Merlin and the War of the Dragons

I had the misfortune of buying this DVD from Play.com thinking it would be half decent to watch. What a mistake that was, as other reviewers have said this is quite bad, actors who can't act etc. etc., but worst of all there is no COLOUR to the film, no green grass, no flesh tones, nothing actually, I know it is supposed to be the Dark ages but the director Mark Atkins is also a cinematographer but he well and truly "cocked" this film up big time. What Jurgen Prochnow was doing appearing in this film is anybodies guess, the story isn't that bad with better direction and a bigger budget from money saved by hiring totally unknown actors except Jurgen who knows. A POOR EFFORT, not a very good advert for the British film industry.

This is a movie which definitely left me pretty uninterested. Some of the main faults are the lack of proper character motivations, the villain's motives are especially weak and unconvincing. The movie is shot on video it appears giving it a very TV quality, this is made worse by the endless tight shots, there's no sense of scale and spectacular set pieces. The dragons are never really explained. Were they there during the roman occupation too? Its never explained. The movie is pretty bloodless despite a few skirmishes. There's only a couple of female characters and they don't really do all that much.

The costumes I guess were okay for what they were going for, I did laugh at the end a fair bit at the cheesiness of it all. These moments of unintentional comedy are few and far between though, its mostly just very slow and dull. The plot is muddled and its all very small scale. One death near the end is so fake its laughable, the classic prop sword under the armpit with no blood.... There's a few awkward moments of editing and some special effect shots which don't work. Some lines are also not delivered or recorded well or muffled by the music.

Massive blunders in the every domain of film making, starting from pound for pound worst special effects on this list. So woeful that it's actually funny.

Strange to see tar Mac road running through the hills in the days of merlin😂😂

Debatable if worth the time to watch it, but has its good sides. Starting with the bad ones. Low budget in everything. While not a crime by itself, one is left to wonder if scenes of murdering someone by sticking a sword under his armpit are best left out. Constant impression that the whole acting crew is maybe 20 people... Which for supposed massive battle scenes with little cg and minimalistic make up looks odd if nothing else. Script is simple and straightforward. One may chuckle at "Mage" being the mage's name... On the good side - actors are very enthusiastic and so very Welsh, which is a good thing as it is refreshing and unusual. Minimalism and ascetic cg/sfx actually convey almost theatrical impression, at the same time evoking a kind of an 'old school' atmosphere (or maybe it is just me). To sum it up - an OK for fantasy fans, not OK for action/cg/massive/budget fans, a sure yes for welsh and legends of round table fans. I'd love it if actors from this movie got big enough to surface in other ones. While acting is often crude, they have their own charm and look different.