Le secret de la voûte enchantée

ha, Holy crud. I remember auditioning for the role of Tee for this film under the title Delta Knights. I remember butchering it so bad. Then a year later, I saw it in the video store and rented it and thanked God I didn't get the part. …. The dialogue was so terrible and in the audition they had me pretend I am looking at a mountain wall looking for a cave or something. I tried to speak with a British accent and failed terribly. Ha. I remember watching and thinking to myself that I cannot believe films this bad get funding. Not to mention a few known actors. but a paycheck is a paycheck. But the director went on to produce Chronicle. some years later.

GASP! at the amazing bad acting. FLINCH! at the horrible in-jokiness of it all (Leonard from the village of Vinci?!?). Yes, it's Sword & Sorcery as you never wanted to see it. It's probably Warner's worst movie (beating out Naked Souls), and possibly his worse performance, but he's just not given much to work with here. Sarah Douglas is suitably evil (can't go wrong there), but even she seems overwhelmed by the sheer hokiness of it all. The rest of the cast seems to be out-of-work SCA members. There's just nothing, nothing good about this.

...there was a production company that wanted to make a sword-and-sorcery flick on a shoestring budget. So they hired out a California Rennaisance Festival and had the extras wander around in front of the merchant shops, and used them for the backdrop of an unoriginal story about a kid, a whore, and Leonardo daVinci (I am SO not making this up) off to find a bunch of junk Archimedes left lying around after the fall of Rome.

Of course, it fails spectacularly. It fails even more spectacularly if you're actually involved in RenFest or SCA-type activities, because then you can tell that the costumes on the extras come from about fifteen different time periods and locations. And that nobody, no not even the Vikings, wore horns on their helmets the way the Vulchare's henchmen do. And that nobody PERIOD would have dressed in the EFX-chorus costumes they stuck Olivia Hussey and David Warner (as Vulchare) into.

The painful segments of this film are innumerable. Such as the pee-throwing scene. Or "advanced" spy techniques employed by the Delta Knights, which involve meteorlogical discussions and that writing-with-lemon-juice-on-paper-and-heating-it-to-reveal-secret-message trick that children's science shows always do. Or Richard Kind in an annoying cameo and possibly the worst fake beard in film history (yes, even counting the wool on Captain Santa's face in Space Mutiny). Or the way the whore solicits the kid for sex even though he's not old enough to shave. Or the guys who wear Halloween masks and live in a summer camp obsticale course, one of whom screams "I'M COMMMIIIIIIIIIIING!" in what sounds for all the world like Cheech Marin's voice. Or the notion that Leonardo wasn't a genius, he was an irritating schmuck who stole all his ideas from Archimedes.

The MST3K version, of course, is priceless. I highly recommend it--it will ease the pain.

the most historically inaccurate film ever made. I'm not even sure this can be called a movie, maybe it's just an after school special on the middle ages gone horribly wrong.

There's something in here, about a boy who becomes the leader of an underground knight group that's trying to stop an evil villain from obtaining a device of unlimited power, at least I think that's what happens.

The acting is bad, but the sets and "special effects" are just so laughably bad that it's a wonder this film got released at all. The MST version was funny, though not one of their best efforts. Nothing for the film, but a 7 for the MST version.

-I wonder how cheap the casting for the film must have been, well David Warner played both the villain and one of the main heroes, so that may be some indication as to how low the budget was.

Having seen this film on Mystery Science Theater 3000, I was more than a little surprised to see this in the children's section of the local video rental place. The packaging definitely made it clear they were marketing this to children.

And I thought to myself, of course! We were looking at the film all wrong, through our jaded adult eyes. Why, this film is perfect for children, from the hilarious pee-throwing scene all the way to the whorehouse (setting new standards in fantasy films for how much breast can be exposed without actually showing a nipple).

It's educational too! Why, you'll learn that Archimedes lived contemporarily with the Romans, and he had a secret "stoolhouse" where he kept all the wondrous inventions of Atlantis. Or that Leonardo da Vinci was a cretinous lech who lifted all of his best ideas from the aforementioned Atlanteans. And that everyone in Europe spoke cheesy middle english and wore poofy hats (Europe's all pretty much the same, right?)

So next time Junior's running wild and you want him to settle down, plop him down in front of this film. It's better than a lobotomy for eradicating any remaining joie de vive! (or, indeed, a reason to live)