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Welcome Back! Today's Friday Hideaway Film Fest entry is 1980's Flash Gordon. It is a glorious cheesy mess of a movie with an over the top soundtrack by Queen and an international cast including Timothy Dalton who would go on to play Agent 007, James Bond, within double-oh-seven years.
The movie is written and acted in the same intentionally campy style as the "Batman" television series of the Sixties. This was not a coincidence as the screenwriter, Lorenzo Semple Jr., also wrote several episodes of the show. HERC is a fan of "Batman" and watches Flash Gordon about once a month. It was a big budgeted film that failed to recoup it's money at the box-office but has since been reissued countless times on every conceivable video format including it's latest release on blu-ray. The film has been well preserved and the high definition transfer is a brilliant one preserving the rich color pallette. HERC recommends this movie if you like so bad they're good sci-fi movies.
Queen's soundtrack is bombastic and often distracting with Brian May reeling off riffs as needed. It remains the least listened to Queen album in HERC's collection. The single "Flash" was edited from "Flash's Theme" on the soundtrack album. After seeing the movie, the song quickly became HERC's favorite and when he learned it wasn't on the soundtrack in the same version as he was hearing on the radio, he bought Queen's Greatest Hits album expressly for that song.
When the soundtrack album was reissued as part of the band's 20th Anniversary campaign on Hollywood Records, the included bonus track was a remix of "Flash's Theme" credited to "Mista Lawnge, 9.5" which, like most of the remixes, is widely reviled by Queen fans. HERC is a fan of the band AND the remixes. He actually spent a considerable amount of time hunting down the announced disc of Queen: The BASIC Bootlegs (Hollywood BASIC was the short-lived hip-hop division of Hollywood Records) but was disappointed to find out it was belatedly issued almost eight years later as a promo only CD-R. HERC eventually acquired those remixes, nuff said.
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