Thor: Der Hammer Gottes

It's easy to see how an idea like this gets commissioned . Someone contacts a producer with a pitch of " It's all about vikings fighting werewolves " or in other words DOG SOLDIERS with swords . So we all agree that there's a good premise ? Good . So why does everyone hate it ?

Easy to explain - the budget for one thing , well maybe the everything is summed up by the budget which means no decent director can hire worthwhile actors , make up crew etc . , or more realistically the producer couldn't hire a decent director in the first place . Not to be too cruel though and that is the director tries to disguise his small budget by shooting action scenes in the dark or holding on an extreme close up of a viking as he fights off an unseen pack of werewolves . Good try Mr Director but it's painfully obvious there's only enough money for two werewolf costumes

The other major irritant is that the cast are to be blunt extremely amateurish . All of them seem to come from another country with differing accents . We even have a multi-ethnic company of vikings with a contrived and needless explanation for it . Looking on the bright side Paterson Joseph doesn't appear and the actor in question Daz Crawford looks like he's playing an anorexic Mike Tyson with a Lancashire accent

I will be charitable and say the cast are not helped one bit by the dialogue . It really is heavy handed , stilted and bombastic . There's no camp value involved and you get the feeling it was written for the Royal Shakespeare Company . Unfortunately Will Shakespeare hadn't thought of adding monsters to any of his more turgid dramas and watching this film you may understand why

This movie is simply awful. Wooden "acting?" lame action scenes, cheap plastic Armor and weapons. What makes it even worse by comparison is "The 13th Warrior" is running at the same time on another channel. The Vampire angle just does not work, at least, in this Viking movie. Indeed the characters themselves as acted do not come across as credible Norsemen. The sword fights look like they where choreographed by a person who learned sword fighting by watching He-Man Master of the Universe cartoons. Zachery Ty Bryan who was to be Thor always looked like a deer staring into a set of headlights at night. Zac' I would suggest better acting classes. Indeed it would be a total waste of hard drive space if you illegally down loaded it off the internet for free. It is not as bad as "Plan 9 From Outer Space", or "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" but not by much. This would be a good movie to show in order to get rid of unwanted company.

Okay just a few quirks for myself here - if you are making a story of the Norse gods don't you think that at least one of the actors would have had a Nordic accent?? And the acting ... well it was good for the dialog, I suppose it could have been worse although I don't know how. I have to wonder if at any time during the production why no one went to the writers and demanded a rewrite. Now if you are going to make a story about a rich mythology, I would hope that someone at sometime would have done at least a little research about it ... I wouldn't be as upset except they made a point of using the name of every god or goddess they could muster - if it were a random bunch of Nordic names it would be one thing, but it was fairly obvious that these characters were meant to BE the Norse gods-- c'mon, get the attributes correct! Its like someone was playing Quake and wrote down all that happened and made it into a script. This is a movie that every Heathen will regret. Pass it by.

I didn't have very high expectations for this movie. I was expecting something low budget but watchable, around the standard of 'King Arthur', 'The Last Legion', 'Reign of Fire' or a Uwe boll movie (if you have seen any of those?) or a feature length episode of Xena Warrior Princess... But even with such low expectations I was surprised by how bad this film is. It's much worse than any of the above.

If you have ever seen a movie made by high school students. Which stars themselves and their friends running about in the woods and play fighting... Then you will have some idea of what to expect here. This is not just a cruel exaggeration it really is that bad. In fairness you might wonder where they got the money for a boat and a snow machine, but otherwise 'school media project' is about the standard we are talking here.

This movie is basically about a bunch of Vikings who sail to a distant land, which turns out to be inhabited by low budget werewolves. Don't be fooled into thinking that the movie has any relevance to the Viking god Thor or actual mythology... It doesn't. They just reused the name (presumably to add inaccuracy to the long list of flaws in this film).

The film has a distinctly amateur feel even by TV movie standards. At no point did I ever believe I was watching real Vikings. I'm not even sure if I was watching real actors since most of the lines are simply read aloud rather than acted. And half-heartedly forcing out a 'ye' or a 'thou' in a modern Liverpool accent didn't add anything to believability.

The set is quite literally 'the woods at the bottom of someone's garden' and most of the film takes place within 50 feet of an old shed, which we are supposed to believe is a village.

It's difficult to find anything good to say about this movie. Some of the girls are nice looking I guess... that's about it *shrug* You might want to watch this just to see how bad it really is, but most of it is boring and painful rather than amusing.

I normally reserve ratings of 1 and 2 for films where the sound and picture quality is so bad that the film is virtually unwatchable. This film doesn't have those problems but I just can't bring myself to give it a 3. Unless you are Todor Chapkanov's parents, you aren't going to be impressed by this.

I have to confess that Norse mythology is not my field of expertise, but this story is supposed to be how Thor attained Deity status by using his hammer to slay one nasty wolf. The hero of the Hammer Of The Gods is played by Tim Allen's oldest son from Home Improvement, Zachery Ty Bryan who has filled out rather nicely and looks every inch the part of a Norse hero.

Bryan has sailed with his two brothers, several other Vikings even some of their women way up north where the gods live. They do find some very powerful creatures there, Norse werewolf types who walk on their hind legs and have a wolf god whom they serve. The Vikings have a lot of rivalries between themselves and it doesn't make for good unity at a time of danger.

Even the three brothers fall out. Baldur (Mac Brandt) is killed early on and the youngest Bryan has to face the older one Daz Crawford who's gone over to the enemy. Crawford might be the oldest, but he's illegitimate and out of succession. That would give me a bad attitude I can tell you.

Watching the Vikings behave with their talk of glory, dying and Valhalla it was like watching Star Trek The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine in an episode with Worf talking about glory and honor. The Klingons were certainly based on the Vikings and this film could have been an extended episode of one of the Roddenberry series.

Hammer Of The Gods is all right, I'll leave it to those who know Norse culture to comment on the veracity and integrity of the story.