Archive for the ‘Fantasy/Swords’ Category
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2026
May 31, 1996
DRAGONHEART is directed by Rob Cohen. I have enjoyed several of Cohen’s movies, especially the one before this (DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY), and I’ve had fun joking about his specific brand of weirdo hackiness over the years, but since he has been accused of sexual assault by at least three people including his daughter I won’t joke about him or talk about him anymore. But I will talk about DRAGONHEART.
Sir Bowen (Dennis Quaid, JAWS 3-D, WYATT EARP) is a knight who mentors the Saxon Prince Einon (Lee Oakes), the little shit son of King Freyne (stuntman Peter Hric), who also has another right hand man called Brok (Brian Thompson, ALIEN NATION, MIRACLE MILE, LIFE STINKS). Brok calls Bowen “nursemaid” when he commands him to bring the prince to witness his father’s “noble victory” over rebelling peasants. Bowen tries to teach the kid “the Old Code” so he won’t be a massacring bastard like his no good father, but it really doesn’t take.
During the massacre the dumbass king wanders away from his army to personally set fire to a village he assumes is empty, then the peasants mob him and start to beat the shit out of him but for no reason their leader (Terry O’Neill, CONAN THE DESTROYER) says, “Stop! The battle is out there!” and then everybody leaves? What the fuck. So the prince may have a window to heroically save his father, but instead he pries the giant crown off of his head and slinks away just in time to be clumsily bumped by the peasant leader’s daughter Kara (Sandra Kovacicova), causing a wound that will slowly kill him.
Queen Aislinn (Julie Christie, NASHVILLE) comes up with a plan: carry the little twit to a dragon. They go to a cave to find a dragon who will later be called Draco (voice of Sean Connery between FIRST KNIGHT and THE ROCK). Einon has to swear to “live and rule with mercy” and come to the dragon to “learn the Once-ways.” Then Draco does some kind of magic to give half of his heart to the prince, healing him. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Brian Thompson, Charles Edward Pogue, David Thewlis, Dennis Quaid, Dinah Meyer, Julie Christie, Patrick Read Johnson, Pete Postlethwaite, Phil Tippett, Rob Cohen, Sean Connery, Terry O'Neill
Posted in Reviews, Fantasy/Swords | 2 Comments »
Thursday, May 14th, 2026
I have not revisited MORTAL KOMBAT (2021) since at-home-viewing during pre-vaccine COVID times. My review opens by calling it “a perfectly okay movie,” and that’s my memory of it. Good cast, some fun fatalities, but it was a movie I’d anticipated for some time and it was sadly middle of the road. Its attempt to MCU-ify the Mortal Kombat mythology was not terrible, but not nearly as fun as the brazen, brain-damaged approach of Paul Wonder Stuff Anderson’s 1995 version.
MORTAL KOMBAT II comes from the same director (Simon McQuoid) but a different screenwriter (Jeremy Slater, FANTASTIC FOUR 2015, GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE), and it’s one of those sequels that’s being made with the understanding that nobody liked the first one very much and they gotta convince everyone this is gonna be different. (How many of those are there, even? Off the top of my head I’m only coming up with GI JOE: RETALIATION.)
They were pretty much required by law to center this one on the titular tournament that strangely didn’t get around to happening during part 1. They also made the two most popular game characters not featured last time into the leads, while the previous non-game audience identification dude becomes just a guy who’s on the team already when they get there. You’d never guess from this that part 1 was all about Cole Young (Lewis Tan, FISTFUL OF VENGEANCE) unless you pick up on the line that’s there to explain that his wife and kid won’t be in the movie. I like Tan and feel bad he got sidelined, but what they do to his character (SPOILER: squash his head with a giant hammer like he’s one of Gallagher’s watermelons) is really fuckin funny. He takes one for the team. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Adeline Rudolph, CJ Bloomfield, Desmond Chiam, fighting tournament, Hiroyuki Sanada, Jeremy Slater, Jessica McNamee, Joe Taslim, Josh Lawson, Karl Urban, Lewis Tan, Ludi Lin, Martyn Ford, Max Huang, Mehcad Brooks, Simon McQuoid, Tadanobu Asano
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Martial Arts, Videogame | 15 Comments »
Monday, March 2nd, 2026
BLADES OF THE GUARDIANS is the new movie that’s gonna make me even more confused when I’m trying to remember which OF THE GUARDIANS movie is the owl one and which is the Jack Frost/Easter Bunny one. But I’m willing to face that challenge in exchange for a new movie directed by the now 80-year-old legend of martial arts choreography Yuen Woo-ping. (Holy shit, MASTER Z: THE IP MAN LEGACY was almost 8 years ago?)
