The Mystical Adventures of Billy Owens

My fourth grade daughter found home-made videos on Youtube. In these videos, kids off camera hold various Barbie dolls and "act" out a "drama" they made up themselves. In all honesty, these Youtube videos are vastly more entertaining, better-acted and more professionally made than this so-called film was. This film looks like it was made by a couple of fifth-graders on a computer. The acting is terrible, the continuity is non-existent, the plot meandering and lacking anything of interest, the characters are shallow and one dimensional, the camera work is amateurish and best of all, it is a blatant rip-off of the Harry Potter franchise. This film comes complete with a boy wizard, his obnoxiously precocious female know-it-all friend, and his dull best bud. There's even a bully with blond hair.

If you are looking for a film worth watching, this is not the one. I would not even characterize this as a B movie; D or F seems more appropriate to me.

If you're the kind of person that loves to watch terrible movies, this is a great one to get. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I swear it was made with iMovie..

You can hear the audio popping in and out, terrible sparkle effects used frequently in the movie, really horrible acting, poor sound quality in general, stupid characters, incoherent plot, and the camera angles are trash. Half the time it's a 2 minute camera view with no transitions. At times you can't see the face of who's talking. Awkward dialog... it's all so great. I'm so happy people decided to put time and effort into this trash...

It's unbelievably horrid and I enjoyed every second of it. It rivals Troll 2 in my book.

It's hard to make a fun, enjoyable "bad" movie. I've seen a wide selection of b-movies, cheesy plots/writing, stiff acting, cheap effects. Some are good fun to watch. Others are painful to force yourself through without MST3K. This is one of the fun ones, filled with laughable content and easy to watch without outside riffing, one reason I gave this 3 stars.

The plot moves along nicely enough, filled with bad lines (i.e. "The strongest bond between friends is friendship"), stagnant acting from most, and topped off with Roddy Piper's accent - a mash-up of Tom Waits and Christian Bale's "Batman" voice.

Any fan of b-movies should add this to their must-see as a blatant Harry Potter knock-off with parts Narnia, parts Goonies, and parts SyFy Thor with extra cheese.

But it was actually pretty ok. I mean is it a shame less harry potter rip off? Yes. But is it funny when its not supposed to be? Yes. Well it was bad but not that bad.

You like magic? Imagine a bored parent who writes a school play and then decides to film it with random people in their neighborhood reciting a few lines, followed by cheap effects they threw in on their PC at home. That's about the level of magic here.

When I looked this "movie" up, I was astonished to see that there is a sequel. However, considering that it appeared to have been made for free, then they shouldn't have had a hard time coming up with the money for another one. What's equally disturbing is the fact that it took no less than THREE people to write this, and yet another to work on the "screenplay".

Rowdy Roddy Piper, if you can believe it, completely outshines the rest of the cast. You can't really blame unpolished child actors for not being very good, but with any level of decent input from a director or an acting coach (even a grade-school theater teacher) you would have gotten better performances. Since everyone else seemed to just walk in and read a couple of lines, we can't assume they wanted any level of "performance".

As other reviewers pointed out, everything else about it was equally amateurish. The camera work, effects, costumes...probably all provided by the people in the movie, who hopefully didn't get paid for much of anything other than residuals from DVD rentals. As the end credits rolled, I saw that a number of the extras had the last name "Gregg." For his sake, I hope that they aren't related to Clark Gregg, the hilariously dark genius involved in Choke and Avengers, because that would be pretty embarrassing.

Still, the kids were cute, if not good actors, and I disagree with others about letting kids watch it - if they're really young, like mine, it will still entertain them, mostly because they haven't learned how to differentiate this from anything good. I'm giving this 3 stars because Roddy and the hot mom gave fairly decent performances, and the kids did better than the rest of the adults, especially with the obvious lack of any kind of training or direction. Hopefully, if they attempt any sort of careers in the performing arts, they will look back on this movie and see the need for a bit of training (any amount would be better than none) before forging ahead.