Highlander

We've had a lot of good posters so far.
This is not one of them.

Highlander (1986)
Dir. by Russell Mulcahy

Starring Christopher Lambert, Clancy Brown, Roxanne Hart and Sean Connery

[content warning: whitewashing]

Plot:

After recovering from being run through during a battle, Scottish clansman Connor MacLeod discovers that he is an Immortal, and can only be killed by having his head cut off. After receiving training from a fellow Immortal, he learns about the Gathering, a time in the future when all surviving Immortals will come together and duel until only one is left. Four hundred years later, the Gathering begins in New York City, and MacLeod must finally face off against the Kurgan, the Immortal who impaled him in his first battle centuries ago.

Nostalgia:

Probably my first exposure to the Highlander franchise was my father watching Highlander 2 on VHS when I was about 10 or so. I distinctly remember it because I liked the cool sword fights, but had absolutely no idea what was going on – a feeling that’s actually pretty common for that movie, as it turns out. I probably saw the original for the first time some time around 1994 or so, as I remember watching it on the tiny tube TV that I had in my bedroom, and that’s when I got it. I never did watch the TV show, but it was pretty popular among the Sci-Fi House denizens in college, judging by how often it was included in the weekly viewing lineup.

Review:

This is a case of a movie with a really great premise, in search of better filmmakers to produce it. The plot is made of pure B and cult movie gold: immortal warriors from various time periods and places hacking each other to bits in modern day New York. That it spawned three further theatrical releases, two direct-to-DVD entries and three TV series is testament to the awesomeness of the idea. It’s just a shame that the film is as messy and unfocused as it is.

French actor Christopher Lambert is simultaneously horrendously miscast and kind of perfect for the title role of Connor MacLeod. At no point did I ever buy him as Scottish, but I did buy him as someone who had lived in many different parts of the world, seen the horrors of war over and over, and would really just prefer to settle down and run his antique store in peace. In all of the scenes set in New York, he has this world-weary warrior vibe, like Hugh Jackman from Logan with a katana instead of claws. If the majority of the movie had been in present-day, I don’t think it would have been much of an issue.

Unfortunately, however, the first half of the movie is spent cutting back in forth, quite frequently, between Connor in the present and in 16th century Scotland. I found this story structure to be way more jarring than I remembered it to be. In fact, my memory of the movie seems to have recut the movie mostly in chronological order, with all of the Scottish sequences being together in a big chuck immediately after the initial fight in the parking lot. While the cutting back and forth prolongs the mystery of just what the heck is going on, it also makes it a lot harder to really get in a groove with the movie’s story-telling.

It also doesn’t help matters that the one major actor who actually has a Scottish accent, Sean Connery, was cast as MacLeod’s most definitely not Scottish mentor. Though MacLeod refers to him as a Spaniard, and he introduces himself with the rather awesome name of Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez, Connery’s character claims to be a two thousand year old Immortal from ancient Egypt. I really wish they’d have left it with him being an actual Spaniard, as A) Connery’s accent is about equally Spanish as Lambert’s is Scottish, so at least it would be consistent, and B) then I wouldn’t have to complain once again about Hollywood whitewashing. I’m not 100% sure what an actual pre-Ptolemaic Egyptian would have looked like, but I’m pretty positive it’s nowhere near as white as Sean Connery is.

While most of the casting and behind-the-camera decisions were definitely a mixed bag, there was at least one certified home run: Clancy Brown, as the villainous Kurgan. I find him absolutely perfect in the role of an immortal mass murderer, both in his D&D bad guy armor when he first appears, and his more punk rock look in the modern setting. This was the first thing I ever saw the veteran character actor in, though I probably heard that distinctive voice in Gargoyles or other animated voice-over roles. I’ve had a bit of a soft spot for him ever since, even though he’s frequently typecast in Kurgan-esque parts.

Another thing that totally works, and which might actually be the best thing to come out of the movie, is the soundtrack by Queen. They wrote several songs specifically for the movie, including now-classics “Princes of the Universe” and “Who Wants to Live Forever.” The former is so associated with the franchise that it was also used as the theme song to the TV show spinoff, which I was surprised to learn ran a whopping six seasons and 119 episodes when I looked it up just now. “Who Wants to Live Forever” also takes on a special poignancy, knowing that Freddie Mercury would be diagnosed with AIDS less than a year later. 

Highlander is very much a mixed bag, an excellent premise surrounded by some shoddy casting and filmmaking. Though the franchise would continue for well over a decade after, it would eventually peter out in the mid 2000s. It’s definitely one that I could see being remade or rebooted successfully, especially given the current wave of 80s nostalgia.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: C+

Stray Thoughts:

-I don’t know if it was just the transfer on the cheap 4-in-1 franchise DVD I borrowed from my brother, but the version I watched was extremely washed out and grainy, like it was on a VHS that had been copied a couple of times. I’m not going to dock it any points, though, as I don’t have a point of comparison to see if it was like that when it originally came out or not.

-The Kurgan assembles his sword like an assassin would a sniper rifle, by assembling it from multiple pieces. That includes the blade, which I’m pretty sure would break on impact if you tried something like that in real life.

-MacLeod’s sword is identified as both being a 1500-year-old katana, and being a Masamune (a detail I never caught before). Masamune was an actual Japanese swordsmith, renowned as the best ever, and many of his surviving blades are held as Japanese national treasures. However, he lived in the 13th and 14th centuries, a tad bit later than the sword was supposedly dated to.

Dragonslayer

Dragonslayer (1981)
Dir. by Matthew Robbins

Starring Peter MacNicol, Caitlin Clarke, Ralph Richardson and one impressive puppet

[content warning: human sacrifice, anti-religion]

Plot:

Tired of a twice-yearly lottery to select a virgin to sacrifice to the rampaging dragon Vermithrax, the citizens of Urland seek the aid of the wizard Ulrich. Before he can help, however, the king’s head knight insists on testing the wizard’s powers….by stabbing him in the chest. After the funeral, Ulrich’s apprentice, an inexperienced wizard-in-training named Galen, decides to attempt the mission himself, despite his lack of both magical and martial skills.

Nostalgia:

I caught bits and pieces of this movie on television at several points while I was a kid, but never managed to see the whole thing. That didn’t prevent me from constructing an entire head-canon narrative out of the disparate pieces, however, or from sharing this wholly imagined (and much more elaborate) version with my friends like it was something that actually existed. I was slightly embarrassed when I finally saw the entire movie from start to finish while in high school, and realized that it was pretty much nothing like the version I’d imagined (which, incidentally, bears more than a passing resemblance to the much later How to Train Your Dragon movies).

