Legend of the Red Reaper

This movie is so bad you cannot even enjoy it for its badness. It is obviously a vanity project for the lead actor/director/writer Tara Cardinal. Unfortunately, Ms Cardinal is not very good at any of her jobs in this. Her acting, and the rest of the cast, was stiff and uninspired. The directing was amateurish. And the story was unoriginal.

The only positive thing I can say is, I admire Ms Cardinal for having a dream and pursuing it. Unfortunately this was a dream not worth sharing.

Mostly I found the movie distracting. I kept being distracted by the acting, which as I already stated was bad. Then there's the fight scenes, which looked like they were from a high school drama club production. The fights moved so slowly at points they looked like someone filmed the choreography rehearsal. And then there was the oddest distraction of all. The characters' names, Ganesh, Adonis, Freya? How did she think using names from a mishmash of mythologies would help the plot line?

Ah, this movie is just a mess. I've actually been known to enjoy bad movies. Some of them can have a certain charm to them. But this movie has no redeemable qualities.

As I watched Red Reaper I kept having one thought. How did Tara Cardinal ever get funding for this?

Yes it's awful, the only reason i watched it, at least the first 30 minutes is because i saw a positive review of the movie here in IMDb. But after i got enough of it, i came here to see all the review and all the good review are written by some people who do it for the first time, which means they just wanted to promote the movie. That pisses me off. And because of that i give it 1 out of 10. And i'll tell all my friends to give it 1 so this movie gets what it deserves. Acting is bad. Special effects are bad, directing is bad. Everything is bad. If there is anything good in this movie, i honestly couldn't find it, because it is buried under a lot of crap. Don't watch unless you want to get depressed!

I would really like to give this a better rating, but sadly, I can't. I don't know if the good reviews here are coming from friendship or adoring Tara Cardinal, but they aren't to be taken seriously.

Sorry Miss Cardinal, you had a lot of troubles to bring this project to life, and you did a big job, given the circumstances, and you had really a lot on your shoulders, but in the end the movie didn't turn out well.

It reminds me of some productions from Romania about Vampires, but we all know, those aren't good movies. Blood Rayne itself is in my opinion much more watchable. Still, there are other similarities than story and red-headed vampire heroine, particularly when it comes to common weaknesses. But that's another topic and is not to be questioned here.

The sword fights here are too slow, there is not much to enjoy with the action scenes. They are far away from their announced greatness, and when I remember "Monty Python And The Holy Grail" decades ago, the action there had more impact.

Of course, for insiders or dedicated fans, and those who can actually oversee the flaws by knowing how low the budget was, the movie may be fun, but for one who is spoiled by modern fantasy productions (and willing to close one and a half eye) it is disappointing.

Especially the big bad enemy, who should be at least a dark, disturbing one, he is only a weak Wraith Clone (Stargate Atlantis). White hair and a electronically manipulated voice isn't enough (since 20 years or so) to give a frightening impression.

All post-production done for this movie in an attempt to give it a little atmosphere, a more modern look, will be useless until there is the harsh decision made to cut out at least 20 minutes of footage, to fasten the pacing and to eliminate bad scenes. Furthermore, the story has to be straightened in the process and disburdened from several dead weight. For instance, the envious sister of Aella could probably be eliminated since she has no impact on the story. I personally think that at least partially a new soundtrack would help. And even then, I don't know if those efforts would be sufficient. But I recently watched a movie where the soundtrack was about 60% of what it made watchable, so....

"Legend of the Read Reaper" was not the worst movie I have ever seen. It's not even among them. But frankly, it's rare for me to rate only 3.

I have to admit I've been following the making of this movie for some time and it looked really promising. Considering the huge difficulties the producer/director and star Tara Cardinal went through to bring this production to the screen, I really wanted to like it, but sadly it is quite abysmal. Tara has said in interviews that large amounts of footage were lost due to the ineptitude of the people employed, so to make it up to a feature length we see the same footage being used over and over again.

However, as she was the star, director and producer surely she should take responsibility for these mistakes rather than continually blaming others. In a movie of this kind, the weakness of the script, plot and acting could be offset by the action scenes, but the movie contains weak ponderous sword fighting and at times looks like a live action role play convention rather than a movie.

Much has been spoken about it being a feminist picture, but even this falls flat. Tara's character spends the whole movie pining over a man who is to marry another woman, gets ordered about by her father, is repeatedly bested in combat by her male trainer and the other women in the movie do virtually nothing. I'm even a little suspicious about the near absence of the scene where Cardinal fought Al Snow while naked. She claims the footage was lost, but I wonder if she deleted the scene because she felt it may have undermined the supposed feminism of the movie?

I also have to say something to reviewers here and on other sites who are claiming that this movie is good! - you are seriously not doing Tara Cardinal or yourselves any long term favours, pride of place going to one reviewer who compares Cardinal to Kubrick & Orwell!!! I was lucky I wasn't the one who paid good money to buy this movie on the strength of the glowing early reviews. It was a friend of mine and she's pretty annoyed at how these 'reviewers', who must be either friends or associates of the cast and crew have used IMDb to mislead us! - Legend of the Red Reaper is not 'an instant classic', it's terrible.

Reading about how hard Tara Cardinal worked to get this very poor movie onto DVD reminded me so much of an episode of 'Mad Men' where a dopey millionaire comes to the ad agency with piles of cash asking them to market a sport that everyone knows is going to flop. In a rare moment of honesty & compassion, Don Draper tells him something along the lines of 'it's good to have a dream, but not this one'. Somebody should have said the same to Tara Cardinal.

Ganesh: God of beginnings, remover of obstacles, patron of art and science. Adonis: Greek god of beauty and desire. What the heck? Isn't there a book that would warn you not to use certain names in a movie unless they actually relate to the movie? The plot is non-existent and jumps all over the place. The acting would have been better done by a class of pre-schoolers. The sound jumps from one badly applied effect to another. The music is laughable and obviously taken from other sources and also badly matched to the scenes and doesn't flow (martial music to a love scene???) I can never get the time I wasted on this rubbish back and that's really sad. You know when a movie is so bad that it becomes funny? That isn't one of those. This is just bad.

I really wish I had one of those devices used by Men in Black to erase my memory, there's about 2 hours I could get rid of.

One star rating is too many.