Wow...I watched this really in lieu of deciding to finally check out a sci-fi channel movie of the week, in this case featuring Amber Benson from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The made-for-TV slew of Saturday night movies are never picks of the litter, matter of fact not even well-made in any respect. But Gryphon, my non-existent God (which you may feel is non-existent if you believe it after seeing this), what a load of tripe! It's a medieval hodge-podge of total clichés and story arcs that obviously were thrown together by the five or six or seven writers who decided to pound this out over pizza and beers one night. Then again, maybe they KNEW that they were making a really stupid movie. But this raises the bar for stupidity, like a litmus test for often incoherent strands of story and character, and for wretched CGI. I'm not expecting Peter Jackson here, but this is enough to send me back to my psychiatrist for a double session of "the good old days of models and puppets."
Actually, what ended up keeping me glued to my seat (in a manner of total irony) was the CGI Gryphon itself. Created by watercolor or paint by number or Mario Paint or all of the above, it's controlled by a sinister sorcerer who wants to use it to create chaos in the kingdom. The gryphon flies about with total abandon of any logic, and it occasionally- in the midst of people trying to KILL IT- comes down to just preen itself in front of its foes. It sometimes kills people too, but often just acts like the most constant, reliable thing about the movie- it's so laughably bad it hurts the mind and diminishes the soul to something comparable to a slug, and makes one pine for a random insurance commercial. As the Gryphon continues as a threat, we're given a quest, a romance between warrior man and woman (the woman Benson, who can't even read her s****y dialog competently enough with her posturing and fake toughness) from the same descended vein, and a random possible battle that might ensue if a) the gryphon and/or sorcerer gets their way, or b) if there's somehow a tiny boost in the budget by the end of filming. And by the time the climax comes around, me and my friends somehow were not only compelled to keep on watching (just to see how low it could go limbo style), but to keep on gleefully- if painfully- yelling at the screen as the sorcerer used his powers in very random, selective measure, and kept his nutty little bird somewhere else by contrivance.
I know I shouldn't be TOO hard on Gryphon, as I'm sure some of the intentions behind it were decent enough. But the execution is just so lacking in every department: special/visual effects (well, in a sense, the visual effects are "special"), proper casting (even the actor playing the sorcerer is like ham left out of the fridge), dialog, cinematography, message, or romance. Even the action is sloppily filmed a lot of the time by lackey Andrew Prowse, who once in a while made me wonder if the soul of Uwe Boll slipped into his own. It simply leaves a residue that wont go away very soon after, even with its own likely self-knowledge of its many flaws. It was made on a quick buck, and for all its exploitive gestures, hopefully most, if not all, of the regular sci-fi movie channel viewers will recognize it as a new standard which other movies in its wake may not live up to even if they try (or lack trying). It's simply one of the very worst made-for-TV movies I've ever seen...albeit with a hell of a goofing-on-it time all the way.
