Reviews
Are certain types of settings bad ideas?
Of course they are. You know that movies about Mars are likely to be bad, that werewolf movies generally suck and that vampire movies also do. I don't know what the problem with King Arthur is, not that I'm a big fan, but King Arthur movies also tend to be extremely disappointing. (And why do authors have a desire to revisit ol' Camelot over and over again?).
I'm saying this because I can't really think of a single decent Arthurian movie. I've seen terrible miniseries - one with a lot of Avalon mumbo-jumbo, one with Sam Neill as Merlin (dear lord, it was awful). There is a Whoopi Goldberg movie of time travel into Camelot, I don't think I managed to endure that one. You have John Boorman's Carmina Burana-enriched Excalibur, which is so pretentious it is hilarious, there's that terrible romantic one with Sean Connery and - well, it is all bad. I don't even think Monty Python's Holy Grail is very funny except for a few moments. It would be funnier as a 30-minute episode. Then we've recently has had movies where Arthur is Roman, King Arthur, where we honorable real Germanians as always are stuck with beards and axes and barbaric behaviour and lose even though we really won. It's some sort of Celto-sniveling reenactment where the good guys won (not us). Pitiful. I'd like to see a movie where noble Germanians mash decadent lead-poisoned Romans and insane druid-following face-painted baby-sacrificing Celts.
What, I'm ranting?
The Last Legion (DVD)
This is a lower-budget Dino Laurentiis version of King Arthur. You know, King Arthur was really Roman, sort of. I'd leave it up to you to find other examples of how certain people believe famous persons are "really" something else. I think it mainly is shot in Slovakia.
Set in about 470AD (the movie seemingly misses the dates a bit), the Roman Empire is falling and the crude, pelt-wearing, long-haired Goths under Odoacer are coming. Noble kid-emperor Romulus, assisted by white-robed staff-wielding Ben Kingsley (guess who he's supposed to be), is deported to a prison island where he finds Caesar's sword (guess which sword that really is), and he of course is Caesar's last descendant, bound to refound his noble dynasty in distant Britannia where the still-loyal Ninth Legion is holding out. (Correct me here, historians, but didn't the Romans abandon Britannia before the Western half fell?). Helping young Romulus is a noble Roman commander, a dark-skinned mighty warrior, and an Indian warrior with a scissors katar. She's in service to the other Emperor, the one in Constantinople, who probably imported lots of Keralan sword maidens for the royal bodyguard.
This is not a good movie. If we somewhat put the historical questionables aside, it still isn't a good movie. While I must admit that I like the idea of pretty Indian girls with katars and curved swords spicing up Roman boredom, the movie doesn't have much else noteworthy. It looks like a poor version of something between The Lord of The Rings and Gladiator, and there's absolutely nothing wanting you to care for a second about the characters. The Arthurian elements are bleedingly obvious and suitably corny (I guess they have to be, given the status of other Arthurian films), the fights aren't that interesting and for a supposedly epic story the movie is far too short, and there's a definite shortage of cool SFX and mass battle scenes. In short, the movie tries to handle a style it doesn't have the budget for, the actors don't do much to lift it and the subgenre is doomed to mediocrity anyway. The movie should have dropped the epic junk and just focussed on being a light Late Roman Swordfight Adventure.
Another mediocre genre is, you know, the people with fangs.
Rise (DVD)
Yeah, vampires. I'm searching for a good vampire movie, probably a lost cause (is 30 Days of Night okay? Well, I'll check it out). In this one, which is sort of more horror than action but still not that horror-ish, Lucy Liu becomes a vampire and goes killing other vampires, after a while aided by Michael Chiklis (playing a tough cop, what else) whose daughter has been taken by the evil ones. Miss Liu hunts with some sort of hand crossbow and has been trained by another sort of master guy, and it feels like a lot of the film doesn't make sense at all, like if it was a pilot for a TV series.
While there is a certain amount of blood, gore and nudity and the producers obviously try to make the movie look scary and unpleasant, in an age of such things as Saw IV it still isn't gory enough to be notable and it definitely isn't scary enough, plus there isn't enough action to really put it in the action-vampire subcategory, and the psych stuff isn't quite up to the psych-horror versions either. The secret training master stuff feels completely unnecessary, and well, despite ms Liu being a decent actress, this is pretty darn unremarkable and doesn't hold together that well. Plusses for a certain lack of fangs and glowing eyes, though.
