Bad/Awesome Flixxx Review: Time Bandits (1981)

"If I were creating the world I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, Day One!" - Evil

"I should do something very extroverted and vengeful to you. Honestly, I'm too tired. So, I think I'll transfer you to the undergrowth department, brackens, more shrubs, that sort of thing... with a 19% cut in salary, backdated to the beginning of time." - Supreme Being

"God isn't interested in technology. He cares nothing for the microchip or the silicon revolution. Look how he spends his time, forty-three species of parrots! Nipples for men! Slugs! HE created slugs! They can't hear. They can't speak. They can't operate machinery. Are we not in the hands of a lunatic?" - Evil

This is a flick that a ton of my friends saw when they were growing up, but its taken me years to finally see it. If you're a fan of Monty Python or time travel or midgets, then you're gonna love this. From director Terry Gilliam, and starring most of the cast of Monty Python, Sean Connery and Shelly Duvall, I present TIME BANDITS!!!

So there's this English kid named Kevin and his parents don't pay any attention to him. His dad is a prick who can't be bothered by his son and gets super pissed when he makes any noise at all. One night Kev is lying in bed when a fucking knight on horseback bursts through his closet door and runs off down a field. He hides his eyes and when he opens them again his bedroom is back to normal, and then his dad comes and screams at him for making a racket. He decides that if this shit happens again he'll be ready. 

So the next night when he jumps in bed, he has a polaroid camera but instead of a knight busting through the closet, about 6 midgets fall from his ceiling, and then they push on his wall and it goes further than even the house is long. Kev is reluctant to follow them down the new hallway in his house until this huge glowing head pops into his room demanding that the midgets return the space map they stole from him. Then he books it, and they run into a little doorway that dumps them into Italy during an invasion by Napoleon. It turns out that the midgets used to work for the "Supreme Being", but they stole his map because they didn't feel appreciated. So they steal a bunch of loot from Napoleon and narrowly escape into the time of Robin Hood, who in turn gives their loot to the poor. Kevin gets mad at them throughout the movie because he has no interest in being a robber, but the boys need him because he's smarter than all of them. Meanwhile the ultimate Evil being is watching them all the while so that he can steal the time map for himself. 

Kevin gets separated from the boys and ends up in Greece and helps Agemmemnon kill the minotaur. Then he tells him that he has no home, so Agemmemnon adopts him for his own, and Kevin is down because his parents care more about new microwaves and dishwashers than they do him. But soon the boys come to his "rescue" and then he's super pissed at them, because he would've eventually become a king if he had've stayed there. They next end up on the titanic and when it sinks, Evil manipulates one of them to suggest they go to the "time of legends" (which is where he lives). They get there and then they're stuck behind an invisible force field. When they bust through it they find the Castle of Ultimate Darkness. They ultimately get locked up in it in a cage above a bottomless pit. Kev finds more time portals in the pic he took of them and the map. So they escape by swinging on ropes out of the cage. 

Ok, so Evil thwarts their attempts to defeat him and he has them right where he wants them until ... well, why should I spoil it for you? Let's just say that the end reminds me of an old episode of the Twilight Zone. Should you see it? Yeah, apparently its essential. I never knew that, but if you're young, I'm pretty sure its better than if you're in your thirties seeing it for the first time. Great flick though.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012