Dragonquest

This "Lord of the rings" rip-off by mockbuster master The Asylum is a lot better than it deserves to be.

Daniel Bonjour, obviously cast because he looks a lot like Frodo, plays Arkadi, a youthful adventurer who must collect a number of jewels which, when placed into an amulet that looks like it was bought at Claire's Boutique for $10.95, will for unexplained reasons give him the power to save the world from the evil of a wizard named Kirill, played by Not Ron Perlman.

He's aided in his quest by two warriors: Katya, whose porn star makeup and lip gloss perfectly match her porn star acting talents, and Maxim, played by ungracefully aging Marc "Beastmaster" Singer, whom the director unwisely required to act like the child of an unholy union between Yoda and Popeye.

Between the opening scenes of Not Frodo peeping at a hottie villager taking her clothes off for no good reason (Note: you don't even get a peek; don't even bother pausing or backtracking the DVD like I did) and the anticlimactic final battle between Not Frodo and Not Ron Perlman, there's in fact a charming little fantasy story going on, with some pretty location shooting and nice b-roll over mountain vistas and lush forests.

The dragons are actually pretty neat looking, even though all they really do is fly around and shake their heads back and forth.

All in all, "Dragonquest" comes off as a bunch of renfaire friends who got together and made their own fantasy movie, with some bargain basement CGI spliced in. On that level, it's a pleasant enough bit of fun.

Don't pay full price for it; that would just be foolish. But I've seen it on Amazon for about three bucks new, paired on the same DVD with the equally workmanlike Asylum effort "Merlin: War of the Dragons." That's how to buy your bad movies, folks. Get 'em cheap, watch 'em once, sell 'em for a profit at your next garage sale.

"Dragonquest" isn't worth anything more than that, and doesn't aspire to be.

Hilarious. I laughed through most of the first half. Things improved after that, once I changed the channel...

It's a little like Hotshots meets Lord of the Rings. You have the makings of an epic fantasy film, with what felt like the world's worst scripting, but pulled off in such a bad manner, it may as well have been branded a spoof.

The bad points include: The script, the special effects (check out the fight scenes!), the acting (for the most part), the choreography, the directing, several of the outfits... the list goes on.

The good points include: Erm... hmm.... Well it was a bit funny anyway.

I know my review is going to be immediately voted negatively, but I did give Dragon Quest a chance, watching it with an open mind and with low expectations. But I just found an all-round awful movie, I'm sorry. I guess the scenery isn't so bad, but the editing and special effects are. The editing is all over the place, especially in the action sequences and the cut-back when we are first introduced to the dragon. The effects didn't look so terrible at first, but their robotic way of moving and that the dragons looked superimposed in the background just made them fake. The dialogue is incredibly insipid and uncomfortably cheesy. The characters are never developed or likable enough to make us identify with them, we learn nothing about them, some come and go and others vanish without a trace. The music is generic. The story reeks of predictability and is full of ridiculous scenes like the dragon falling being in flames and after the cut-back we clearly see that for some reason the ground has been untouched and the means of the hero proving his worth was just stupid. The costumes don't really give a proper sense of what period or genre it's supposed to be, what's even more disconcerting is the constant changes, or shall I say continuity error, of the hero's shirt. The action sequences are hopelessly inept, nothing is thrilling in this regard and you can tell nobody seemed to know what they were doing. The acting is also terrible, Marc Singer is unsubtly over-the-top while Daniel Boujour and Jason Connery have the charisma of coat-racks. In conclusion, not the Asylum's worst or one of them, but for a fantasy adventure Dragon Quest sure was one dull quest. 1/10 Bethany Cox

I'm giving it a 2 out of 10 all because they cast Marc Singer one of my favorite Genre Actors he was a hottie back in the day and made some great sci-fi fantasy films like V, and Beastmaster. Beyond that this movie is awful and I can watch a lot of SyFy originals even some of the really bad ones can be fun to pass a late night when nothing is on mindless plots and bad special visual FX don't bother me as much as extremely terrible dialog and lackluster directing and this movie has both plus not so great CGI. Someone else who reviewed said he thought Uwe Boli directed this, I dare say Uwe might have done better....did I really just say that. I cannot believe this is on Blu-Ray don't even buy it in the discount bin...yikes.

So let's movie on and point out the positives of this finely crafted piece of horribleness.

1- Mark Singer does his best to channel the pirate Long John Silver as was played in the movie with Robert Newton, except that Mark's character is not a pirate, so that's pretty nifty.

2- Daniel Bonjour shifts from an American to a British accent and back again in every sing sentence he speaks.

3- The props appear to be the best stuff one might buy off the shelf at somewhere like Hot Topic. The jewelry... just wow.

4- Russel Reynolds looks like Spock!

5- They didn't waste money on expensive 3D graphics, and this is a movie that is better left as cheap as possible.

6- All the outfits look really clean and new, almost as if they had never been worn before, ever. It's a very clean world in this movie.

So what is bad about this movie? Nothing. This has everything you could possibly hope for. Film, this is.