A Python was directing. A Python was starring. It was set in the Middle Ages, arriving right on the heels of Holy Grail. Audiences settled in expecting more coconut-clopping silliness. It was not a Monty Python movie.

JABBERWOCKY (1977) was Terry Gilliam's first film as a director on his own, out from under the troupe for the first time. He announced the break in the opening scene, by having the monster kill Terry Jones, the man he had just co-directed Holy Grail with. Then he showed everyone what he actually wanted to make.

The filthiest, most plague-ridden, mud-caked vision of the Middle Ages ever put on film, following a dim barrel-maker's apprentice named Dennis who bumbles his way into a dragon hunt he wants no part of.

It is grotesque and uneven and often astonishing, and it is where the entire Gilliam universe is born: the little man ground up by absurd systems, the Bruegel squalor, the dread and wonder that would become Time Bandits and Brazil.