Review:

Prior to the late 1990s, Vermithrax Perjorative was the cinematic dragon. And while Draco from Dragonheart, and Smaug after him, may have replaced Vermithrax in the fantasy-filmgoing public’s minds, for many people (including Guillermo Del Toro and George R.R. Martin) Vermithrax remains definitive. She is the reason that this film lodged itself so firmly in my imagination as a kid, despite only having seen about 15 minutes of the movie. A quarter of the film’s budget went to her creation, and all of that money is up there on the screen.

I think Vermithrax is so effective in part because we don’t actually see her for a very long time. This movie is closely patterned after the Jaws style of monster movie, in that you only get brief glimpses and partial views of the creature until over halfway through the movie’s running time. They save the first full-body shot of the dragon for the climax, when Galen enters her lair to do battle solo, and comes face-to-face with the legendary creature. The audience sees the dragon for the first time at the same time that Galen does, maximizing the impact of the amazing special effects and allowing them to create two extended sequences of dragon action – one on the ground and one in mid-air – that might not have possible if they attempted to stretch their budget by showing more of the creature throughout the film.

I lead off with the dragon because Vermithrax is by far the best part of the movie, though Ralph Richardson is also a delight as the eccentric wizard Ulrich – a role which received top billing but which amounts to an extended cameo. The rest of the movie is, unfortunately, not as good. I wouldn’t say that I was ever outright bored by the plot leading up to the dragon fights, but the movie does seem to take forever to really get going. After the death of Ulrich in the first five minutes, the movie seems to take almost half an hour for Galen and the villagers to journey back home, a journey that despite a murder and a gender reveal is pretty uninteresting. Things pick up a bit when they introduce the asshole king, who throws Galen in a dungeon for trying to kill the dragon, confiscates his magic amulet to use in a lead-to-gold scheme, and lies to his daughter about removing her name from the biannual lottery to select a sacrifice.

I want to talk about that lottery for a bit, because that’s probably the most interesting part of the movie apart from the dragon. In many ways, Dragonslayer was intended as a subversion of the dominant tropes of fantasy films up to that point: the Arthurian idyll of knights in shining armor, veiled princesses in pointy hats, and honorable chivalry. In this, the king is a slimy asshole, and the knight openly takes pleasure in murdering innocents. When Galen attempts to use magic to bury the dragon in a landslide, the king imprisons him instead of rewarding him, giving a speech about how previous attempts to slay Vermithrax have only lead to more death and destruction in retribution. According to him, sacrificing two people to the dragon each year to keep it otherwise appeased is better than risking the lives of hundreds if it attacks the villages. And while the king is a jerkass, the jerkass has a point: when Vermithrax gets out from under the rubble, she does attack the villages, leading to an impromptu extra lottery in an attempt to placate her wrath.

In most fantasy that came before this (and, to be fair, in a lot of print and film fantasy that came after) the love interest would of course be the one selected in this lottery, leading Galen to attempt to rescue her. Valerian herself seems to expect it, and is quite surprised when another name is called instead. Her selection had actually been foreshadowed earlier, as Valerian spends the first part of the movie passing as male (the movie implies that this was done solely to avoid the lottery, and was not connected to her gender identity – not that anyone making the movie in 1981 was thinking about that at the time) before getting outed publicly once the dragon is assumed dead. But instead of Valerian, the princess’s name is called instead, her having rigged the lottery against herself to make up for all of the times that her name was secretly removed from the running. 

So instead of having to rescue Valerian despite the king attempting to kill her, Galen instead is sent by the king himself to stop his own ritual before his daughter can willingly go to her death. The vicious knight turns against the king, thinking that the sacrifice is the only way to save the citizens, and actually fights Galen not out of bloodlust, but out of a sense of duty to protect those who he’d previously expressed a desire to murder. And the princess, despite being cut loose by Galen and told to flee, walks into the dragon’s lair intentionally, determined to make the heroic sacrifice despite all of Galen’s efforts.

It's quite a bit darker than anything I can recall from fantasy movies prior to this, and in fact presages a bit the grimdark trend in fantasy literature, which would kick off in earnest with the publication of Glen Cook’s The Black Company a couple of years later. The sight of the princess’s body being gnawed on by hungry dragon babies is not something that I would expect from a PG Disney co-production (and in fact would help lead to the creation of Disney’s Touchstone Pictures banner for more mature live-action movies). This movie came out well before the PG-13 rating was created, but I can’t possibly see it being rated as anything less this days.

Dragonslayer is also interesting for a having a definite streak of anti-Christianity, something that I definitely wasn’t expecting and hadn’t remembered. Ian McDiarmid (of Emperor Palpatine fame) has a small role as a Christian missionary attempting to convert the villagers. When the dragon attacks the town, he tells them to have no fear, that the dragon is actually Satan, and that he will banish it back to Hell. His attempt to exorcise a fire-breathing dragon goes about as well as you’d expect. It’s implied several times throughout the film that the rise of Christianity is what is killing off magic, as both dragons and wizards are almost extinct, and the villager converts view the dragon’s death at the end as a wholly divine miracle, denying Galen and Ulrich any credit for their feat. The king is the one who takes public credit for the slaying, gently inserting his sword into the (rather disgusting) blown-up corpse. Galen and Valerian are left alive and together, but get no reward, no glory – again, in line with modern fantasy but very much a subversion of Arthurian tropes. 

Dragonslayer wasn’t a success at the box office, though it did get an Oscar nomination for its effects. Coming out only two weeks after Raiders of the Lost Ark (the movie it lost the Effects Oscar to) certainly didn’t help. Though it became a cult classic on home video, it seems to have been mostly forgotten with the rise of CG effects, which is a damn shame. Vermithrax could take Drogon in a fight any day of the week.

Nostalgia: B+
Rewatch: B+

Stray Thoughts:

-I bought a quartz pendant that looked very much like the amulet that Galen uses the first time I went to the Renaissance Festival, and wore it every time I went from then on. I probably still have it somewhere, though I don’t think I’ve seen it since high school.

-Vermithrax Perjorative is actually a really good name for a dragon. It loosely translates to “the Thracian worm that makes things worse.” The Game of Thrones producers actually included Vermithrax in Viserys’s list of Targaryen dragons as a tip of the cap to Dragonslayer.

