Attack of the Gryphon

What amazed me about this movie was the difference between the highs and the lows in it. Many of the locations were great. They picked some very nice places in Bulgaria to film some of the shots. The gryphon itself I thought was actually very good, but the way they put it into the picture was laughably bad. It was really, truly terrible. The plot was equally bad. Throw all the old fantasy clichés into a hat and just randomly draw 10 or so, and you'll get an idea of how bad the plot is. The acting also had highs and lows. Jonathan LaPaglia read his lines well - I bought his performance. Amber Benson, on the other hand, was terrible. Interestingly, it seemed like the decent performances were all by the "Delphites" (LaPaglia's character and his nation), and all of the "Locklanders" (Benson's character and her nation) were just the opposite.

Anyway, it was kind of fun to watch once my expectations were lowered to a reasonable level.

I am surprised that I haven't heard about any lawsuit yet against the filmmakers, I mean they even stole the Path of the Death from Lord of the Rings! I am sure this one ends up in my top 250 of worst movies, maybe even at number one. O gosh, I hardly have words to explain how bad this is.

Bad acting, bad script : I have seen bad movies, for sure, but this one is so bad that beside my laughs about stupidities and terrible visual effects I felt eternal regret for even buying the movie on DVD.... result, I dumped it in the garbage can, glad to have never ever watch this again.

I really won't recommend it to anyone at all. I would feel guilty forever, afraid of loosing my best movie pals.

This low-budget knockoff of LORD OF THE RINGS, among others, has various medieval folks having to deal with an amateurishly animated gryphon, a giant bird with an an eagle's head and lion's body. An awful lot of the so-called action takes place in the woods, obviously to save on money. What I want to know is what Jonathan LaPaglia is doing in this backwoods barn burner. He is too good for this sort of crapola, but then I guess it's a paycheck like any other. After the gryphon flies overhead for about the 500th time, you will be ready to kill it yourself. Larry Drake, who has done some great work (LA LAW) and some awful work (DARKMAN 2), is simply awful here as the porcine mage who calls the gryphon to life. Fortunately for him, he is almost unrecognizable.

I had looked forward to this movie. I love the fantasy genre and expect to make allowances for low budgets, B actors and short time frames production schedules. But I think this one could have been made better in somebody's basement.

The costumes were unacceptable. They looked contrived and inappropriate for their purpose.

The acting was horrible. The hero and heroine didn't appear to be in this movie. Their dialog was stilted. The delivery appeared uncomfortable. Part of this could be blamed on the direction, but maybe the director couldn't pull better performances from them. Hard to say.

The plot of this genre is often far-fetched and I don't have a problem using my own imagination to fill in the usual gaps. But this film had too many gaps for even the most vivid imagination to assist.

I feel sorry for anybody whose name was associated with this film. It will certainly not do their careers any good.

this movie was beyond lame. I immediately wondered how this kind of crap gets the green light when a talented high school writer could definitely do better. The direction was uninspired. The writing was just awful and so full of cliché, it became hard to watch at times.

However, my main concern was not the atrocious qualities of this film, but how it is being maintained at a 7.9 rating. It was at 7.8 before the show even aired on the Sci-Fi channel, an obvious attempt to pad the rating by someone with a vested interest. If you look at the other reviews you can see more dubious ratings where people will call it flawed but yet give it a rating of ten. That is an obscene use of IMDb for shameless promotion of such a crappy attempt at a film.

In looking at the other films by both the director and the writer of this film, I am convinced they are sleeping with the producers...