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DRAGON STORM (2004)
Angel Boris...but no nudity? What?!?!? First things first - the dragons look great. Not like Reign Of Fire great, or that last Harry Potter movie great, but probably better than any movie with less than a nine-digit budget since Dragonslayer. Shame about the rest of the movie then, which gets off to a good start and loses its way but quick. That good start is when the 12th-century Carpathian kingdom of the corrupt, snarly Fastrad (John Rhys-Davies) comes under siege by five dragons, who arrived in meteorites. Fastrad is a grump, and he's run his kingdom into the ground, but he and his chief goon (Tony Amendola, who I thought the whole time was F. Murray Abraham) have a sense of humor and seem human enough, just selfish and foolish and not very good at running a kingdom. The two of them flee the flaming remains of his castle with a few other goons and seek assistance from a more enlightened and far more prosperous neighboring king. All good so far. I like Rhys-Davies, I like Amendola, and aside from the dragons (which shoot spikes from their tails, manticore-style!), I looked forward to a story of a bad king learning to be a good one through a trial by fire. That wasn't going to happen though. No, King Fastrad is a douchebag to the end, and his ultimate fate is so quick and unspectacular (we'd just seen some guy get his head bitten off) you may have to watch the ending of the movie again just to see what happened to him. Most of the plot centers around the huntsman Silas (Maxwell Caulfield), a vagrant who is dragooned by the good king into hunting the dragons alongside the hot princess (Angel Boris). It's all downhill once it becomes apparent that this is Silas's story; Caulfield is terribly miscast because he just doesn't look comfortable with a bow and arrow, which is his primary weapon. That he's a con man is a fact that Fastrad first accepts with a little becoming humility, but when they meet again Fastrad becomes pure villain, Silas is established as pure noble boring heroism, and things proceed inevitably from there. Silas rousts some other recruits in what amounts to a barroom brawl (in a courtyard), even hiring a pretty ballista operator (Iskra Angelova) who's had an awfully short time to invent the ballista since dragons killed her parents, like, this morning. They also hire on an Asian guy, because he knows kung fu. Angel Boris's hair takes a little getting used to (miss that bob) and her nude scene conceals enough that it really isn't a nude scene, though it's still pretty sexy. That said, she and all other actors beyond the two baddies and the ballista operator deliver all their lines with complete indifference, while most bit players in this made-in-Bulgaria production (set, if you'll recall, in Carpathia) try their best to affect American accents. There are no foolish attempts to explain or bring logic to the dragons (one of Reign Of Fire's problems), although one questions the evolutionary probability of any creature that explodes if shot with an arrow in just the right spot. They're simply there to fly around, look mean, bite a few people in half, and occasionally inflict the ultimate punishment on people who never saw the "Stop, Drop and Roll!" movie in third grade. Which is all I really want from dragons. I ask for more from humans though; there are two fuck-up accidental grenade ignitions (which call for a "get clear!" or "cover!") in the span of about three minutes. Is a good script and story really that hard to come up with? It's a nice change of pace, to say "great effects, terrible acting, not much story" about a movie as low-budget as this. (c) Brian J. Wright 2006 BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |