REEL RETRO CINEMA | 13th Dimension, Comics, Creators, Culture

Dec07

‘FLASH GORDON’ AT 45: Movie of the (Wonderfully) Impossible!

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Dec 7, 2025

‘FLASH GORDON’ AT 45: Movie of the (Wonderfully) Impossible!

REEL RETRO CINEMA: New looks at old flicks — and their comics connections… — UPDATED 12/7/25: Flash Gordon came out 45 years ago this month! Perfect time to reprint this piece from Dec. 5, 2023! Also, check out Rob’s new REEL RETRO CINEMA banner, above. Nice, huh? Dig it. — Dan — By ROB KELLY Sometime around December 5, 1980, my Dad took my older sister and me to see Flash Gordon. Having read numerous Flash Gordon comics and watched hours of the movie serials, I was the perfect audience. Also in the audience that night? Two drunken young women, who seemed to be enjoying the movie for entirely different reasons. But more on them later. After lying somewhat fallow in the pop culture landscape for a few decades, big time movie producer Dino De Laurentiis was eager to get Flash Gordon onto the silver screen. He did the trick for Danger: Diabolik and Barbarella (both 1968), and ultimately the somewhat campy approach taken with those films would be used for Flash Gordon, just a lot more family friendly. It’s a famous story by now—one of the great What If?s in all of pop culture—that in the early 1970s, George Lucas tried to buy the rights to Flash Gordon. His failure to do so led (indirectly) to the creation of Star Wars, and popular entertainment would never be the same. De Laurentiis had first wanted Federico Fellini(!) to direct, then moved onto Nicolas Roeg(!!), finally settling on journeyman director Mike Hodges and screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. (who, besides helping develop the Batman TV series, wrote the 1976 King Kong remake for De Laurentiis). With a budget of $27 million (around $100 million today), De Laurentiis was, as usual, going big. He’s a miracle! After a magnificently exciting opening credits scene (scored to Queens’ iconic, propulsive theme music, and peppered with art from the comic strip), we jump right to the action—by the 20-minute mark we’re already on Mongo. Every sci-fi/fantasy film post-Star Wars bears its influence, visually and tonally. But De Laurentiis’ personality was still so big and forceful that Flash Gordon hits a sweet spot between what a big budget, modern sci-fi movie was supposed to feel like in 1980, and the more idiosyncratic, phantasmagorical, Pop Art feel of the 1960s. Almost everything in Flash Gordon is a...

Oct06

Hammer’s CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF: A Movie for an October Full Moon

Posted by Dan Greenfield on Oct 6, 2025

Hammer’s CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF: A Movie for an October Full Moon

REEL RETRO CINEMA: Aa-hooo! Werewolves of Spain! — New looks at old flicks and their comic-book connections… UPDATED 10/6/25: It’s a full moon! It’s even a supermoon! It’s October! Perfect time to reprint this column from February 2018! Dig it! — Dan — By ROB KELLY Can you make a werewolf movie without a werewolf? That was the question director Terence Fisher attempted to answer with 1961’s The Curse of the Werewolf, the only flick produced by the legendary Hammer Films to focus on this particular type of movie monster. Loosely based on the novel The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore, Curse features notorious wild man Oliver Reed in his first starring role as Leon, the poor soul afflicted by the titular curse. Set in 18th century Spain, an old beggar (Richard Wodsworth) staggers into a wedding banquet thrown by the Marquis Siniestro (Anthony Dawson) looking for scraps of food or a coin or two. Siniestro is a cruel man (must be the name), and taunts the old man, treating him like an animal. After unwisely speaking up for himself, the beggar is thrown into a dank prison and promptly forgotten for 15 years. The beggar’s sole human contact is his jailer and his beautiful, mute daughter (Yvonne Romain), but when the young woman rejects the sexual advances of the aged and decrepit Siniestro, she is thrown in the same cell as the beggar. Driven mad by his imprisonment, the beggar rapes the young woman and then dies. After she is released from jail, the young woman kills Siniestro (nicely done!) and runs into the forest. She is rescued by a kindly couple, Don Alfredo Corledo (Clifford Evans, who narrates the film) and his housekeeper Teresa (Hira Talfrey), and they discover the poor, young girl is pregnant. The baby is born on Christmas Day, which is considered unlucky because it was born out of wedlock. The young woman dies in childbirth, and the couple decides to raise the baby, named Leon, as their own. As the boy grows, it becomes clear that young Leon is troubled, at one point explaining to Don Alfredo that a hunting incident gave him a taste for blood, and he liked it. When some sheep are found slaughtered, a local dog is blamed. Flash-forward a few years later, and Leon is now fully grown...

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