Of course they are. You know that movies about Mars are likely to be bad, that werewolf movies generally suck and that vampire movies also do. I don't know what the problem with King Arthur is, not that I'm a big fan, but King Arthur movies also tend to be extremely disappointing. (And why do authors have a desire to revisit ol' Camelot over and over again?).
I'm saying this because I can't really think of a single decent Arthurian movie. I've seen terrible miniseries - one with a lot of Avalon mumbo-jumbo, one with Sam Neill as Merlin (dear lord, it was awful). There is a Whoopi Goldberg movie of time travel into Camelot, I don't think I managed to endure that one. You have John Boorman's Carmina Burana-enriched Excalibur, which is so pretentious it is hilarious, there's that terrible romantic one with Sean Connery and - well, it is all bad. I don't even think Monty Python's Holy Grail is very funny except for a few moments. It would be funnier as a 30-minute episode. Then we've recently has had movies where Arthur is Roman, King Arthur, where we honorable real Germanians as always are stuck with beards and axes and barbaric behaviour and lose even though we really won. It's some sort of Celto-sniveling reenactment where the good guys won (not us). Pitiful. I'd like to see a movie where noble Germanians mash decadent lead-poisoned Romans and insane druid-following face-painted baby-sacrificing Celts.
What, I'm ranting?
The Last Legion (DVD)
This is a lower-budget Dino Laurentiis version of King Arthur. You know, King Arthur was really Roman, sort of. I'd leave it up to you to find other examples of how certain people believe famous persons are "really" something else. I think it mainly is shot in Slovakia.
Set in about 470AD (the movie seemingly misses the dates a bit), the Roman Empire is falling and the crude, pelt-wearing, long-haired Goths under Odoacer are coming. Noble kid-emperor Romulus, assisted by white-robed staff-wielding Ben Kingsley (guess who he's supposed to be), is deported to a prison island where he finds Caesar's sword (guess which sword that really is), and he of course is Caesar's last descendant, bound to refound his noble dynasty in distant Britannia where the still-loyal Ninth Legion is holding out. (Correct me here, historians, but didn't the Romans abandon Britannia before the Western half fell?). Helping young Romulus is a noble Roman commander, a dark-skinned mighty warrior, and an Indian warrior with a scissors katar. She's in service to the other Emperor, the one in Constantinople, who probably imported lots of Keralan sword maidens for the royal bodyguard.
This is not a good movie. If we somewhat put the historical questionables aside, it still isn't a good movie. While I must admit that I like the idea of pretty Indian girls with katars and curved swords spicing up Roman boredom, the movie doesn't have much else noteworthy. It looks like a poor version of something between The Lord of The Rings and Gladiator, and there's absolutely nothing wanting you to care for a second about the characters. The Arthurian elements are bleedingly obvious and suitably corny (I guess they have to be, given the status of other Arthurian films), the fights aren't that interesting and for a supposedly epic story the movie is far too short, and there's a definite shortage of cool SFX and mass battle scenes. In short, the movie tries to handle a style it doesn't have the budget for, the actors don't do much to lift it and the subgenre is doomed to mediocrity anyway. The movie should have dropped the epic junk and just focussed on being a light Late Roman Swordfight Adventure.
Another mediocre genre is, you know, the people with fangs.
Rise (DVD)
Yeah, vampires. I'm searching for a good vampire movie, probably a lost cause (is 30 Days of Night okay? Well, I'll check it out). In this one, which is sort of more horror than action but still not that horror-ish, Lucy Liu becomes a vampire and goes killing other vampires, after a while aided by Michael Chiklis (playing a tough cop, what else) whose daughter has been taken by the evil ones. Miss Liu hunts with some sort of hand crossbow and has been trained by another sort of master guy, and it feels like a lot of the film doesn't make sense at all, like if it was a pilot for a TV series.
While there is a certain amount of blood, gore and nudity and the producers obviously try to make the movie look scary and unpleasant, in an age of such things as Saw IV it still isn't gory enough to be notable and it definitely isn't scary enough, plus there isn't enough action to really put it in the action-vampire subcategory, and the psych stuff isn't quite up to the psych-horror versions either. The secret training master stuff feels completely unnecessary, and well, despite ms Liu being a decent actress, this is pretty darn unremarkable and doesn't hold together that well. Plusses for a certain lack of fangs and glowing eyes, though.