-Microsoft Word apparently recognizes the word “Targaryen” without triggering spellcheck.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Dir. by Mel Stuart

Starring Gene Wilder, Peter Ostrum and Jack Albertson

[content warning: racism, a seriously traumatizing boat ride]

Plot:

When eccentric and reclusive candy company magnate Willy Wonka announces a contest for a lifetime supply of chocolate, a worldwide hunt begins for five Golden Tickets. Poor paperboy Charlie Bucket lucks into the final Ticket, and together with the other four winners he joins Wonka on a surreal tour through the fantasy land that is his factory.

Nostalgia:

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this was the first live-action (as in, non-Disney animated) musical that I ever saw. I say this because, while I’m sure that I saw Wizard of Oz while I was young, I have absolutely no memory of watching it, whereas I do have very concrete memories of seeing Willy Wonka as early as age 7. I don’t think I’ve seen it since the (rather terrible) Tim Burton remake came out in 2005, but I still remember pretty much all of the plot and major scenes.

Review:

This…is a really weird movie. It’s divided into two halves, which bear almost no resemblance to each other at all. And almost everything that anyone remembers is from the last forty minutes or so of the movie. However, I feel like that’s actually a strength of the movie. It’s as eccentric as its title character, and as Charlie says in the movie “and that’s not bad!”

Speaking of Willy Wonka, this is perhaps the definitive Gene Wilder performance. Sure, his collaborations with Mel Brooks resulted in some of the greatest comedies of all time, but whenever I picture Wilder in my head, he’s wearing a purple velvet frock coat. He has the perfect mix of playfulness and deadpan snark to pull off the role. Despite the fact that he doesn’t actually appear until halfway through the movie, Wilder dominates the screen from the moment he enters it. In fact, that entrance – in which he hobbles out onto the red carpet with a cane, slowly walks towards the crowd, before falling down and turning it into an athletic tumble – was actually Wilder’s idea in the first place. Although Charlie Bucket is the main character, and the book was in fact named Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, I feel that the movie’s name change was justified.

Being a musical, it helps to have songs that are actually memorable. And this one definitely has more than its share. I remembered every song in it but one (“Cheer Up Charlie”), and that one came back to me in full at the first line. “The Candy Man” was the song that was the pop hit at the time, but it’s Wonka’s song, “Pure Imagination,” that’s stuck in popular culture through the decades. An instrumental version of the song was used for the trailer to Ready Player One, despite being nearly a decade older than every other pop culture reference in the film, because it fits so well with the movie’s plot of “Willy Wonka, but a video game designer.”

The film is, of course, a morality play, with each of Charlie’s companions representing a different negative personality trait. This was very obvious to me even as a kid. What was less obvious was that Charlie himself represents one: envy. He’s first introduced staring longingly through a candy store window at all of the other kids enjoying treats that he can’t afford. He gets mocked by his teacher for not participating in the Golden Ticket contest, even though his lack of participation is not by choice, but rather an economic necessity for his family. And when he initially believes that the contest is over, he sinks into a depression, having defined his worth by his ability to win the contest and now believing himself to be even more of a failure than before. Unlike the other children, however, Charlie is actually able to conquer this trait. It is his personal sacrifice at the end, returning the Gobstopper to Wonka even though he could sell it for a lot of money, which ultimately wins him the contest.

In fact, the entire movie contains a whole lot of what TV Tropes calls “parental bonus.” Pretty much everything Wonka says contains a reference to a famous work of literature, something that most definitely went completely over my head as a child. I also missed a whole lot of the social satire of the first half of the movie, especially the innuendo of the computer programmer telling his machine “exactly what it can do with a lifetime supply of chocolate” after it refuses to help him win the contest.

Finally, we have to bring up that boat sequence. Where the hell did that come from? I most definitely remembered it from way back. In fact, I’d be surprised if anyone who saw this as a child didn't. It might be the most inexplicably terrifying sequence in an otherwise perfectly fine children’s film ever made. And I love it. Wilder’s increasingly frantic monologue, which ends with him screaming at the audience in a tight close-up, is the best single distillation of Wilder’s film persona. That none of the other actors were told about it in advance, and therefore gave perfectly realistic reactions, just makes the scene better.

Roald Dahl himself reportedly hated the adaptation, though reports differ somewhat on the degree of this dislike. Most of the disagreement seems to have hinged on the producers re-writing the script behind his back, which I guess is a reasonable complaint. He also hated “Pure Imagination,” however, which makes me less inclined to sympathize with his side. The adaptation also cleared up some of the very unfortunate racial aspects of the book, as the Oompa Loompas were originally written as explicitly African, which would make the already patronizing tone of Wonka’s “rescue” of them even more uncomfortable.

This is one of the key movies from my early childhood, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t be objective about it even if I tried. I have a niece who will be turning three in a couple weeks, and I’m looking forward to introducing her to it. I might wait another year or two, though. I don’t think she’s quite ready for the boat scene yet.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: A

Stray Thoughts:

-“Pure Imagination” wasn’t even nominated for the Best Song Oscar that year. While I don’t think it would have beaten the Shaft theme, which won, it’s certainly better than three of the other nominees, none of which I think I’d ever heard before.

Clash of the Titans

Clash of the Titans (1981)
Dir. by Desmond Davis

Starring Harry Hamlin, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith and Burgess Meredith

Plot:

A retelling of the Greek myth of Perseus: the son of Zeus, the infant Perseus and his mother are cast into the sea by his grandfather, the king of Argos, whose kingdom is destroyed by Zeus in retribution. Surviving on an island, the now-adult Perseus is transported to the mainland by the goddess Thetis, where he becomes involved in a back-and-forth power struggle between her and his father. He falls for and rescues the princess Andromeda, but due to Thetis’s rage must embark on a quest to retrieve the head of Medusa before the princess is to be sacrificed to the Kraken.

Nostalgia:

Even before I saw any of Ray Harryhausen’s movies, I was really into Greek myths as a kid. In third grade, I bought a big book of world myths from a library book sale, and read it cover to cover. I’m not sure if I saw Clash of the Titans or Jason and the Argonauts first, but I loved both of them growing up. We had both on VHS, but Jason was on the back half of an SP tape with another movie, so Clash of the Titans was the easier one for repeat viewings. I actually brought the tape in to class in eighth grade for us to watch in English class when we did a mythology unit. I’ve only seen it once in the last decade, though, back when the remake came out in 2010.