(Note: the full on screen title is BLADES OF THE GUARDIANS: WIND RISES IN THE DESERT. Man, I love movies!)
Wu Jing (LEGENDARY ASSASSIN, KILL ZONE 2, WOLF WARRIOR 2) stars as Dao Ma, a bounty hunter and bodyguard for hire who’s also the second most wanted fugitive in the empire. I actually didn’t recognize him for a second because he has long hair and looks a little older and smaller than I think of him as. In a good way, though. He kinda looks like Vampire Hunter D with his all black outfit and wide brimmed hat. He travels with his young nephew Xiao Qi, but it’s not like LONE WOLF AND CUB because he tries to cover the kid’s eyes when there’s violence. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Chen Lijun, Ci Sha, Jet Li, Li Ynxiao, Max Zhang, Nicholas Tse, Sun Yizhou, Tony Leung Kai-fai, Wu Jing, Xing Yu, Yu Rongguang, Yu Shi, Yuen Woo-Ping
Posted in Reviews, Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Fantasy/Swords, Martial Arts | 5 Comments »
Friday, February 27th, 2026
YOUR MONSTER is a 2024 romantic comedy with a fantastical genre concept. Laura (Melissa Barrera, ABIGAIL) is a theater actor who gets dumped by her longtime boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan, CIVIL WAR) while she’s in the hospital getting cancer treatments. She lived with him, so when she gets discharged she goes to stay at her wealthy but absent mother’s house to try to put herself back together. But she doesn’t really get around to that. She mostly eats pies that her mom sends and cries so much that she starts getting regular Kleenex shipments from Amazon.
Then one day she’s startled by a monster (Tommy Dewey, STEP UP REVOLUTION) in the closet. He’s not that fancy of a monster, just kinda like Ron Perlman’s Beast on Beauty and the Beast – gnarly brow, lion-like nose, long hair and beard, hairy hands. He is a monster, but he wears t-shirts and just talks like a dude. When she wakes up from fainting he’s kinda offended she doesn’t remember him. He reminds her she saw him under her bed when she was a kid. And he chased off some dork who tried to kiss her and tried to shame her for not wanting to. I think she remembers.
Anyway, he says the house is his now and she needs to get the fuck out. She cries for a while, so he gives her two weeks. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Caroline Lindy, Edmund Donovan, Kayla Foster, Meghann Fahy, Melissa Barrera, musical theater, Tommy Dewey
Posted in Reviews, Comedy/Laffs, Fantasy/Swords, Romance | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2025
I’m not gonna waste your time pretending you need my opinion whether to see AVATAR: FIRE AND ASH or not. If you don’t like these movies, no, don’t bother. If you do, obviously you’re gonna see it, it’s a new AVATAR! A new James Cameron! You’re not a heathen. And he’s still pretty much undefeated. The streak continues.
