JABBERWOCKY (1977)
Article 4001 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-10-2012
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Featuring Michael Palin, Harry H. Corbett, John Le Mesurier
Country: UK
What it is: Comic adventure fantasy

A hapless cooper, forced to leave his small village in the hopes of making it in the city, becomes embroiled in a quest to slay and defeat a hideous monster.

I looked through the trivia section for this movie on IMDB before I started writing this review, and I discovered one piece of information that explains a lot; apparently, the movie was shot with such a low budget that many of the scenes had to be shot in a single take. This explains to me why much of the movie seems messy and muddled and why some of the humor falls flat, and rather than faulting director Terry Gilliam (who was here engaging in his first solo directorial effort of a full-length motion picture) for the mess, I actually end up admiring that he kept it together as well as he did. There are touches that I’ve come to expect from Gilliam, such as that his portrayal of the dark ages was about as squalid as he could make it, and that he has a real flair for the visual sense of dark fantasy, and, to be truthful, the actual monster was much better than I expected it to be, given the film’s budget. Still, there are problems with the script (which he co-wrote); the first half is something of an aimless mess, and the often crude humor often lacks the intelligent panache I’d expect from a member of Monty Python. Nonetheless, the second half works much better, and overall, I was satisfied with the movie. Outside of Michael Palin in the lead role, other Pythons that show up include cameos by Terry Jones and Gilliam himself. The movie is based, of course, on the poem by Lewis Carroll. Gilliam is actually one of the few directors who I think might have actually done a worthy job of bringing Carroll’s Alice books to cinematic life, but this is probably about as close as we’re going to get.