Critics reviews

What’s perhaps most marvelous about Jabberwocky is how undeniably troubling its depiction of the medieval period is... The tone feels like a strange mix of the droll reverence seen in Pasolini’s Life Trilogy mixed with the untoward violence and various body functions bluntly depicted in Paul Verhoeven’s Flesh+Blood (1985).

Indifferently paced as it is, Jabberwocky shows a ton of promise, which was manifested further in Gilliam's next three films, the galloping Time Bandits, the masterful Brazil, and the curiously beautiful The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Nice bits here and there don't amount to a good movie: like the portmanteau words in Lewis Carroll's poem, there's just far too much packed together for anything to make proper sense.

Much of the film’s humor stems from the studied incongruity between its broadly cartoonish and almost verité depictions of medieval life. Beneath the buffoonery, the trenchant (and still pertinent) script by Gilliam and Charles Alverson scores satirical points off the benefits of fearmongering, the insolence of political office, and the ascendency of assembly-line mass production over smaller-scale economies based on a sense of craftsmanship.

The magical-realist twist of Jabberwocky is simple: follow the arc of classic fairy tales and fantasies through the extraordinary filth and torment of actually living during those periods in history. Gilliam steps through the mirror and a familiar room is transformed into a foreign and disturbing place, where everything happens as prophecy dictates but has the opposite of the presumed effect.

A beautifully crazed landmark in British cinema... a riotous tale of monsters, true love and medieval manners. Sometimes seen as a companion to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Jabberwocky is pure, undiluted Gilliam.

Jabberwocky is a work still at the experimental stage and, like its monster, it only just hangs together. There are some problems with pacing and not all the jokes work, but it's easy to feel for Palin's hapless hero, and, ugly as it is, the world we encounter within it is visually stunning. A must for all Gilliam fans.

The frisson (cinematographic majesty versus beastly tomfoolery) is derived from Holy Grail: Gilliam's unveiling of the titular dragon-parrot is a fine example of what Orson Welles called "taking the mickey out of it," assorted jests (out of Duck Soup, Chimes at Midnight, Shoot the Piano Player) are added en route to the thematic culmination of The Fisher King.

The cinematography in Jabberwocky (first released in 1977 and now at Film Forum in a new print) is at times incongruously lovely—dusty beams of sunshine alighting on the slithy toves—but the film itself is thinly conceived, except in the area of bodily misfunction. It plays like the murky B side to the immortal Gilliam-Jones epic Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Jabberwocky looks like the Python movie that never was, sharing the same muddy, medieval setting as the Holy Grail, several cast members and even its unique surreal sense of humour. Except here, Gilliam overdoses on violence, gore and mud, and you wonder if the director wanted to make a totally different film but played it safe by keeping a lot of the Python influences.

The wry, grotesque wit doesn't sustain the film, though there are a few fine moments in the gloom. More peculiar than funny.

It's a monster film with heart, a movie romance with bite, a costume picture without zippers, and a comedy with more blood and gore than Sam Peckinpah would dare use to dramatize the decline and fall of the entire West... The performances are fine, but even more remarkable for a comedy of this sort are Roy Smith's stylish production design and the camera work of Terry Bedford. "Jabberwocky" is very funny, yet it looks like an epic.