Review:

If you’d asked me when this movie was made, if I hadn’t known any better I would have guessed late 1960s or early 1970s. It really doesn’t feel like a movie that came out four years post-Star Wars, and the same day as Raiders of the Lost Ark. Titans has much more in common with the Biblical epics of the 50s/60s, or the live-action Disney adventure films of the era, than the fast-paced, visceral thrills of Indiana Jones. 

More than the special effects (which we’ll get to in a moment), it’s actually the acting and direction which make this seem like so much of an old-fashioned film. The movie is very methodically paced, with long sequences without much action or dialogue. The acting is also very stilted and theatrical (which is no wonder, given that Sir Laurence Olivier and Dame Maggie Smith play Zeus and Thetis). Harry Hamlin in particular is spectacularly uninteresting as Perseus, and his love interest isn’t any better. She literally spends the first half of her screen time in a hypnotized haze, and most of the rest of her role is spend as the prototypical damsel-in-distress, chained to a rock awaiting the Kraken. At least Burgess Meredith, as Perseus’s ally and advisor Ammon, is clearly having fun with the role, hamming it up as a Greek poet and playwright who gives every utterance an over-the-top exuberance, as if he were playing for an audience at all times.

Jon Snow called, he wants his hair back

The movie does have one thing going for it, however, that justifies the cost of admission, and that is Ray Harryhausen. Yes, yes, the stop-motion special effects looked super dated and cheesy, even when the movie first premiered. The stop-motion work that Phil Tippett was doing for ILM at the time, such as the AT-AT walkers from Empire Strikes Back, represented a significant step beyond what Harryhausen was producing with his traditional animation techniques, which dated all the way back to Willis O’Brien and King Kong. Even Harryhausen himself claimed that his work on Titans was far from his best. However, they do mesh really well with the old-fashioned storytelling on display throughout the film. And there’s one sequence in particular that blows everything else in the movie out of the water, and perhaps represents the single most impressive display of stop-motion ever committed to film. 

I’m talking, of course, about Medusa. Three quarters of the way through the film, Perseus and the handful of redshirts that have survived with him so far have finally reached the temple where Medusa resides. He has to retrieve her head in order to save Andromeda, but making eye contact with her will turn any mortal into stone. What follows is a tense cat-and-mouse game in a dimly-lit, statue-filled interior, as Medusa picks off his men one by one with a combo of arrows and petrification, until only Perseus is left. It’s by far the best sequence in the movie, and is even more impressive for the appearance of Medusa herself. In the actual myths, and in most previous depictions of Medusa, she is a regular human, sometimes with wings, with snakes for hair. Here, the snakes-for-hair is retained, but Harryhausen goes further, turning her into a half-snake, with a serpentine tail instead of legs. It’s a look that would influence many a fantasy writer and video game designer, and has arguably become “the” appearance for Medusa in popular culture in the last few decades.

It was also a sequence that was fiendishly difficult to animate. In addition to the challenge of animating serpentine movement and all of those independently-moving snakes on her head, Harryhausen had the added challenge of doing so on a set that was dimly lit by flickering torches. He actually managed to realistically portray firelight on Medusa’s body, changing with every second as she moves in and around the columns and statues. I have absolutely no idea how he managed to pull it off, and I’m in awe of the talent that he displayed during this sequence.

Most of the movie is a very mixed bag. It’s a slow movie that seems to pad out its running time, with mediocre acting by anyone without a Sir or Dame in front of their name. But it also has one of the best old-school effects sequences of all time, and is definitely worth watching for that alone. I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history of special effects, or in Greek myths, though it might be one that’s okay to half-watch while playing a video game or something, and pay attention when it gets to the good parts.

Nostalgia: A-
Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-The 2010 remake, despite taking full advantage of thirty years advancement in special effects, is…not good. Like, at all. It was quickly converted to 3-D on short notice due to the popularity of Avatar, and the result was a very muddy, difficult to watch theatrical experience. It seems to exist mainly to create a meme of Liam Neeson bellowing “Release the Kraken!” 

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991)
Dir. by Kevin Reynolds

Starring Kevin Costner, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Alan Rickman and Morgan Freeman

[content warning: Crusades, religious persecution, witchcraft]

Plot:

Robin of Locksley, a Crusader imprisoned in Jerusalem, escapes with the help of the Moorish prisoner Azeem. Returning to England, he finds that the Sheriff of Nottingham has branded his father a devil-worshipper and seized his lands. Banding together with a group of forest outlaws, he and Azeem set out on a campaign to thwart the Sheriff’s attempt to stage a coup and overthrow King Richard.

Nostalgia:

When I was eight years old, my father was transferred from America to the U.K. for business. It was in the middle of the school year, so instead of immediately enrolling me in the British school system my parents held me out of school until the next school year began. We spent six months exploring Britain instead, including stops at Nottingham and the actual Sherwood Forest. That also happened to be the year that I read The Hobbit for the first time, and the two combined to firmly cement my love of fantasy literature for life. The next year, while we were still living north of London, this movie came out in theaters. It was the right movie at the right time. It might not be the best cinematic version of Robin Hood, but it’s definitely the one that I’ve seen the most times.

Review:

The cinematic history of Robin Hood is a long and peculiar tale. It seems that every 10-15 years there’s a new version of the story that comes along, with pretensions of being the “definitive” Robin Hood. Personally, I think that ship sailed back in the 1930s with the Errol Flynn version, as that movie helped define the look and feel of all subsequent Robin Hood retellings. However, each generation definitely puts its own spin on things, from the 1970s furry version to the 2010 Ridley Scott movie that kills off King Richard in the first ten minutes.

The 1991 Kevin Costner version was very distinctly a movie made for the tail-end of the 1980s action movie boom. It’s got explosions, horse chases, and the villain from Die Hard. Robin Hood even gets flung over the walls of a castle with a catapult! Kevin Costner seems to attempt an English accent for about twenty minutes, before just giving it up and playing it as an American. The movie was a ginormous financial success, becoming the second-highest grossing film that year at the world-wide box office, but a lot of critics had disdain for it. It got nominated for two Razzies, and it’s been fashionable to hate on the movie ever since, like a forest-bound Waterworld (which coincidentally had both the same lead actor and director as this).

