Archive for the ‘Fantasy/Swords’ Category
Wednesday, November 26th, 2025
I was a child of the 1980s, but not of HBO or Showtime. That’s probly why I never saw DEATHSTALKER (1983) until last week. Still, I knew the idea of DEATHSTALKER enough to be excited when I read that it was getting a rebootmakemagining from writer/director Steven Kostanski, the Canadian goofball who gave us PSYCHO GOREMAN, FRANKIE FREAKO, the makeup effects for IN A VIOLENT NATURE, and more. My hopes got even higher when I learned that it would star Daniel Bernhardt, one of the great henchmen of the JOHN WICK era but not usually a leading man since his days headlining the BLOODSPORT sequels. He was fun in the ‘90s but now he’s more distinguished, he has a giant sword, and there’s goblins and magic and shit everywhere. Some things do get better.
I asked around, and it does not seem to be a controversial statement that the remake is way better than the original. I kinda enjoyed catching up with that one, it has more flavor than some of the other CONAN cash-ins, and Lana Clarkson is in it pre BARBARIAN QUEEN, but I’ve already pretty much forgotten it. People seem to be fonder of DEATHSTALKER II, which is played for intentional laughs (but also a little chintzier). I’d say Kostanski’s is way better than both, and kind of pitched in the middle of them tonally. It definitely has some great jokes in it but overall seems to be sincere in its goal of having a great time with the swords and the sorcery. It’s a swordablast. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Christina Orjalo, Daniel Bernhardt, good remakes, Nina Bergman, Patton Oswalt, Slash, Steven Kostanski
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, November 19th, 2025
Okay, I’m gonna be up front about this: RED SONJA (2025) is a movie that I kinda liked, but it took some effort. It’s an underdog movie, you kinda gotta be rooting for it to work, I don’t know if it’s gonna win over anybody standing there with their arms folded. But maybe I’m wrong. It has a sincerity to it. It doesn’t seem self conscious. That can go a long way.
It’s set in the land of Hyrkania during the Hyborian Age. When Sonja (Matilda Lutz from the excellent Coralie Fargeat movie REVENGE) was a child her village was raided and she fled. (Unlike in some of the ’80s barbarian movies we don’t have to specify what horrible things the raiders did.) Since then somehow she became a hell of a fighter and lives tribeless in the forest, searching for her people. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: M.J. Bassett, Martyn Ford, Matilda Lutz, Michael Bisping, Rhona Mitra, Robert E. Howard, Robert Sheehan, Tasha Huo, Wallis Day
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords | 6 Comments »
Friday, October 31st, 2025
There was a time when I was 14 years old and Clive Barker’s NIGHTBREED was my favorite movie. Maybe that was too soon to move on from BATMAN, or maybe they were both my favorite movie. They blew my brain open in a similar way, and come to think of it they have more in common than just baroque, enthralling music by Danny Elfman (his ninth and tenth film scores). Both are ambitious early films from idiosyncratic directors who are also visual artists, who are breaking into a larger budget range than their previous work but getting even wilder than before. Both are arguably a little stiff with the traditional action expected of a blockbuster, but it doesn’t even register much because they’re so overflowing with visual imagination and invention that they create their own, very specific worlds. And though both were intended as mainstream event movies, at their heart they’re by, for, and about misfits and weirdos.
NIGHTBREED, unfortunately, was treated like a misfit and weirdo itself. It was produced by Morgan Creek (YOUNG GUNS, ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES) and distributed by 20th Century Fox (whose other releases that year included DIE HARD 2, PREDATOR 2 and HOME ALONE), but they didn’t know what to do with it. Barker was forced to make compromises that were drastic, though not catastrophic in my opinion (or I would never have loved it so much). Other than changing from the book’s title Cabal (I agree with that), they really didn’t know how to market it to the normies, though they did okay with nerds. I still cling dearly to autographed comic books and a “Nightbreed Chronicles” paperback with portraits and bios of the movie’s Star-Wars-esque collection of background creatures. Though a triumph in the minds of myself and my best friend at the time, it was a financial flop and novelist turned director Barker never even wrote the next book in the proposed trilogy. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Anne Bobby, Clive Barker, Craig Sheffer, Danny Elfman, David Cronenberg, Doug Bradley, Hugh Quarshie, John Agar, Oliver Parker
Posted in Reviews, Fantasy/Swords, Horror, Monster | 14 Comments »
Wednesday, October 1st, 2025
My recent revisit of THE BROTHERS GRIMM (2005) pushed me to finally get around to seeing HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS (2013). I had wondered whether they were kind of in the same genre and yeah, turns out they’re more similar than I even guessed. Just like Gilliam’s movie this one starts out with a fairy tale inspired childhood flashback, then tells the story of a pair of traveling supernatural expert siblings hired to help a small town where the children have gone missing. Both movies even have Peter Stormare (GET THE GRINGO) as a cartoonish bad guy (this time he’s the sheriff who gets a chunk of his nose bit off by Gretel).
