Right out of the Muppets and into the Labyrinth… I am very glad I watched this movie before I dug into that project, because I think I would have rage quit this whole thing. This list has a Jim Henson bias, which is semi-understandable, but like… 8 movies? Out of 100? There aren’t better musical movies than these?
Family Video rents most old movies for like .50, but because of the world slowly ending, the one by my house was closed and I was forced to pay $3.99 to stream Labyrinth. It was about $3.49 too much. I don’t understand how Jim Henson, George Lucas, Terry Jones, and David Bowie could get together and make such a mediocre film. Like, honestly, the entire time I just wanted the movie to end so I could watch Flight of the Conchords and laugh at some truly ridiculous Bowie-related content.
A self-involved teenage girl named Sarah is politely asked by her stepmother to babysit her little brother. Sarah decides to take her angst out on a literal infant by offering him up to a goblin king, freeing up her time so she can wander the streets reciting dialogue from a play to herself, which is super important, guys, there’s no way she could have done that in her own home.
Jareth, the Goblin King, who is also David Bowie, is in love (!?) with 15-year-old Jennifer Connelly, and shows up to steal her little brother, leaving a glitter trail behind him. Sarah decides suddenly she wants the burden of being an older sister, and follows him to the Goblin City to get the kid back.
She is immediately greeted by Hoggle, a puppet that simultaneously looks like the animatronic tree trolls in Maelstrom and Mel Brooks dressed up like Yogurt.
He tells her the only way she can get to the castle of the Goblin King is to first make her way through the Labyrinth. In an effort to save money on sets, they have Sarah run the same glitter herpes infected stretch of it for 5 minutes, complaining it goes on forever, without having the thought she could use any of the trees to climb up the wall and jump over it. An actual adorable worm takes pity on her and tells her to walk through the wall, because he’s sick of seeing her pace back and forth. Sarah learns that everything in the Labyrinth is not as it seems.
David Bowie, observing how slowly Sarah is making her way through the maze, does a preemptive “I’ve stolen a child to raise for nefarious purposes and there’s no way she’s going to get him back” celebration dance.
I discovered Sting was Jim Henson’s first pick for Jareth (presumably because he saw how excellent his acting was in Dune) but his son talked him into approaching David Bowie for the project. I would give anything to know what that pitch conversation was like.
“Now, picture this… you are a goblin king, and you’re going to steal a kid. The great majority of the movie you’ll either be trying to entertain an infant, lust after a teenager, or dance with creepy fucking puppets. Also, we need you to write all the songs. We cool?”
I should probably take this moment to mention that I’m not a huge David Bowie fan (I know, I know… it’s terrible), so it’s hard for me to consider how appealing these songs are to those who like his type of synth-pop. They fit the mood of the film, but I don’t feel like they add anything particularly special to the narrative. Labyrinth easily could have not been a musical and nothing would have been lost.
Anyway, Sarah continues to truck her way though the maze and runs into Alice in Wonderland-style talking playing cards that ask her to pick a door, and then assist her in falling through a rabbit hole. She is accosted by nightmare-fuel hand faces that ask if she wants to be molested up out of the pit, or down into it.
She decides to go farther down into hell, where she runs into Hoggle and convinces him to help her get through the maze in exchange for a fancy plastic bracelet. It’s about around this time where Jareth intervenes to grab some constructive criticism about her experience.
Not very much, David. Not very much.
Being frustrated with her answer, he sics the cleaners on Sarah and Hoggle, which is a drill driven by two guys on a bicycle. After avoiding certain death, they are greeted by a series of verbally abusive rock faces, who apologize for just doing their job.
Here’s the thing about this movie – The sets and the puppets are awesome (although super fucking creepy), and they are used for some really great visual gags. But all the craftsmanship is crushed under the weight of a truly unremarkable, low-stakes story. I tried to write this summary for over a week, and every time I tried, I got bogged down trying to come up with what the fuck I’m going to say. The plot is like if Monty Python and the Holy Grail and every Disney movie fairy tale cliché had a puppet baby, and I’m just bored. Let’s fast forward through the rest of the Labyrinth, shall we?
Hoggle and Sarah run into a large dog-looking thing named Ludo (not Pluto), who is being attacked by a bunch of things that look like the naked mole rat anti-christ from South Park’s Woodland Critter Christmas. They save him, work their way through another set of doors, listen to a musical number by a group of demonic Crash Bandicoots, and trudge through a bad smelling swamp. They are then introduced to the only cute thing in the entire movie, a fox-looking puss-in-boots that pulls a Gandalf and a black knight.
Sarah convinces Sir Didymus and his big Hammerlock energy to help them reach the castle, and he joins their group. She then gets poisoned and trapped in a dream bubble, where she wears a gown that looks like it would melt if exposed to an open flame and lusts after a grown-ass man who yanked her brother out the window like the Lindbergh baby.
She escapes from the dream, reunites with her party, and storms the castle. They are immediately confronted by the coolest monster ever to be made out of a door, and Hoggle Shinji’s his way into the mecha and takes it down from the inside.
Seriously, this, and the battle that ensues afterward, is peak Jim Henson. From Ludo opening up the wall to enter the house, to the exploding cannon, to the goblins going down like bowling pins… I was increasingly impressed by the work and care that clearly went into creating these scenes. If only the rest of the movie were this captivating.
Sarah finally confronts Jareth in the castle, and the big climax of the movie is… David Bowie whining that Sarah is ungrateful that he stole and babysat her brother for a few hours, while she runs through an M.C. Escher painting to grab Toby. No, seriously.
Sarah jumps out of the rabbit hole and returns back to her house to find Toby in his crib. She celebrates by throwing a party with all the puppets in her bedroom, while Jareth turns into an owl and buggers off to make some other teenager walk through a maze for 2 hours. Hot.
Now to prepare myself for some 1950s Baltimore camp, because Cry-Baby is next.