Time Bandits (1981)

I saw this movie when I was a small child and I'm pretty sure I shouldn't have.  I remembered nothing about it except that it terrified me and involved closets.  For years I thought it was just the product of my febrile imagination.  That or my parents were secretly lacing my food with opium.

This is an early work from Terry Gilliam and I can sort of see it as the logical beginning to a career culminating in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.  That could be because I am a strange and terrible person.

It's full of cameos (they're too short to be called roles) by famous faces including Sean Connery, Ian Holm, and Shelley Duvall.  John Cleese and Micheal Palin help out their Monty Python pal as Robin Hood and a guy with erectile dysfunction, respectively.

Plot?  You want plot?  Okay, but you asked for it...

Kevin is a little British kid who likes history.  His parents are materialistic and obsessed with a TV show hosted by (a ridiculously skinny) Jim Broadbent.  One night, just as he's about to fall asleep, a band of dwarves jump out of his closet and begin to assault him.  They are pursued by a giant glowing head that demands they return a map.  They run and drag Kevin with them through the wall of his room and into the Napoleonic War. 

After being a bit shaken up, Kevin learns that the dwarves used to work for the Supreme Being as handymen but had been demoted to patching up holes in time.  They decided that it would be easier to use the holes to pop in and rob famous historical people.  This does not go as easily as you might think since the dwarves didn't do any fucking research and it's left to Kevin to point out that Robin Hood's whole schtick involves giving away treasure, for instance.

Also, as with most objects of power, the forces of Evil totally want the star-map that shows the location of all the holes.  Evil, by the way, is the bad guy's name.  Nothing else, just Evil.  He manages to con the dwarves into bringing the map to his place, called the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness.  You gotta call 'em like you see 'em, I guess.  So everybody ends up getting caught and the ten-year-old has to come up with a plan to get the hell out and rescue the map before Evil destroys all of recorded history.

Normally, I don't like to give away the ending but this one is so fucked up I feel like you should go ahead and know about it so you can't come back to me later like "What the eff, Lucy?"  I will simply say "I told you so, jackass.  You made that bed and now you get to sleep in it."

So, Kevin decides that all the dwarves should jump in a big time-hole and come back with whatever help they can find while he and one other guy distract Evil and grab the map.  They leave him the most retarded of the crew because why would he need competent help while going up against someone who is only named Evil.  Psh.  He can handle it.

Then he gets captured by ghouls.
  This is a fan-made costume.  The ones in the movie are even freakier, if you can imagine.

And they screech.

The dwarves show up with Greek archers, cowboys, knights, an M1A1 Abrams tank, and some sort of laser thing from the future.  This amounts to jack shit since Evil whips everyone's ass, collapsing a column onto and killing one of the dwarves.  Just as he's about to like eat everyone's souls and shit, the Supreme Being shows up and explodes him.  Yes, it's a literal Deus ex Machina ending.  It would be fittingly hilarious if the Supreme Being wasn't just as much of a dick as the evil guy.  First thing he does is tell all the dwarves that he wants all this shit cleaned up and puts them to work.  He re-animates the dead one, not because it's the right thing to do but because he hates slackers.  Then he sends Kevin home because he wasn't supposed to be there anyway, over the kid's objections because he notices that a piece of exploded Evil has started smoking.

Kevin wakes up to find that the smoke is because his fucking house is on fire.  He gets rescued by Sean Connery (and let's face it, who wouldn't want that?) and taken out to his parents...who don't even notice because they're too busy arguing over what appliances they should have saved.  One of the firemen says "This is what did it" and hands them a still-smoking toaster oven.  They open the oven and Kevin recognizes the black chunk inside as being the exploded bit of Evil.  He screams at his parents not to touch it, so of course they do.  Boom.  Twin piles of ash.

Roll end credits.

ARE YOU SHITTING ME, MOVIE?!  You're just going to leave your protagonist a homeless orphan?  Fucking seriously?!  I don't care what jaunty little tune George Harrison wrote for your ending, you just left a pre-teen to starve.  Fuck you, Time Bandits!  And the motherfucking horse you rode out of the wardrobe!