Kingdom of Gladiators

In the Italian/American production Kingdom Of Gladiators the sword and sorcery genre has found its own Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Starring a trio of pro-wrestlers (Matt Polinsky, Leroy Kincaid and Annie Social) as its ad hoc heroes, a supporting cast of LARPers (I don't know they were LARPers, I'm just guessing) and an Italian tourist castle as its main location, this movie is a laugh-a-minute from its opening spiel to its closing rainbow (yes, it ends with a rainbow!) Although the acting is uniformly dreadful across the board (not helped by an overwrought script from Marco Viloa and director Stefano Milla that randomly pads out sentences with meaningless portentous wordage), special mention has to go to the dead-pan "comedy" stylings of Bryan Murphy as King Wolfkahn - who pretty much steals the show with his monotonous, emotion-free delivery.

If you're not already crying with laughter by the time you spot Matt Polinsky's distinctive bomb-shaped neck tattoo then you haven't entered into the right spirit - and surely the impromptu wrestling match between him and Leroy when they're searching for the magic sword with their magic sunglasses should have tipped you off that this isn't Shakespeare.

What passes for a story in Kingdom Of Gladiators is the aftermath of a secret pact between Wolfkahn and agents of the Dark Lord to secure peace in his kingdom, Keemok, at the cost of his offspring (we later discover the demons aren't particularly on the ball here), but after ten years the demon Hel returns with some vague plan of wiping out humanity by resurrecting a giant earth elemental creature called Guano (or something).

Hel shows up in the form of Wolfkahn's superhot missing daughter Luna (Suzi Lorraine), the movie's main eye candy, and at the start of The Grand Tournament (to choose Wolfkahn's heir); a slight misnomer as a succession of stunt men (and women) in ragged armour fighting in a castle courtyard in front of an audience of about 50 peasants isn't exactly what I'd call "grand".

There's some mutterings about the demon needing a blood sacrifice, but that doesn't stop Wolfkahn from continuing with the tournament - and it has to be said that there is, at least, one cool kill during the fighting. However, most of it unfolds at a lamentably slow pace that totally lacks the trendy "bullet-time" slo-mo I suspect they were trying to emulate.

Every so often, odd things occur that are completely unexplained - the strangest of which is when one audience member suddenly stabs another and no-one takes any notice. I wondered if it was part of the demon's great scheme, but it was never referenced again.

People wander around, talking heads pop up every now-and-again with a new bit of exposition to move the plot on, Annie actually wears a chainmail bikini, there's some titillation (although no nudity), people die and the storyline hangs together with the barest of threads, but ultimately it doesn't matter.

Twisted genius that would make Ed Wood proud, Kingdom Of Gladiators is truly so awful it has to be seen to be believed - possibly with the aid of large quantities of alcohol - because although played straight it is actually one of the greatest comedies of the year.

This was a terribly directed and badly put together movie.

Even with bad acting, a better script and better editing this could have been a great story, I really wanted to know more.

Was very drawn out, and full of over acting. So much so that it was hard to follow what was actually going on.

Fight scenes were slow, and very little for a gladiator movie.

The one and only good thing about this movie was its location, truly spectacular.

I would not recommend watching this movie, unless you like wasting your time. I am sorry I did.

I cannot even know where to begin or what to say here. Is this a movie? Uhm.. Maybe. There are some pretty gorgeous locations, but the script, the actors, the direction, SFX, and any technical support, including (ahi ahi!) editing are so plain awful, to look almost virtually amateur. I had heard good things about Stefano Milla. Well, this movie is truly something to stay away from. Most of all, Mr.Milla needs casting advisers! There are so many great,intense, driven, good looking actors, under unemployed and he gets these people? Let me tell you, we are on a "beyond awful" grade here. Juvenile can be fun in 8th grade, but, after that it becomes a place of no return. Felt sadness and disconcert, bore, and, finally,despair: why Italian genre movies have gotten (for the most part) so bad? The only one to stand out seems still to be Ivan Zuccon, who's always has great actors in his films, and, an extreme visual strength. These other guys.. are, well.. not truly able to deliver something professional, or even merely bad, yet.. Just amateur crap.

There are so few 'good' things about this film that I can count them with one hand: 1. Music/sound - In order to partially offset the painful torment of this film, I found myself closing my eyes for a large portion. However, in my blind contemplation, I was quite surprised to notice that some orchestration in this film was very well done. There are a few unsuitable choices for music (for example, some more modern music was used when this clearly did not suit the era of this film). Despite some occasional acoustic pleasantries, these were often short-lived, being crudely interrupted by the shrill voice of some of the actors (see comments below). 2. Scenery - In my few moments of bearing through this, there were some enjoyable choices of location. Some of the countryside shots were quite stunning and the castle shown were also very captivating.

