Sleeping Beauty

Decent watch, probably wouldn't watch it again, and can't recommend.

Wow, they did this on a shoestring budget. The monsters and effects were interesting, but clearly cheap (not bad, but cheap), even at the time. The zombies were a hair better, and yes, they added monsters and zombies to this.

This is basically if Maleficient (I'm sure that Disney has had the free-license laws re-written so that they own the movie rights to pieces of stories they lifted from free market fairy tales), or Tambria, actually attempted to rule the human kingdom while everyone slept, stuck in an eternal cycle.

The writing is probably what got this movie made in the first place, and its the best part of this. I fully recognize that they use character transformation, growth (at least in presentation) of the characters' morals, and very decent pacing of arrogance, adversity, advancement, on repeat, slowly building up to the climax.

The only one you might recognize in this is Jessica Van Dien (Greenhouse Academy), and she's pretty, but I don't know if I'd send man after man to their deaths for her. Sadly, it's a bad sign when one starts to consider the attractiveness of actors to the quality of a movie, and I can't say there is enough to convince anyone to watch this. It not even that it's a bad movie, its just not above the average when so many other movies are.

I was hoping for something along the lines of a Disney type kids drama but the fact that the leading characters had messy hair and had dialogue as wooden as a 70's robot made me realise this was something unique. I managed to last about 15 minutes until I wanted to gouge out my eyes and drill a huge hole in my head to make it all stop.It is such a long time since I have seen a movie so awful, how it managed to to get a 4 I will never know, I would have given it less than 1 but there is no option. Today in this financially challenged time I find it incredulous that this type of junk direct to DVD rubbish keeps being made, I would have hoped that the financiers had closed off the lines of credit, the sooner the better in my own opinion.

The 2014 Sleeping Beauty is mediocre at best in pretty much every capacity, but at least I got a few laughs out of it. It's no 'The Room', but there's a chuckle or two in there.

This is just your average, run of the mill fairytale. Only with zombies and badly rendered CGI monsters. The prince is kind of a jerk this time and the princess is in the movie even less than in the original.

So the queen and king of Magicfantasyland have a baby daughter and hold a ceremony in the courtyard. The three good fairies are busy blessing her with vague, useless gifts like "truth" instead of chainsaw arms when an evil fairy (now Tambria rather than Maleficent) bursts in and curses the child to be pricked by a spindle before her 16th birthday. Years later, instead of hiding her way on her 16th, her parents take her to a party and let her run off with some dude. And hey, he just happens to have a spindle. As you may guess, trouble ensues.

Somewhere close by, a bratty prince and his goons are picking on his whipping boy (the prince is like 24 by the way). The whipping boy has been receiving poetry from Sleeping Beauty and has fallen in love with her. The brat prince discovers her kingdom's plight and runs off to face the evil Tamera and her gang of monster zombies-- goons and whipping boy in tow.

The Bad:

• The writing is bland and amateurish. Half the time, I wasn't sure whether to blame the actors or the script for a particularly terrible line. There's only so much you can do to make junk sound passable. And the exposition... Oh, the exposition.

• The plot. The story is pretty simple, but there are so many unanswered questions. Like, where is the prince's kingdom? Why do we never see it? Why does the prince have a whipping boy? Does everyone in this land get spankings at his age? What do you need another kingdom for? Don't you already have one? And as for the princess, why would you want to touch the tip a spindle-- curse or no? How did you write those letters while sleep? Why did the characters shed established personality traits and prejudices like a change of clothes? Why weren't the plot devices wearing their disguises? (I'm looking at you conveniently omnipresent commoner girl)

-The acting. I often wondered if some of these actors were reading from a teleprompter. I've never heard people fail so hard at expressing emotion. Though I suppose I'd be a hollow shell of a person if I were cast in this too. The Maleficent stand in (Olivia d'Abo) is flat which is a shame considering the potential in a role like that. The prince (Edward Lewis French) is given terrible material at best and extremely annoying at his worst. I believe Sleeping Beauty's mother may take the cake in the bad acting department. I almost wished she had more screen time.The sheer lack of damns given was remarkable.