The major distinction is that they’re not con artists or skeptics – as the title suggests, Hansel (Jeremy Renner immediately following a run of THE TOWN, GHOST PROTOCOL, THE AVENGERS and THE BOURNE LEGACY) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton, CLASH OF THE TITANS) grew up to become witch hunters, and this being a twenty-teens studio movie that means they wear cool leather outfits, have fancy steam punk shotguns and crossbows, do lots of slo-mo spins and flips and what not. Yes, that kind of sounds like a parody movie-within-a-movie meant to satirize Hollywood excess (like something from LAST ACTION HERO, or the Max Landis action version of Huckleberry Finn from the pilot of Jean-Claude Van Johnson). Fortunately writer/director Tommy Wirkola (DEAD SNOW, VIOLENT NIGHT) takes the ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER route of keeping a straight face and trying to make it cool instead of giving in to the temptation to prove to the audience that he’s in on the joke. I was worried for a second because there’s a joke at the beginning about drawings of missing children on milk bottles, but that was a one time occurrence. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alice Krige, Brothers Grimm, David Leitch, Derek Mears, Famke Janssen, Fiona O'Shaugnessy, Gemma Arterton, Ingrid Bolso Berdal, Jeremy Renner, Osgood Perkins, Peter Stormare, Robin Atkin Downes, Sam Hargrave, Samuel Leakey, Sophia Lillis, Thomas Mann, Tommy Wirkola, Zoe Bell
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Horror | 7 Comments »
Wednesday, September 10th, 2025
August 26, 2005
THE BROTHERS GRIMM is one of the types of movies these summer retrospectives were made for: it was kind of a big deal at the time (because of who directed it), I’ve barely heard anyone talk about it since, and I’ve never really considered revisiting it before, so doing so becomes a weird sort of time travel. Something like BATMAN BEGINS or WAR OF THE WORLDS has stayed in my brain and in the culture, so it’s ongoing. I have to put myself in a certain mindspace to remember what it felt like at the time. But does THE BROTHERS GRIMM even exist outside of the year 2005? I don’t know, I’d have to see more evidence.
It was an intersection of a bunch of different things happening in that moment. Terry Gilliam was a respected, still-we-hoped working director for people who loved film. Dimension Films was dominant and this was their most expensive film ever. Hollywood still saw screenwriter Ehren Kruger (SCREAM 3, REINDEER GAMES, THE RING, THE SKELETON KEY) as an exciting new voice, and there was a bidding war for this spec script. When you think about it this is exactly the kind of high concept screenplay that always ends up on The Black List, which started that year, so it just missed it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ehren Kruger, fairy tales, Heath Ledger, Jonathan Pryce, Julian Bleach, Lena Headey, Matt Damon, Monica Bellucci, Peter Stormare, Terry Gilliam
Posted in Reviews, Fantasy/Swords | 13 Comments »
Friday, July 18th, 2025
July 15, 2005
I’d like to say Tim Burton’s CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY plays better now than it did then, but for me it’s the reverse. I can guess based on some costumes I saw when I went to see the 2023 movie WONKA that there are people who grew up on this one and still like it, but for people my age I felt alone in believing it even had some good qualities. It was disappointing because I had faith that Depp would have an interesting take on Wonka, and that faith was not rewarded. But I could point to many things I liked about it, so I felt a little protective when people said it was worthless.
I’m partial to both the 1964 book by Roald Dahl (or at least the version of it that existed in the ‘80s) and the 1971 film by Mel Stuart starring Gene Wilder. After a teacher read the book to us in class I decided Dahl was my favorite author – I read James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, Danny the Champion of the World, The Twits, George’s Marvelous Medicine, The BFG, The Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes, I’m not sure what else. I remember waiting what seemed like forever for The Witches on inter-library loan, and it was worth it. His dark sense of humor really appealed to me. His descriptions of awful people next to those scratchy Quentin Blake drawings. When I found out he wrote “Lamb to the Slaughter” (the short story turned into the Alfred Hitchcock episode about the woman who killed her husband with a frozen leg of lamb) I was amazed. When I found out he had a book for adults called Switch Bitch I giggled. (But I never read that one.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex McDowell, Christopher Lee, Deep Roy, Freddie Highmore, John August, Johnny Depp, Missi Pyle, Noah Taylor, Roald Dahl, Tim Burton
Posted in Reviews, Family, Fantasy/Swords | 16 Comments »
Wednesday, June 18th, 2025
THE UGLY STEPSISTER (Den Stygge Stesøsteren) is a 2025 movie from Norway, available on Shudder. If I’d seen it somewhere else I don’t know if I’d think of it as a horror movie exactly – more like a dark period drama with some magic, some blood, and some puke. But I’ve seen people call it “body horror,” and it’s the rare movie I’ve seen described that way that isn’t very Cronenbergian, so I support that. I read in Fangoria that the director calls it “beauty horror.” It has also been compared quite a bit to THE SUBSTANCE, and that’s nice because the similarities are all thematic. Otherwise they’re very different movies.
Confession: it took me embarrassingly long to put together that this is literally a retelling of Cinderella and not just making an allusion to it with that title. Let me say this: this ain’t your grandpa’s Cinderella! But it’s cool that your grandpa has his own version of Cinderella that he likes, I respect that.
The story centers on Elvira (Lea Myren), oldest daughter of Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp, DEAD SNOW), who is about to remarry to older widower Otto (Ralph Carlsson), but during the wedding celebration he suddenly drops dead. While trying to comfort Otto’s daughter Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss, THE LAST KING), Elvira learns that both partners thought the other was rich and were trying to marry for the money. Since younger sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) hasn’t had her period yet it now falls upon Elvira to save the family by marrying a prince. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Ane Dahl Torp, Emilie Blichfeldt, fairy tales, Flo Fagerli, Lea Myren, Malte Gardinger, Thea Sofie Loch Naess
Posted in Reviews, Fantasy/Swords, Horror | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, June 10th, 2025
June 10, 2005
HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE is the ninth film directed by Hayao Miyazaki. He’s only done three more in the twenty years since, so I guess it counts as late Miyazaki. When I saw it back then I went to a subtitled screening, so this time I tried it with English dialogue, and that worked well too.
It’s a story about Sophie (Emily Mortimer, THE 51st STATE), a young woman who makes hats in a shop founded by her late father. When her sister Lettie (Jena Malone, FOR LOVE OF THE GAME), a baker, encourages her to find something she loves rather than staying shackled to the family business she swears she’s content doing this.
Then one night after close this terribly rude rich lady (Lauren Bacall, THE BIG SLEEP) comes into the shop and starts saying the hats are tacky. To quote THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE, “we’re a business with posted hours,” so get the fuck out. But this lady is actually the Witch of the Waste, who has come not to look for headwear, but to curse Sophie by turning her 90 years old. Then she’s out of there in a palanquin carried by her henchmen, oily black blob people with nice coats and masquerade masks. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Billy Crystal, Blythe Danner, Christian Bale, Emily Mortimer, Hayao Miyazaki, Jean Simmons, Jena Malone, Josh Hutcherson, Lauren Bacall, Studio Ghibli
Posted in Reviews, Cartoons and Shit, Fantasy/Swords | 8 Comments »
Wednesday, June 4th, 2025
RETURN OF THE BASTARD SWORDSMAN (1984) is indeed about the Bastard Swordsman returning. It’s not like BATMAN RETURNS where the title character hasn’t actually gone anywhere and is only returning to the screen – at the very end of BASTARD SWORDSMAN our guy Yun Fei Yang (Norman Chui, LEGEND OF THE LIQUID SWORD) had overcome his fate as a bullied servant of Wudang by mastering Silkworm Skill and defeating the prick who framed him for the murder of the chief and took over the clan. So he becomes their de facto leader but instead of letting them give him a parade or something he immediately walks away with his crush Lun Wan Er (Leanne Liu, WHITE HAIR DEVIL LADY).
Honestly the returning is kind of a bummer, I liked the idea of him traveling around having adventures. Instead this continues the story of Wudang and their feud with Invincible Clan. If you remember, the maniacal Invincible Clan leader Dugu Wu Di (Alex Man, CHINA WHITE) had left for two years of seclusion to further advance his use of the clan’s secret technique Fatal Skill after defeating Wudang in three consecutive duels over 20 years. In this one he comes home and it’s like he woke up out of a coma, he has to hear all this shit that went on in the last act of part 1 with Yun Fei Yang coming out of a cocoon and shit. So Dugu goes to Wudang to demand a duel with our bastard and they don’t want to admit that their chief ghosted them so they act like he just went out for smokes or something, which gets them a week’s reprieve to try to find him. But oh by the way if anyone leaves Wudang during that time they will be killed on sight. That Dugu always has some hardcore stipulations to his offers. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alex Man, Chen Kuan-tai, Lau Siu-Kwan, Leanne Liu, ninjas, Norman Chui, Shaw Brothers
Posted in Reviews, Action, Fantasy/Swords, Martial Arts | 5 Comments »
Thursday, May 1st, 2025
THE LEGEND OF OCHI is a beautiful and imaginative PG-rated fantasy from A24. Since the number of friends I recommended it to this week that had never heard of it is higher than the number of people at the Saturday matinee I went to, I’m thinking there are limits to that company’s marketing powers. But future adults who remember seeing it in a theater will know they had cool parents. This one is special.
It was filmed “on location in the remote mountain villages of Transylvania” and other parts of Romania, set on the fictional island of Carpathia. Apparently it’s the early ‘90s, though the time doesn’t matter that much. Maxim (Willem Dafoe, LIGHT SLEEPER), who lives in a small village on the north side of the island, is obsessed with fighting off furry, ape-like creatures called Ochi, who live in the nearby mountains. He trains the local adolescent boys in riflery and leads them into the woods on night time hunts. This is not a situation where he’s the lone true believer and everybody else thinks he’s crazy – Ochi are a fact of Carpathian life. In the opening scene the troop encounters a group of them, gets attacked, shoots some of them, but not fatally. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: A24, David Longstreth, Emily Watson, Finn Wolfhard, Helena Zengel, Isaiah Saxon, Willem Dafoe
Posted in Reviews, Family, Fantasy/Swords | 6 Comments »