This film is not cheese. `Flash Gordon’ was cheese (and very tasty cheese, too). This film is a kind of imitation cheese. It’s made from the same substance that goes into those `cheese’ flavoured snacks that have never so much as been in the same room as real cheese in their lives. The substances from which this film was made don’t even have names – at least, not English names, although I presume there is a way of describing them in chemical notation.

I guess what I am trying to express is that everything here leaves a bitter, inorganic aftertaste. `After’ taste, my foot: it makes the very surface of my tongue cringe even as I watch it. I long to be looking at something else. And the score …! James Horner leapt to prominence as a result of it, and this puzzles me. The indescribably vile music that follows the cowboy character around wherever he goes is like a concentrated dose of factory-made raspberry substitute.

No doubt the makers knew that they were making something bad. Does this excuse them? Of course not: if anything it makes their actions worse. Let me, though, knock down one or two of the makeshift defences usually constructed for this type of movie. If is NOT a cheaply made film that nonetheless looks good. As I have intimated several times it looks surpassingly bad. The art direction is terrible. Neither sets nor costumes nor props look like they were worth the effort of constructing – they look deeply ugly, and there is an end of it. The world created is neither interesting nor, in any sense whatsoever, poetic. There is no beauty even behind the scenes TO shine through the lousy production design; so of course none does. I struggle to think of a single redeeming feature. No doubt the actors do their best under trying circumstances, but the same could be said of a man who’s just been thrown into the lion’s den.