I'm pretty sure 1100s-era black powder isn't going to do THAT

I personally think that the hate for this movie is extremely misplaced. I’m of the opinion that it’s the best cinematic Robin Hood movie made in the last forty-five years, and probably the best fantasy movie of the early 90s. And yes, I just called Prince of Thieves a fantasy. This version of the Sheriff has a fortune-telling, Satan-worshipping witch as an advisor, whose role is even more significant in the extended cut of the movie that I watched for this review. Her presence, and the fact that the England of Prince of Thieves resembles Westeros more than it does the actual 12th century England, puts the movie squarely in the fantasy camp for me.

A large portion (perhaps even the majority) of my love for this movie can be laid at the feet of two actors. The first is Alan Rickman as the Sheriff. This may be the most over-the-top villain performance ever committed to celluloid, and I unabashedly love every second that he’s in the frame. Rickman is clearly having the time of his life playing the villain, and this movie, coming so soon after Die Hard, is probably what earned him his reputation as one of the best villain performers of his generation. He steals the movie in the same way that Jack Nicholson’s Joker did to the first Batman movie, which is probably why the next major Robin Hood movie after this one downplayed the Sheriff role so much that you could be forgiven for not even noticing that the character was in the movie.

No scenery left unchewed

The other actor is Morgan Freeman, playing the new addition to the Merry Men, the Moor Azeem. This wasn’t the first Robin Hood adaptation to feature a Muslim character in the ensemble. The British TV show Robin of Sherwood featured a Saracen named Nasir a good five years earlier. But Freeman’s performance left so much of an impression that it’s hard to imagine a new Robin Hood production that doesn’t include the character, especially for American audiences that may not have been as familiar with the origins of the Robin Hood legend. While Jamie Foxx may be playing Little John in the new adaptation coming out later this year, his appearance is clearly modelled after Freeman’s in Prince of Thieves. 

I think it is especially significant that not only does Freeman play a black Muslim, two minority groups that until this point had been woefully underrepresented in Robin Hood films (and in the case of PoC, in fantasy films in general), but that he is also perhaps the most positively-portrayed member of the Merry Men. This is even more interesting in contrast to the movie’s take on Friar Tuck, and the interactions between the two men that make up a significant side plot in the movie. Tuck’s always been portrayed as a bit of a bon vivant: a great lover of food and drink, sort of a “boisterous bruiser” type. Prince of Thieves' Tuck, as portrayed by Michael McShane, goes a little bit farther than that, however. He is first introduced singing a ribald drinking song while he gorges himself on wine. When he meets Robin Hood, he latches on to Robin’s leg and begins to chew upon it, forcing the remaining men of Robin’s band to pry the inebriated cleric off him. He is rude, unshaven, and slovenly at all times, and is pretty much an altogether poor example of a clergyman.

Yet, his position as a member of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church gives him an air of moral superiority which colors his judgment. He cannot see the positive traits of Azeem, his humility and spirituality. He can only see that he is a Muslim, whom the Pope has declared to be the sworn enemies of Christianity. Tuck blindly assumes that a heathen that does not follow God in the same fashion as a Christian could not possess knowledge that a Christian does not, despite the fact that the Muslim civilization of the twelfth century was the most technologically advanced of the time. He cannot see past this us-versus-them mentality, saying that “You know nothing of our God”, even though, as Azeem points out, Muslims and Christians both worship the Jewish God. This is why Tuck initially refuses to allow Azeem to attempt to save the life of Little John’s wife. Azeem’s success in performing the surgery brings about a marked change in Tuck’s attitude towards the Moor. He is now humbled before his Muslim counterpart, stating “I may be Godly, but I know now that I am not worldly.” As a final gesture of contrition and reconciliation for his prior behavior, he offers to share his precious beer with Azeem. Of course, Azeem must decline, as he holds to the Muslim prescription against alcohol. However, the two men become friends from this point on, and even team up together for the infiltration of Nottingham at the end of the movie. 

Okay, is it obvious yet that I wrote about this movie for my Master’s thesis? Sure, the movie does some things wrong. Maybe a lot of things wrong (just ask anyone who’s at all familiar with the geography of Great Britain to explain how Hadrian’s Wall is within walking distance of Nottingham). But it also does a whole lot right, and really shouldn’t be written off as so many people seem to have done in the last couple of decades.

Nostalgia: A
Rewatch: A-

Stray Thoughts:

-In case anyone’s wondering, my thesis was about how Hollywood had portrayed Arabs and Muslims historically, and how that portrayal was affected by 9/11.

-Seriously, it’s not just any old wall that they’re walking along. They used Sycamore Gap, only probably the single most famous section of the Wall, and maybe the most-photographed single tree in the U.K.

-The music for this movie, by the late Michael Kamen, is truly amazing. It’s one of the best movie scores of the 90s in my opinion. And the Bryan Adams song, cheesy though it may be, is also my mother’s favorite song. So I can’t really complain about that either.

Masters of the Universe

Masters of the Universe (1987)
Dir. by Gary Goddard

Starring Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella and Courteney Cox

Plot:

Galactic warrior He-Man and his allies find themselves trapped on modern-day Earth after a battle with their sworn enemy Skeletor on the planet Eternia. They must enlist the help of two Earth teenagers to recover their portal-creating device and return to Eternia before Skeletor can use the power of Castle Greyskull to become a god and rule the universe.

Nostalgia:

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was my absolute favorite Saturday-morning cartoon when I was six or seven years old. I knew every character by name, and had all of their action figures. I don’t recall seeing the live-action adaptation at the time, though given my age that’s not too surprising. I know I saw it well before high school, though, as even then I knew of its reputation for being a giant turkey of a film.

Review:

This movie REALLY wants to be the Star Wars of the mid-80s. It’s got the epic sets, epic galaxy-saving swordfights, epic music….but what it doesn’t have is an epic budget. Or filmmaking talent. But it does try, it really does, to be more than its source material, a cartoon produced for the sole purpose of selling toys. And I’m actually surprised on this rewatch how close it comes to succeeding at its ambitions.

First, the bad. The plot premise is definitely pretty silly overall. Three space warriors, only one of whom has an actual name (they retain Man-at-Arms’s name from the toys/cartoon, which is more of a title than a name), have to suffer through a Star Trek IV-esque fish-out-of-water comedy plot while stuck in suburbia on Earth. I guess they decided that there had to be teen protagonists for the audience to identify with (another nod to Star Wars), even though the cartoon didn’t have them, or Earth for that matter. It doesn’t help that I can’t watch Dolph Lundgren play a shirtless, sword-wielding warrior named He-Man with a straight face. He definitely looks the part of the cartoon hero, though his acting is also probably the worst in the film. It doesn’t help that the script doesn’t give him a whole lot to do during the middle hour of the picture.

