Ulises y la isla de la niebla

I didn't think SciFi Channel could broadcast a worse myth-&-monster movie than MINOTAUR. I was wrong.

It's okay to make a movie on the cheap; not everyone has access to a big budget, and amazing things can be done with a little imagination and talent. But there's very little of those commodities here. Acting is at a high school level. Direction is worse. Dialogue is trite. Scenes lurch from one dull monster attack to another, with occasional babe (er, goddess) interludes to break the monotony. The goddesses look and sound as it they're reading cue cards at a second-rate beauty contest.

Why must the makers of such movies mess with Greek myth, about which they clearly know (and care) nothing? Here, Homer the tale-teller appears as part of Odysseus's crew. That's an okay idea. Except this Homer (played by the worst actor of the lot, which is saying something) scribbles notes (with a feather quill!) and fawns over the heroes like an embedded reporter in Iraq. Legend tells us that Homer was blind, and recited his stories from memory. There is great power in that idea, a hearkening back to a prehistoric, preliterate age of traveling bards and oral tradition.

A magical movie could be made about Odysseus, and Homer, but this is not it.

Actually I was using a bit of hyperbole, it wasn't as atrocious as I made it out to be in the summary, but to be honest it is still pretty bad. Some of the scenery and costumes are decent, some of the monsters are interesting and Arnold Vosloo is imposing and charismatic enough as Odysseus. However, the story is hackneyed and is very uneven in pace, the dialogue is a vast majority of the time absolutely abysmal, the direction is heartless, the pace is poor and the acting with exception of Vosloo is laughable particularly with Homer and the goddesses. While the ending comes across as rather cheesy. To conclude, pretty bad but there are some minor redeeming qualities. 3/10 Bethany Cox

I really wanted to like this film. I truly did. The cast seemed excellent (although the inclusion of "Homer" should have told me all I needed to know about the script). Sadly, the best looking men on screen could not save this one.

The language is always a problem, and I realize that it is hard to decide between going for pure period speech or making it all modern. I prefer the former with some latitude for comprehensibility, but too many writers today don't even realize how people spoke in times past, so the occasional slip into a modern cliché is just glaring.

So as long as you don't pay any money for it and put your brain in neutral you'll get through it fine. Chant the mantra: entertainment value.

A funny thing happened on the way to Ithaca...Odysseus went off course and inadvertently discovered the origin of vampires. Not as bad as it sounds, the story is grounded in Greek myth but reconstitutes Persephone as an evil lamia with vampiric children from Hades who lures the wily Greek and his crew for aid in her plot to conquer mortals. The concept is a good one, however poorly written and executed. Despite a lagging pace and the irritating presence of a post-adolescent poet Homer, the film looks good with imposing Arnold Vosloo and the rest of the crew looking pretty much like Homeric heroes, rather than the scroungy leather trouser-wearing biker rejects that seem to be so lamentably much in vogue in BC epics these days. Unfortunately, the two best actors of the crew get killed off, one rather too soon. Mercifully, viewers are also spared the annoying, wailing nonsensical Celtic and/or Moroccan women posing as soundtracks and incidental music score which is also far too prevalent in productions of this kind. However, in the interior cave sequence I did detect very subtly a chorus in the background singing "Agnus dei", a total non sequitur. With a better script, a better use of the actors on hand, and a brisker pace this would have been a winner. It's always a pleasure to see Mr. Vosloo, and he can't be faulted in his rendering of Odysseus.

It's neither good nor bad, amateurish acting, poor direction with compentent special f/x,weak script/dialogue. Many movies lately just can't seem to get the language of a time period right without adding ridiculous modern dialogue clichés, slangs and what not. I kept waiting for one of them to pull out a cellphone because most the performances were phoned in, for me the beginning was the worse stupid twinkling lights in the background of scenes of them on the ship while long shots with harpies flying over head were of a cloudy twilight sky, so where did the twinkling stars come from....this is just pointing out one of many flaws and of course this ship was filmed in a studio with no water at all, I'm sure of it. If you're a fan of sword and sandal sci-fi adventure with sorcery and magic it only barely acts as an apetizer, a lightly flavored one at that, leaving you wanting terribly that you had The Odyssey starring Armande Assante in your DVD collection because watching all the hours of a rerun would be more satisfying than watching 90 minutes once you remove commercials of this drivel. I had tivo'd and fortunately was able to fastforward some simply painful dialogue moments in order to watch the special f/x. One thing to keep in mind few things shown as Sci-Fi Channel orginals they are really just productions from foreign markets like Canada, BBC, Germany or worse some reckless direct to video producer. Voslo does what he can but with this material its a wasted effort.