Odysseus: Voyage to the Underworld

I've come not to expect much from any SyFy "original" movie. This particular one, though, plumbs new depths of bad writing, atrocious plotting, mediocre-to-bad acting and weak execution. It hijacked names from Greek mythology and applied them to the movie's two-dimensional characters in an attempt, I suppose, to give them some apparent depth, and then to compound the theft shamelessly grabbed some material from Christianity and Bram Stoker, and THEN, not content with making a complete mess of things, swiped an ending right out of any one of the "Halloween" movies. It was flat, predictable and never more than minimally interesting.

This movie held during the journey of Odysseus after Trojan War included Homer as a man of his crew, what is impossible for three or four centuries. The expected beginning as a B movie (bad CGI and cliché dialogues will appear throughout the film) was followed by a scene in which the crew was concerned about the song of the sirens. When flying creatures appeared surrounding the ship I got surprised, asking myself: "would this movie be a rare case of true adaptation to Greek mythology?" Sirens were not mermaids, as they are recurrently portrayed nowadays, but partly women, partly birds creatures. However, soon I noticed that they were original creatures not present in any myth, and so is the mist isle itself. Demons who attack injured warriors exist in Greek mythology, but the rest of the story does not fit. Persephone and Hades' offspring, the Erinyes, were ugly winged creatures, but also quite different from those bat-like ones with shining eyes from the film, both physically and in their attributes. As a matter of fact, this is just one more B film aiming to have the flavour of Greek myths but no connection to them. The plot is a new version of the very same overly repeated story of a evil one trying to dominate the world. Besides that, Hades is, as usual, misaddressed as Christian hell and not as the Greeks saw it, and the fact that there is a "hellfire cross" in the movie is just one more evidence of it. Perhaps having inserted an original character, a diviner named Christos, is a Freudian slip. The ending, seeming a parody of Bram Stocker, mentioning vampiric creatures fearing the signnof the cross, is ridiculous.

I stumbled upon this fantasy film by accident and didn't really expect much from it, even though it stars the Mummy legend, Arnold Vosloo, who made an excellent Darkman 2. I was pleasantly surprised.

The premise, about Greek hero Odysseus encountering vampires on a lost island, sounds absurd. The special effects budget was clearly small and there are some scenes when you have to imagine what the heroes are fighting since the camera doesn't show it. However, the whole thing is saved by two factors. Firstly, the writers knew what they were doing. They were obviously familiar with Homer's classic epic, with the protagonist's strengths and weaknesses, and with how people talked and behaved in those mythological times. This helps makes the whole thing plausible. They also didn't waste time on unnecessary plot detours. Further, the story is actually well-crafted and every scene is actually relevant.

Secondly, the cast perform very well. Vosloo, as ever, is charismatic, and delivers his dialogue excellently. Randal Edwards makes a believable Homer and JR Bourne is a courageous Perimedes. All this without any irritating side kicks or distracting contemporary styles of speech.

If you're expecting a modern-day horror film, you'll be disappointed. But if you watch this with some cynicism, if you're familiar with Homer's Odyssey and enjoy a different slant on the vampire myth, this is a perfect Saturday afternoon movie, which may leave you with some interesting thoughts.

A decent enough film, certainly not good but not really bad.

The acting is patchy. Vosloo is quite good as Obysseus, Bourne and Antonakos are OK in their roles but Edwards is terrible as Homer, not so much his performance as the fact that while the other characters are talking in a old style Homer speaks like a modern person and this jars every time he talks and finally Gibson is awful, completely wooden, but thankfully she isn't in it long.

The story is simple with good guys and bad guys and we are in no real doubt about which is which. It is an old fashioned fantasy film with OK effects although the action sequences are a bit poor.

Its a cheap film with a simple script and a decent pace.

The mixture of modern and old speech patterns is annoying and the cheesy extra bit at the end is also annoying but it'll kill a bit of time painlessly.

It's neither good nor bad, amateurish acting, poor direction with compentent special f/x,weak script/dialogue. Many movies lately just can't seem to get the language of a time period right without adding ridiculous modern dialogue clichés, slangs and what not. I kept waiting for one of them to pull out a cellphone because most the performances were phoned in, for me the beginning was the worse stupid twinkling lights in the background of scenes of them on the ship while long shots with harpies flying over head were of a cloudy twilight sky, so where did the twinkling stars come from....this is just pointing out one of many flaws and of course this ship was filmed in a studio with no water at all, I'm sure of it. If you're a fan of sword and sandal sci-fi adventure with sorcery and magic it only barely acts as an apetizer, a lightly flavored one at that, leaving you wanting terribly that you had The Odyssey starring Armande Assante in your DVD collection because watching all the hours of a rerun would be more satisfying than watching 90 minutes once you remove commercials of this drivel. I had tivo'd and fortunately was able to fastforward some simply painful dialogue moments in order to watch the special f/x. One thing to keep in mind few things shown as Sci-Fi Channel orginals they are really just productions from foreign markets like Canada, BBC, Germany or worse some reckless direct to video producer. Voslo does what he can but with this material its a wasted effort.