These are not the pecs you're looking for

The Earthlings are a bit better, played by a pre-fame Courteney Cox and Robert Duncan McNeil, both already looking too old to play teenagers a decade before Friends or Voyager. And James Tolkan pretty much plays exactly the same character as he did in Back to the Future, this time as a cop instead of a school principal. There’s also a plot contrivance of Cox’s parents having recently died in a plane crash which feels tacked on solely to provide a way for the villains to trick her into giving them the Cosmic Key, in a scene that is literally, beat for beat, the same as a scene from Spaceballs, even more noticeable for me having watched them back-to-back.

So yeah, the plot is ridiculous, and the acting of most of the leads ranges from so-so to flat out bad. So why, then, did I say that the movie comes close to actually being a success?

Two words: Frank Langella.

His Skeletor is one of the most gloriously over-the-top, scene-chewing villains I’ve ever seen. It’s obvious that he’s having a blast in the role, even under a heavy robe and facial makeup. The opening and closing 15 minutes, which are set on Eternia and feature him much more heavily than the Earth sequences, are head and shoulders above the rest of the movie. I wish the entire thing had been set on Eternia, as I think that the movie would have been much stronger for it and would have played more like something like Willow for me (it even has Billy Barty, the Nelwyn wizard from Willow, in a significant supporting role).

Unfortunately, even if they’d have wanted to they wouldn’t have had the budget. Masters of the Universe was produced by Cannon Films, whose modus operandi was to be an action movie equivalent to Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. They’d option rejected B-movie scripts for pennies, put them into production quickly, and then over-market and over-hype the results hoping to get a huge opening-day gross before people realized that they’d been had. Most of their movies were made on shoestring budgets, and this one was no different. They spent more than half of the budget on the elaborate Castle Greyskull set, and then completely ran out of money before they could film the climactic swordfight between He-Man and Skeletor. The director had to shoot the ending on his own dime, the weekend before they were going to demolish the set, which is why the whole fight is done without major lighting (though I’d always assumed that it was to hide all of the scenery that Frank Langella had chewed up previously).

So, while this definitely wasn’t a good movie by most definitions, I found myself enjoying it a lot more than I had actually expected to based on my memories of it. I’d say it’s worth a watch, for Frank Langella if nothing else.

Nostalgia: C-
Rewatch: C+

Stray Thoughts:

-Langella is actually on record as naming Skeletor as one of his favorite roles in his long acting career. Dolph Lundgren, on the other hand, likes to pretend that Masters of the Universe never happened.

-Embarrassing He-Man Related Story Time! When I was four years old, my mother took me to a movie theater that was playing Pinocchio on a Saturday morning. The theater was apparently completely full. When Pinocchio gets swallowed by the whale at the end, I jumped up onto the back of my seat, and shouted “I’ll save you, Pinocchio! I have the power!” in my best He-Man voice. She snuck me out of the emergency exit about 20 seconds later.

Red Sonja

It’s telling that Arnold’s only in the movie for
about half an hour, yet he’s larger on the poster
than the actual lead

Red Sonja (1985)

Dir. by Richard Fleischer

Starring Brigitte Nielsen, Sandahl Bergman and Arnold Schwarzenegger

[content warning: sexual assault, evil lesbians trope]

Plot:

 A female warrior is tasked by her dying sister to recover and destroy a power magical artifact that has been stolen by an evil queen, before its power grows out of control and it destroys the world.  Along the way, she is joined by a deposed prince, his servant, and Conan the Barbarian Kalidor of Hyrkania.

Nostalgia:

This is one that we had taped off of TV sometime in the early 90s.  I watched it a couple times, but it never really caught my imagination the way even something like Beastmaster did.  I included it in a bad movie marathon that I ran in college, but I believe that was the last time I’ve seen it before this viewing.

Review:

As I discussed back in my Beastmaster review, the unexpected success of Conan the Barbarian in 1982 kicked off a sword and sorcery movie boom that lasted until the middle of the decade.  While The Beastmaster might have been the first movie out of the gate during that boom, Red Sonja just about represents the last gasp of the genre, at least for the major Hollywood studios.  It was a certified bomb at the box office, making less than half of its production budget.  While there would be fantasy films released theatrically after this (Labyrinth, Legend, The Princess Bride), there wouldn’t be another medieval-set action/fantasy movie like this until Willow, three years later.

Other than possible genre fatigue, I blame the end of the movie boom on the movies not actually being any good.  Red Sonja is an excellent example.  This movie, frankly, sucks.  It’s only 90 minutes long, yet I found myself getting bored halfway through, and was actually struggling to remain awake by the end.  It had a higher budget than Conan the Barbarian, but looks significantly cheaper. It’s as if they blew 75% of the budget on getting Arnold (who’s only actually in the movie for maybe five minutes before the halfway mark), and had to skimp on everything else as a result. 

Okay, they had one set that made decent use of a low budget. It's still lit terribly, though.

That presumably includes all of the non-Arnold actors, as everyone else is universally terrible.  And when Arnold Schwarzenegger is the best actor in your movie, you’ve got problems.  Brigitte Nielsen, who plays Sonja, had never acted before this, and was discovered by the producers while modeling in Italy.  She was only cast a bare eight weeks before production began, which isn’t a lot of time for an acting crash course.  She’d go on to have a respectable career as a B-movie actress, but she’s extremely wooden and stiff here.  While Nielsen was a beginner actress, Sandahl Bergman doesn’t really have an excuse.  She went from winning a Golden Globe for Best New Actress in Conan to a (deserved) Razzie Award nomination here for her turn as the evil Queen Gedren.  And child actor Ernie Reyes Jr. turns in one of the most annoying performances of the 80s as the deposed Prince Tarn. 

It’s Sir Legally-Distinct-From-Any-Previous-Character-I’ve-Played!

Speaking of the queen, let’s talk about her characterization, especially its use of a particularly annoying and noxious trope.  Namely, she’s an Evil Lesbian, and it’s implied that being a lesbian is part of what makes her evil.  She’s introduced at the beginning of the movie when she sexually assaults the young Sonja, and then orders Sonja’s gang rape and the murder of her family when Sonja resists and injures her face.  Later on, during their end-of-film confrontation, Gedren claims that the destruction of the world is of less consequence than the scar Sonja left on her cheek.  Even Sonja, for all of her badass warrior independence, has still sworn an oath to not have sex with any man that can’t beat her at combat – which leads pretty much every male with a sword in the movie to challenge her to a fight in order to get her into bed. 