If I were to offer viewing advice it would be to avoid HFR (high frame rate) projection at all costs. I recklessly decided to see it at my favorite theater (SIFF downtown, f.k.a. Cinerama) despite my hatred for that format, and as soon as it started my heart just sank. When projected in this format, what seems like the majority of the movie is presented with the ugly screen saver sheen of 60-frames-per-second, but it repeatedly switches back to aesthetically pleasing 24 fps and if you’re like me you sigh with relief until it goes back and then you start grumbling to yourself again. It felt like I spent the whole 197 minutes fighting over the remote control with some guy who wants the motion smoothing on, so my level of concentration was not ideal for maybe the first 45 minutes. I was so taken out of the movie that a James Cameron directed air battle dropped dead in front of me like some Stephen Sommers clatter. Should be illegal. I’m never doing HFR again. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Amanda Silver, Britain Dalton, David Thewlis, Edie Falco, Giovanni Ribisi, Jack Champion, James Cameron, Jemaine Clement, Josh Friedman, Oona Chaplin, Rick Jaffa, Sam Worthington, Shane Salerno, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Zoe Saldana
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 29 Comments »
Wednesday, November 26th, 2025
I was a child of the 1980s, but not of HBO or Showtime. That’s probly why I never saw DEATHSTALKER (1983) until last week. Still, I knew the idea of DEATHSTALKER enough to be excited when I read that it was getting a rebootmakemagining from writer/director Steven Kostanski, the Canadian goofball who gave us PSYCHO GOREMAN, FRANKIE FREAKO, the makeup effects for IN A VIOLENT NATURE, and more. My hopes got even higher when I learned that it would star Daniel Bernhardt, one of the great henchmen of the JOHN WICK era but not usually a leading man since his days headlining the BLOODSPORT sequels. He was fun in the ‘90s but now he’s more distinguished, he has a giant sword, and there’s goblins and magic and shit everywhere. Some things do get better.
I asked around, and it does not seem to be a controversial statement that the remake is way better than the original. I kinda enjoyed catching up with that one, it has more flavor than some of the other CONAN cash-ins, and Lana Clarkson is in it pre BARBARIAN QUEEN, but I’ve already pretty much forgotten it. People seem to be fonder of DEATHSTALKER II, which is played for intentional laughs (but also a little chintzier). I’d say Kostanski’s is way better than both, and kind of pitched in the middle of them tonally. It definitely has some great jokes in it but overall seems to be sincere in its goal of having a great time with the swords and the sorcery. It’s a swordablast. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christina Orjalo, Daniel Bernhardt, good remakes, Nina Bergman, Patton Oswalt, Slash, Steven Kostanski
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords | 10 Comments »
Wednesday, November 19th, 2025
Okay, I’m gonna be up front about this: RED SONJA (2025) is a movie that I kinda liked, but it took some effort. It’s an underdog movie, you kinda gotta be rooting for it to work, I don’t know if it’s gonna win over anybody standing there with their arms folded. But maybe I’m wrong. It has a sincerity to it. It doesn’t seem self conscious. That can go a long way.
It’s set in the land of Hyrkania during the Hyborian Age. When Sonja (Matilda Lutz from the excellent Coralie Fargeat movie REVENGE) was a child her village was raided and she fled. (Unlike in some of the ’80s barbarian movies we don’t have to specify what horrible things the raiders did.) Since then somehow she became a hell of a fighter and lives tribeless in the forest, searching for her people. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: M.J. Bassett, Martyn Ford, Matilda Lutz, Michael Bisping, Rhona Mitra, Robert E. Howard, Robert Sheehan, Tasha Huo, Wallis Day
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords | 6 Comments »
Friday, October 31st, 2025
There was a time when I was 14 years old and Clive Barker’s NIGHTBREED was my favorite movie. Maybe that was too soon to move on from BATMAN, or maybe they were both my favorite movie. They blew my brain open in a similar way, and come to think of it they have more in common than just baroque, enthralling music by Danny Elfman (his ninth and tenth film scores). Both are ambitious early films from idiosyncratic directors who are also visual artists, who are breaking into a larger budget range than their previous work but getting even wilder than before. Both are arguably a little stiff with the traditional action expected of a blockbuster, but it doesn’t even register much because they’re so overflowing with visual imagination and invention that they create their own, very specific worlds. And though both were intended as mainstream event movies, at their heart they’re by, for, and about misfits and weirdos.
