The dark crystal movie series#

You're probably going to love the remake. For those who loved the original film, good for you. I don't like the mystery, and the child who misguidedly was allowed to watch the 1982 original will always live in fear of the puppet monsters hiding around any given corner. Netflix's The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance has the benefit of having recognizable voices and even more enhanced visuals, but I can't get past the fact that this level of puppeteering is essentially just witchcraft for people who own Etsy shops. There's something so incredibly terrifying about it that watching it again 23 years later still makes me want to check under my bed and make sure that a Skeksis isn't hiding under there. These puppets are too realistic to be fake, but too fake to be real. If memory serves me correctly, I didn't leave my bed for years after this because I was terrified these monsters lived under it. The voice work sounds menacing across the board, but the real terror comes from the puppets themselves. Jen (Stephen Garlick), raised by the noble race called the Mystics, has been told that he is the last survivor of his own race, the Gelflings. The Dark Crystal was well beyond its time when it comes to its technical aspects, but the problem here is that this film is just too throughly, terrifyingly '80s.

Actually, here's a picture because words can't fully capture it. This is important because at this point, the planet of Thra is currently being ruled by the evil Skeksis, a race of creatures that look a bit like the cast of Dinosaurs, if you put them in the microwave on defrost. To catch you up, Jen, a muppet baby with mouse ears and Carly Rae Jepsen's haircut, is sent out into the world to retrieve a shard of crystal that will restore balance to the universe. The original, branded as a Jim Henson puppet feature, was inappropriately marketed to kids as a children's film.

The dark crystal movie series#

Some parents feel the need to protect their children from the mature nature of violence or sexual content, but heed these words: The real threat is puppets.Īfter Netflix announced a series based on the world of The Dark Crystal, I decided to return to the film because I'd managed to block out that film from my waking memory. That strange criteria is how I was able to sneak by and watch Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal, a 1982 live action puppet film that will haunt the very essence of your being. I was allowed to watch most R-rated films, but not Will & Grace-the world of parental supervision was a Wild West situation in my house. When I was a kid, my parents had very strange rules about what I could and couldn't watch on television.