That being said, it seems as if too large a portion of this film's budget was blown on film locations and/or orchestration. As an audience, it felt as if the director's idea of making a good film was spending an obscene amount of money.

My biggest strife with this movie is the "acting". I put the word acting in quotes here, because beyond the incessant muscle-flexing, skimpy-outfit wearing women and awkwardly corny scenes, there wasn't much of this "acting" going on.

Firstly, the accents of this film were incredibly annoying. On the one hand we had this king - who I presumed was English. Yet on the other hand, the returning crude yankee-American accents stood out like a sore thumb. Was it just too hard to ask the actors to attempt an English/British accent? The change of accent is not only incredibly disorienting to the viewer (are we in England or America?), it just reflects poorly on the actors/directors for putting up with it. I wouldn't have cared as much if they had just stuck with either one, but a mixture of both is just plain laziness.

Don't get me started on the role of women in this film. The poster looks promising, and I was expecting a mixed arsenal of skilled warriors and adept female assassins of some sort. What I got instead was a blatant over-the-top sexualisation of what should have been a graceful film in this regard. One of the scenes depicted the king's daughter pushing her breasts together exclaiming no one had "seen a body this good". I understand that 'sex sells' is a commonly accepted marketing tactic, but stuff like this just comes off as shallow and unnecessary. Furthermore, the very same female warrior as shown on the poster sports what I make out as being a skimpy chain-mail bra-like garment (designed primarily I suppose to as a cleavage-enhancing device). To me such costume designed just made no logical sense. What was the point of making the bra out of chain-mail and exposing as much skin as possible on the girl? Doesn't that just defeat the very purpose of wearing armour? This type of nonsense can also be seen on some of the other costume designs. Did they just spend too much on flying everyone out to the extravagant locations that they just ran out of budget on chain-mail costumes? I just wish the director spent as much time working on the authenticity of this film as much as he did on computer retouching every seen with banal transitions and effects (or perhaps even half as much time as the women in this play spent exhibiting their breasts).

I felt as if there was no real performance here: the actors just stuck way too precisely to the scripting. For example, there is also one scene in particular where the king struggles with one of his maids in which he forces her head down onto a table after she called his daughter a witch. This particular scene is just embarrassing to the industry of acting. The maid flinches too artificially and the entire act looks forced. I expect that attempting to ad lib some of the scenes would help eliminate this awkwardness, but that would require a brain-cell or two as well as some level of skill in acting. The fight scenes looked just as contrived and unpracticed as ever. These were often accompanied by the lousy gore effects of limbs being torn off, weapons piercing through heads/necks/torsos and generally disconnected fight scenes (it felt as if they were there just to claim the title of 'gladiator' as opposed to offering any worth to the plot/story of the film).

There are also numerous camera anomalies. Off the top of my head, one particular scene shows one of the gladiators dropping a dagger down upon a defeated enemy who is lying half-dead on the floor. Just in the nick of time the dagger is caught by a third gladiator. The scene is just cut and stuck together, one showing the dagger falling and the next showing it being caught (and suddenly one of the gladiators has disappeared in this cut scene). Once more, it's little things like this that reflect poorly upon the directors/editors for not picking it up.

My last knit-pick is the narration to this film. I'm as much for a mythical/enchanting/magical story line as the next guy, but this film just doesn't execute it right. It feels as if they took as many words pertaining to mythology as possible: demon, devil, evil, shadow, scar, hell etc. and just stuck them all together in what makes for a confusing and rather pointless story. There were various elements ripped off other classic stories (Excalibur) and numerous clichéd twists (guy succumbs to evil and must be vanquished by someone pure).

Overall, what I got was mixed assortment of crummy costumes, corny acting, eye-popping breast panoramas, confusing and contrasting accents, lack of genuine direction in terms of plot, poorly executed fight scenes which held next to no merit.

B movies must surely now have a new "best of the worst ever" because this HAS to have been made as a dare. I beg for an explanation of how this got past censorship as being too cruel to an audience. Truly, movies are not these guys' strong suit. For those now curious to see this still, I feel like a guy waving his hands at oncoming traffic, warning them of the horrendous wreck just around the next bend. Slow down ! Don't go there ! You'll end up part of the pile-up ! If these people truly got financed to the tune of $3 mil to make this, then all I can visualize is a bunch of guys laughing as they skip the country with the cash. Oh, wait, they're in Italy... Do we have an extradition treaty with them ?