Labyrinth Panned

After seeing MirrorMask, I thought I'd go back to the source: Labyrinth. Both are Jim Henson related stories about rebellious teenage girls falling into a fantasy realm. In Labyrinth, the girl is Jennifer Connelly, a dreamy, fantasy obsessed girl whose father and stepmother leave her to babysit her baby half-brother. When she wishes that the goblins would take him, Goblin King David Bowie takes her up on it.

Yes, this film stars David Bowie as Goblin King, and proves that even the sexiest, coolest man alive can look like a dork given the right material. Even his songs (he has 2 or 3) are excruciating - produced by Arif Mardin, they still sound like the cheesiest 80's disco. He does a "You remind me of a babe" - "What babe?" - "The babe with the power" - "What power?" - "The power of hoo-doo" routine (see The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer). It fails to amuse.

Connelly has 13 hours or something to find her brother before he becomes a goblin forever and she needs to navigate a maze to find him. The look is quite good, with some ingenious hidden faces, cute goblin puppets (if you don't mind muppety goblins), Mike Moschen doing his crystal ball manipulation and an early CGI owl, representing the Goblin King. But the film's message is just a mess: "Don't take things for granted" - OK, I'll just assume that I'm on the right track. "Things aren't what they seem" - so I should trust you because you seem like a nice guy. And so on. The real message seems to be "Don't drop acid while reading Lord of the Rings and listening to David Bowie if you have to babysit. It'll be a bummer."

Terry Jones wrote an early version of the script, and his voice seems to come through in some scenes, but only rarely. Someone must have realized that there should be some tension between Bowie and Connelly, that she was growing up and might be attracted to his perverse glamor, even while she wanted to do right and save her brother. But that doesn't occur - there is no chemistry between them at all. In fact, her tempatation is to turn her back on her brother and return to her childish dolls and fairy dress-up. It just didn't work for me. MirrorMask was better.

This pretty much kills off my plan to re-watch The Dark Crystal. I didn't like it the first time I saw it, and don't feel like giving it another chance.