So yeah, between the bad dialogue, worse acting, boring action, cheap sets and morally dubious sexual content, there’s very little to recommend this movie.  It’s definitely not one of those movies that deserves a so-bad-it’s-good watch.  However, the concept of Red Sonja itself is one that I could see working, especially in a post-Fury Road/Wonder Woman action environment.  80s remakes are en vogue right now, so how about this one?  It couldn’t be much worse.

Nostalgia: C+

Rewatch: F

Stray Thoughts:

-It’s billed as being based on a character created by Robert Howard, the writer of Conan, but that’s not really true.  It’s actually based on the Marvel Comics character (making this actually a comic book movie), who was a composite character compiled from several Howard side characters.

-Arnold himself considers this the worst movie he’s ever been in.  He’s been quoted as saying “when my kids get out of line, they're sent to their room and forced to watch Red Sonja ten times.”

-There’s one scene that I definitely don’t remember from our VHS.  At one point, Queen Gedren has her court wizard use a magic mirror to spy on Sonja, but instead the image of a naked belly dancer comes up.  It’s literally a fantasy version of the computer tech caught looking at porn during a meeting, and seems like it comes from a more modern parody film (say, Your Highness) rather than from anything in the 80s.

The Flight of Dragons

As a TV movie, it didn't have a poster. But I like this 
homemade one by Ursula Lopez on Redbubble

The Flight of Dragons (finished in 1982, not released until 1986)

Dir. by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass

Starring James Earl Jones, John Ritter and Harry Morgan

[content warning: burning to death, icky romantic behavior towards a child]

Plot:

Faced with the weakening of magic caused by the rise of scientific reasoning, three of the four great wizards attempt to seal off the realms of magic from the rest of the world, only to be opposed by the Red Wizard Ommadon.  To defeat him and save magic, they recruit a knight, a dragon, and a man of science from the 20^th century, Peter Dickinson.  However, before the quest can begin, a magical mishap causes Dickinson’s mind to be placed in the body of the dragon.  The quest must go on, though, so Dickinson has to save magic and learn to be a dragon at the same time.

Nostalgia:

My relationship with this movie and its source material is an interesting one.  It was originally produced as a TV movie, and that’s how I first saw it, multiple times on cable somewhere between the ages of nine and twelve.  I never managed to catch it at the beginning to tape it on VHS, though, and over time I completely forgot about it.  Flash forward to my junior year in high school, and I’m an avid reader of fantasy novels.  A friend in one of my English classes recommends a book to me, The Dragon and the George by Gordon R. Dickson, and lets me borrow a copy.  Through the first hundred pages or so, I had a growing sense of familiarity with it, but couldn’t place where I was recognizing it from.  Then I got to the sandmirks scene, and I suddenly remembered.  While the movie had billed itself as being adapted from the book of the same name by Peter Dickinson, the actual plot of the movie was from the Dickson novel I was reading.

Review:

This is the first request I’m doing for a review, and it actually turns out to be a movie that I probably should have had on my list to begin with.  The story I related above is actually one of the “OMG” moments as a fantasy reader that I remember the most strongly.  I’ll get into the differences between the book(s) and the movie more later on, but for now I’d like to focus on the actual movie itself.

Despite being written and produced by an American production company, Rankin/Bass (most famous for their stop-motion Christmas movies), it has a lot more in common visually with 1980s anime.  Of course, this is because Rankin/Bass farmed the actual animation out to the Japanese firm Topcraft, which also did the animated Hobbit movie and The Last Unicorn (Topcraft itself would go bankrupt in 1985, and was bought by Hayao Miyazaki and renamed Studio Ghibli.  Yes, that Studio Ghibli).   Like the two previous projects, Flight of Dragons has a highly distinctive style that immediately sets it apart from a lot of the other animation being aired in America at the time.  It also has a top-notch voice cast.  Other than a couple cases where Bob McFadden’s British accent noticeably slips, I enjoyed pretty much everyone.  And you can never go wrong casting James Earl Jones as an evil wizard.

Speaking of the wizards, they were actually surprisingly diverse given the era that the movie was produced.  While the main wizard character, Carolinus, is a white Gandalf type, the two other good wizards are Chinese and ambiguously brown (though coded as Middle Eastern by his costume).  The movie also scores a couple of points on the gender front, with a badass female archer joining the quest and her gender never being called into question for it.  Unfortunately, however, this is undercut quite a bit by the other female character, Carolinus’s adoptive daughter Melisande (and yes, I really want to put an R in there every time I type it).  Her only purpose in the film seems to be serving as a love interest.  Not only does she have a love-at-first-sight plot with Dickinson, a trope I hate, but there’s an even ickier bit between her and the knight, Sir Orrin, that I’d completely forgot about.  While relating his backstory to Dickinson, he tells about meeting Melisande for the first time when she was about five, and immediately vowing to fall in love with and marry her, “when she was old enough, of course.”  Umm….how about no?  In fact, can we just take that whole conversation and burn it, please?

This feels like one of those joke contests where you have to
come up with a funny caption

This movie is an amalgamation of two very different sources: a speculative non-fiction book called The Flight of Dragons, in which a biologist attempts to theorize how the standard mythological dragon traits (breathing fire, etc.) could have evolved to work biologically, and a fantasy novel by Gordon R. Dickson, in which a medieval history doctoral candidate and his fiancée get transported to a fantasy version of 13^th century England, and he accidentally ends up in the body of a dragon.  The two have very little to do with each other, and are a fairly awkward fit together.  Most of the Flight of Dragons content comes in a couple of scenes in the middle, where the narrative comes to a screeching halt while Dickinson learns how dragons work.  I don’t know why they didn’t just adapt The Dragon and the George straight through, as they’ve already got about 80% of the plot present.  Maybe they thought the character (called Jim Eckert in the book), wouldn’t be as relatable to the target kid audience if he was in his 30s with a fiancée?  If that’s so, why then have the entire final confrontation hinge on Dickinson’s knowledge of science and mathematics, with him spouting off multiple theorems and equations in rapid fire?  For being aimed at kids, there’s sure a lot of five dollar words being thrown around.

