwarves, buggers off whenever the weather gets shitty or he gets tired or whatever, miraculously reappears in time to save the day, and then disappears again. And then spends the denouement belittling Bilbo. "You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck?" Gandalf asks at the film’s end, "just for your sole benefit?  You're a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I'm very fond of you, but you're only quite a little fellow in a wide world, after all." This after Bilbo rightly points out that prophecies are all well and good, but he had a pretty big hand in getting shit done.

Caligula (1979) 

As a cultural artefact, Caligula is absolutely fascinating. It represents the last gasp of a non-starter industry subgenre (historical literary arthouse porn, I guess?) which was about to be dealt the dual killing-blows of home theatre technology and a cultural U-turn to social and political conservatism.  As a film, however, Caligula is just about the worst thing I have ever seen, and I've seen The Chronicles of Riddick before the post-production effects were added. 

 Krull (1983) 

First, of course, Colwyn must outfit himself with the expected epic weapon, in this case the "glaive," a kind of knife-edged, five-pointed boomerang he can apparently control with his mind.  Don't get excited, though; Colwyn will never ever use this weapon when it could save the lives of his friends, instead using it as a drill to saw through a door to get to his affect-free princess at the movie's climax.

See you in Cimmeria,

Anne

Thank you so much for subscribing! If you're enjoying the newsletter, forward it to someone you think may enjoy it too. Tell me about your favourite monster or mullet on Twitter @thefingersofgod.