Movie Review: Dungeon Siege

My friends chose a wammy of a bad movie for their Monday night get-together: In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale. I must admit I had never seen a film by Uwe Boll before, though his reputation as the worst director alive precedes him.

I know he has a dedicated cult of people who hate him, but I don't get them. I can understand following a bad director if they are sincere in their filmmaking yet blithely inept, like Ed Wood, or so extreme that they've got a kitsch-cool element to them, like Russ Meyer. But to dedicate yourself to someone, even in good fun, who is so half-assed in their filmmaking and so lacking in talent seems to be a wast of time to me.

Still the movie was an all-out assault on the brain and a bore to the senses. It's a Lord of the Rings rip-off that somehow makes room to steal from Gladiator, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Star Wars, Cirque du Solei, and recent wuxia films like The House of Flying Daggers. It has the strangest combination of actors probably ever assembled: Jason Statham, Burt Reynolds, Leelee Sobieski, Ron Perlman, Matthew Lillard, Kristanna Loken (the Terminatrix), John Rhys-Davis, Claire Forlani, and Ray frickin' Liotta. It's humiliating. Not to mention Ork-things that stumble around like Putties and NINJA!

There are only two real highlights:

(1) Leelee Sobieski wears an awesome suit of armor, which is almost odd because the rest of the costumes look like they were put together by somebody's busy mom the night before the 3rd grad play. Now I am no Ren Fair nerd, and I have never lusted after anything that could hypothetically used while fighting, but I want that armor. Here's a picture of it, which I'm glad to find because you never get a clear view of it in the movie. Because that would have been competence in action.

(2) The Putty-Trolls are fighting. They have a catapult. They catapult rocks and things. Then they set things on fire and catapult them. Then they put their own men into the catapults. And set them on fire. And then catapult them. And when the on-fire Putty-Orks land, they start attacking people. While still on fire.

I cannot make these things up.

Bad movie! No buscuit!

Musical News

Singing Spidey will Dance Across Broadway Sooner than Expected

I don't know what to make of this. It's Spider-Man the Musical, a pretty ridiculous premise, but it's a U2 and Julie Taymor collaboration. Who is the target audience? Musical theatre fans? Marvel fans? Women who liked the movies?

This isn't the first time they've tried to bring a superhero to the stage. There was a scary awful Superman musical, "It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman!", that flopped in the 70s. And there was an aborted Batman show as long ago as 2004. However, is this really stranger than many of the movie-based musicals based on as of lately?

Still, Bono and Taymor! And if the webslinging is done well, it could be pretty neat.

(I think that Evan Rachel Wood would make a better Black Cat than Mary Jane. She wouldn't have to wear a wig, even!)