The movie is also incredibly dark for a kids’ movie.  Not quite Don Bluth dark, but there was a lot higher body count than I was remembering.  The final confrontation ends with a near total party kill, with only Dickinson surviving.  Yes, they all got brought back at the end, but that doesn’t discount the scene of Sir Orrin literally getting set on fire, then slaying the evil dragon that did it while he burns to death.  There’s also a scene where Dickinson-as-dragon and his elderly dragon mentor get incredibly drunk at an inn and sing drinking songs together, while Sir Orrin and Danielle the archer head off to a room holding hands after she proclaims it could be their last night alive.

Don’t know why scene didn’t give me nightmares as a kid

So I did enjoy this rewatch, but couldn’t help spending most of the running time comparing it to the book.  It’s a pretty good kids’ movie (what nine-year-old wouldn’t want to turn into a dragon?), but I’d actually recommend anyone interested to actually skip the film – it’s pretty hard to track down at the moment, having only ever been released on DVD as a burn-on-request title from Amazon – and read the book instead.  It’s got pretty much all of the scenes that this one does, plus a better ending (which is whited-out below for the spoiler-conscious).

Nostalgia: A-

Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-[ending spoilers for The Dragon and the George - highlight to read]:  In the movie, Peter Dickinson rejects magic and returns to the 20th century, with the Princess Melisande deciding to join him.  In the book, Jim Eckert, a soon-to-be-married academic trying to live on student loans and his fiancee's teaching assistant salary, says "Screw that, I have a castle!" and stays in fantasyland.  He becomes human again, and inherits the lands and title of an evil knight he'd defeated as a dragon.  There are actually half a dozen more books, where he becomes a magical apprentice under Carolinus, learns to become a dragon at will, and is called into service fighting for the king in France.

-They included pretty much every character from the book, except for my favorite: Welsh archer Dafydd ap Hwyel.  I guess two archers would have been too much for them?

-There was talk a couple of years ago about making a live-action sequel to the movie, based on the second book in the series, The Dragon Knight.  I’m sure it’s been dropped by now, since I would have heard something about it otherwise, but it’s something I wish had been picked up.

Cutest. Dragon. Ever.

Ladyhawke

Ladyhawke (1985)

Dir. by Richard Donner

Starring Matthew Broderick, Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer

Plot:

A fast-talking thief escapes from a medieval French dungeon, only to be waylaid by a swordsman who wants his help to break back in.  Over the course of their travel, the thief learns of the curse affecting the swordsman and his lover: he turns into a wolf at night, and she turns into a hawk by day.

Nostalgia:

This is another 80s fantasy film that I grew up with, that I haven’t seen in ages now.  I remember watching it a lot on VHS, though we never got the DVD for it, and I probably haven’t seen it since the late 90s.  I do remember watching it once in high school, specifically because I watched it in a double feature with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and it was my first time seeing the latter.

Review:

In the wake of the success of the Lord of the Rings films, Hollywood’s fantasy output seemed to narrow down to two subgenres: world-shaking epic fantasy blockbusters, or YA adaptations with young protagonists.  Sometimes the two would cross with each other, resulting in things like Eragon.  In most cases, these were big-budget potential franchise starters, with copious CG and action writ large.

However, Hollywood used to produce a much different sort of fantasy film.  Prior to the 90s CG revolution, which helped to make secondary-world fantasy like LotR more feasible, a good portion of the fantasy movies made were essentially medieval dramas with a couple of wizards or dragons thrown in.  Conan the Barbarian and The Beastmaster, for all of their Bronze Age grandeur, are essentially the story of one man using his sword to survive, and accidentally falling into some semblance of a quest in the second half of the film.  Even in The Princess Bride the stakes are personal ones: Buttercup’s life, and Inigo’s revenge.  No giant clash of armies, no apocalypse to avert, no evil warlock with plans for world domination.

Ladyhawke is very much a part of this tradition, and possibly one of its finest examples.  It’s essentially a cursed love triangle, played out on the backdrop of 13^th century France.  Other than some nameless henchmen, there are only seven significant speaking roles in the whole movie, and most of it is shot outdoors on location, with the occasional ruin or inn thrown in.  It’s a very small, intimate film, almost entirely unlike modern fantasy.  In fact, the “fantasy” aspects of the movie are extremely limited, being mainly restricted to the titular curse and a fortuitously timed eclipse at the climax.  If it took place in a modern setting, I’d say it was more magical realism than fantasy.

Now, all of this isn’t to say that the movie isn’t any good in comparison to modern fantasy.  In fact, I enjoyed it quite a lot.  Matthew Broderick in particular was quite amusing, as the escaped thief who keeps up a running dialogue with God about his attempts to reform and the mixed messages that fate is sending him.  It’s not quite the fourth-wall breaking that occurs in Ferris Bueller, but it provides some levity in an otherwise heavy story.  I also enjoyed Rutger Hauer as the taciturn Navarre, single-mindedly fixated on killing the bishop that cursed him even when a way to break the curse is presented to him.  I’m pretty sure he couldn’t actually throw his zweihander like a javelin, however, something he does more than once.

That...is not how you use a two-handed sword

While I’d say that most of the film holds up quite well (and Broderick’s more modern-sounding character is actually ahead of his time), there’s definitely one aspect that immediately dates it, and rather badly at that: the score.  Written in part by Alan Parsons, it’s one of the most 80s-taculur pieces of synthesizer prog rock I’ve ever heard.  The main theme sounds like the intro to an NES Mega Man game.  There’s some token cues with more traditional orchestral score, but these are few and far between.  Broderick’s dialogue didn’t manage to take me out of the movie, but the music almost did.

My other major complaint is that this is a movie whose plot hinges around two characters who transform into animals daily, and yet there’s no actual transformation sequence in the movie.  It always happens offscreen, the closest we get being some blown-out closeups of Michelle Pfeiffer’s face with some fluttering wings superimposed over top.  Since this is the central magical conceit of the film, it's definitely a major missed opportunity.  Come on, Donner!  Your budget was higher than either American Werewolf in London OR The Thing.  You’ve gotta give us something!

Ahem…Anyway, I think that for the most part the movie’s still an enjoyable watch.  A little dated in some ways, a lot dated in others, but overall I’m positive on it.  I still prefer Willow, but it’s definitely better quality than some of the other fantasy films I’ve watched for his project (I’m looking at you, Krull).

Nostalgia: B-

Rewatch: B-

Stray Thoughts:

-This is one of the only movies I can think of where Rutger Hauer doesn’t play a villain.  He does bring some of those sinister overtones to Navarre, though, especially in the early going before you learn about the curse.

-You know, the movie spends over a third of its running time before you find out about the curse.  Maybe they shouldn’t have put the reveal in the title.