NIGHTBREED, unfortunately, was treated like a misfit and weirdo itself. It was produced by Morgan Creek (YOUNG GUNS, ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES) and distributed by 20th Century Fox (whose other releases that year included DIE HARD 2, PREDATOR 2 and HOME ALONE), but they didn’t know what to do with it. Barker was forced to make compromises that were drastic, though not catastrophic in my opinion (or I would never have loved it so much). Other than changing from the book’s title Cabal (I agree with that), they really didn’t know how to market it to the normies, though they did okay with nerds. I still cling dearly to autographed comic books and a “Nightbreed Chronicles” paperback with portraits and bios of the movie’s Star-Wars-esque collection of background creatures. Though a triumph in the minds of myself and my best friend at the time, it was a financial flop and novelist turned director Barker never even wrote the next book in the proposed trilogy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anne Bobby, Clive Barker, Craig Sheffer, Danny Elfman, David Cronenberg, Doug Bradley, Hugh Quarshie, John Agar, Oliver Parker
Posted in Reviews, Fantasy/Swords, Horror, Monster | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, October 1st, 2025
My recent revisit of THE BROTHERS GRIMM (2005) pushed me to finally get around to seeing HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS (2013). I had wondered whether they were kind of in the same genre and yeah, turns out they’re more similar than I even guessed. Just like Gilliam’s movie this one starts out with a fairy tale inspired childhood flashback, then tells the story of a pair of traveling supernatural expert siblings hired to help a small town where the children have gone missing. Both movies even have Peter Stormare (GET THE GRINGO) as a cartoonish bad guy (this time he’s the sheriff who gets a chunk of his nose bit off by Gretel).
The major distinction is that they’re not con artists or skeptics – as the title suggests, Hansel (Jeremy Renner immediately following a run of THE TOWN, GHOST PROTOCOL, THE AVENGERS and THE BOURNE LEGACY) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton, CLASH OF THE TITANS) grew up to become witch hunters, and this being a twenty-teens studio movie that means they wear cool leather outfits, have fancy steam punk shotguns and crossbows, do lots of slo-mo spins and flips and what not. Yes, that kind of sounds like a parody movie-within-a-movie meant to satirize Hollywood excess (like something from LAST ACTION HERO, or the Max Landis action version of Huckleberry Finn from the pilot of Jean-Claude Van Johnson). Fortunately writer/director Tommy Wirkola (DEAD SNOW, VIOLENT NIGHT) takes the ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER route of keeping a straight face and trying to make it cool instead of giving in to the temptation to prove to the audience that he’s in on the joke. I was worried for a second because there’s a joke at the beginning about drawings of missing children on milk bottles, but that was a one time occurrence. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alice Krige, Brothers Grimm, David Leitch, Derek Mears, Famke Janssen, Fiona O'Shaugnessy, Gemma Arterton, Ingrid Bolso Berdal, Jeremy Renner, Osgood Perkins, Peter Stormare, Robin Atkin Downes, Sam Hargrave, Samuel Leakey, Sophia Lillis, Thomas Mann, Tommy Wirkola, Zoe Bell
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Horror | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, September 10th, 2025
August 26, 2005
THE BROTHERS GRIMM is one of the types of movies these summer retrospectives were made for: it was kind of a big deal at the time (because of who directed it), I’ve barely heard anyone talk about it since, and I’ve never really considered revisiting it before, so doing so becomes a weird sort of time travel. Something like BATMAN BEGINS or WAR OF THE WORLDS has stayed in my brain and in the culture, so it’s ongoing. I have to put myself in a certain mindspace to remember what it felt like at the time. But does THE BROTHERS GRIMM even exist outside of the year 2005? I don’t know, I’d have to see more evidence.
It was an intersection of a bunch of different things happening in that moment. Terry Gilliam was a respected, still-we-hoped working director for people who loved film. Dimension Films was dominant and this was their most expensive film ever. Hollywood still saw screenwriter Ehren Kruger (SCREAM 3, REINDEER GAMES, THE RING, THE SKELETON KEY) as an exciting new voice, and there was a bidding war for this spec script. When you think about it this is exactly the kind of high concept screenplay that always ends up on The Black List, which started that year, so it just missed it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ehren Kruger, fairy tales, Heath Ledger, Jonathan Pryce, Julian Bleach, Lena Headey, Matt Damon, Monica Bellucci, Peter Stormare, Terry Gilliam
Posted in Reviews, Fantasy/Swords | 13 Comments »
