In my language this movie is called "The old tales of Vikings". For a fan of movies featuring Vikings one must say, that there aren't that many movies to watch. You keep returning to the same 3-4 good ones and if you crave something different, you start to scrape the bottom of the barrel pretty fast.
This movie appeared in the offering of my VOD. Given that it was apparently about Vikings and featured Zebrowski, whom I liked in the Witcher Series I gave it a go.
The movie has things I liked very much and things I didn't. Lets start with the bad.
The Acting is somewhat wooden, so is the direction and camerawork. The movie isn't very good to look at, with often bland colours, excessive exposition, lack of contrast and general shakiness. The opening shot of a wooden statue was already overly shaky, so the rest of the movie wasn't much of a surprise. The camerawork is basic and amateurish, reminiscent of television rather than a film. Imagine a worse Xena warrior princess style thing and you'd get the idea. What was making the experience worse in my case was the bad quallity of the dubbing, which had a reverb as if recorded in a bathroom. That's a problem though only if you watch the movie in Czech. I'd probably still choose the bathroom dubbing over trying to acquire the original with subtitles.
At times the direction is unintentionally funny. Usually death scenes feel more entertaining than dramatic.
The good things about the movie (other than the unintentional comedy) are the costumes, locations, fightscenes. The depicted Vikings are among the best and most accurate ones I have seen in a movie. Propper helmets and birnies are worn along with shields and 9th century swords. The fight scene against a band of Vikings is especially nicely done with practical effects and stunts. They must have been especially proud of the functional portcullis, because there are at leas 5 shots of it closing throughout the movie.
Overall, you can see that a lot of effort and passion went into making this movie. I feel like, they did the best they could with what was available and thus I can't be too critical about the shortcomings.