• The filmography. The filming was clumsy and sometimes confusing. I'm no filming expert and I typically don't notice bad camera work. If I noticed it this time, there's definitely a problem.

The Good:

Okay, I'm really scraping the bottom here...

The musical score. I didn't really notice it. So it couldn't have been that bad, right?

The good fairies. The good fairies were no where near as annoying as the fairies in 'Maleficent'. And just to make sure of that, one of them was taken care of during the opening sequence and the other two were hardly seen again. Definitely an improvement.

Barrow (Finn Jones) didn't annoy me as the lead and actually did a decent job of playing the annoyed whipping boy the whole time. Though I had a hard time telling if this was actually good acting or if he was actually annoyed the whole time. I mean what with being involved in this mess and being tricked into sating the director's weird whipping boy fetish, who knows?

The ending. Everyone loves a good twist. But mostly, I was just happy that it was over.

it seems be only expression of an actor to be director and impose his family to public attention. it is not important the manner or the plot, the acting or the script. more than not inspired work, Sleeping Beauty is chaotic. the dialogs are childish, the events without sense,each scene - expression of lost courage and ideas. a film like a family game who could be , at each step, only improvisation. and that fact is almost creepy. because the subject has a high potential. because the experience of Casper van Dien as actor could be basis of a better story. because it is only a film for the family and friends of director and the great question remains why the movie is on the big screen. more than uninspired film, it remains strange. because it has out of credible purpose.

Sleeping Beauty is a production of The Asylum—a film production company known for making so-called 'mockbusters'. These mockbusters are films that are released to coincide with the release of big studio epics in order to capitalize on the hubbub surrounding the big-budget movies. They feature titles that are VERY similar to the bigger films—and this movie is being released just before Disney's big summer release Malificent! A few other examples of their films are Atlantic Rim, Death Racers, American Battleship, Snakes on a Train…and many others that have titles almost like blockbuster films. Because of this, it's obvious the film will have a low budget and very modest pretensions—and most likely will be a film you'll see coming direct to DVD. And, I might add, it's filmed entirely in Bulgaria.

The cast for Sleeping Beauty is very, very unusual. It seems like this production was a real family affair. In addition to acting in the film, Casper Van Dien directed the film. This isn't so unusual. However, his wife (Catherine Oxenberg) also is in the film…as are Van Dien's three daughters! This makes for a most unusual pedigree. However, despite being a family film, in many ways I would NOT recommend this film for your entire family! Nor would I recommend it to the youngest of Van Dien's kids. This is because this odd version of the classic story has a lot of intense gore as well as a reference to rape—and I really am not sure why these were included in the film.

The first portion of the film is much like the Perrault story as well as the Disney tale. A king and queen have a daughter and they invite everyone to come celebrate with them EXCEPT for the one person who happens to be a complete maniac and almost all-powerful sorceress. When this nasty lady arrives and is miffed by never receiving an invitation, she curses the girl to die by being pricked by splinter from a spinning wheel by the time she turns 16. However, the good fairies are able to change the curse—instead making it so the princess will sleep for as long as it takes until a prince of good heart will come and kiss her. Weirdly, they also put the entire kingdom to sleep when she falls asleep —even though this seems like an incredibly bad idea as it leaves the kingdom to the nasty sorceress.

So far this is pretty much the classic story. However, this is all shown in the first quarter of the film! Having the prince battle his way in, kill the sorceress and kiss the sleeping girl clearly had to be padded out…a lot. So, they created an all-new story about a wastrel idiot of a prince, his lackey friends and his whipping boy. Is this interesting? Mildly—but often the characters behave inconsistently and you wonder why anyone would follow this prince, since he is a complete and total moron. But as I said above, there is a lot of adult content tossed in as well as some incredibly bad dialog from time to time. The overall effect isn't bad…but it is muddled and not particularly noteworthy unless you thought the original story should be spiced up with zombies, spinal columns being yanked out, be-headings and the like. It's not good…but not completely terrible either if you absolutely must see a classic fairy tale infused with zombies and the like. I do wonder, though, who exactly would really want to see this one---it's certainly not the average viewer.