L'attaque du griffon

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.

Only my love of Amber Benson got me to not only watch the movie, but actually watch the whole thing. She was easily the best aspect of this movie, but even she couldn't do much to alleviate the pain caused by the stilted dialogue and hammy (or at the very least uneven) acting of most of her co-stars...and why were most of her lines dubbed and then poorly mixed?

The effects were terrible even by Sci Fi Original standards and I was completely underwhelmed by the repetitive score.

I hope the film gave Amber Benson a nice check so she can go off and make more brilliant flicks like Chance...

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...

My goodness. I just finished watching this on the SciFi Channel, and it's everything I thought it would be. Everything about the gryphon, from concept design all the way up the pipeline to rendering & compositing, is sub-par. Everything about the story is asinine; it feels like the random result of a D&D match between the scriptwriters. Even the props and costumes are silly; the majestic Lance of Whatever the evil sorcerer spent the whole movie fondling looked like a claw hammer covered in gold leaf in several shots.

And the acting! Half the cast obviously drew inspiration for their roles by watching Lord of the Rings a few times, and the other half just didn't care. Evil Sorcerer Guy, for example -- I have never in my life seen a man so bored as that actor was in the final scene! He never did really attain the point of being an imposing presence. More than anything, he reminded me of one of the recurring characters on Food Network's Good Eats, so much so in fact I've been hunting around trying to see if it's the same actor.

All that said, it's good for watching on a Saturday night with a few buddies, especially if there's beer involved. If it had taken itself a little less seriously, it actually could've made for a really fun epic-film parody. In its current state, unfortunately, I can only recommend one viewing -- And that's if you're a fan of cheese-ball movies.

Wow...I watched this really in lieu of deciding to finally check out a sci-fi channel movie of the week, in this case featuring Amber Benson from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The made-for-TV slew of Saturday night movies are never picks of the litter, matter of fact not even well-made in any respect. But Gryphon, my non-existent God (which you may feel is non-existent if you believe it after seeing this), what a load of tripe! It's a medieval hodge-podge of total clichés and story arcs that obviously were thrown together by the five or six or seven writers who decided to pound this out over pizza and beers one night. Then again, maybe they KNEW that they were making a really stupid movie. But this raises the bar for stupidity, like a litmus test for often incoherent strands of story and character, and for wretched CGI. I'm not expecting Peter Jackson here, but this is enough to send me back to my psychiatrist for a double session of "the good old days of models and puppets."

Actually, what ended up keeping me glued to my seat (in a manner of total irony) was the CGI Gryphon itself. Created by watercolor or paint by number or Mario Paint or all of the above, it's controlled by a sinister sorcerer who wants to use it to create chaos in the kingdom. The gryphon flies about with total abandon of any logic, and it occasionally- in the midst of people trying to KILL IT- comes down to just preen itself in front of its foes. It sometimes kills people too, but often just acts like the most constant, reliable thing about the movie- it's so laughably bad it hurts the mind and diminishes the soul to something comparable to a slug, and makes one pine for a random insurance commercial. As the Gryphon continues as a threat, we're given a quest, a romance between warrior man and woman (the woman Benson, who can't even read her s****y dialog competently enough with her posturing and fake toughness) from the same descended vein, and a random possible battle that might ensue if a) the gryphon and/or sorcerer gets their way, or b) if there's somehow a tiny boost in the budget by the end of filming. And by the time the climax comes around, me and my friends somehow were not only compelled to keep on watching (just to see how low it could go limbo style), but to keep on gleefully- if painfully- yelling at the screen as the sorcerer used his powers in very random, selective measure, and kept his nutty little bird somewhere else by contrivance.

I know I shouldn't be TOO hard on Gryphon, as I'm sure some of the intentions behind it were decent enough. But the execution is just so lacking in every department: special/visual effects (well, in a sense, the visual effects are "special"), proper casting (even the actor playing the sorcerer is like ham left out of the fridge), dialog, cinematography, message, or romance. Even the action is sloppily filmed a lot of the time by lackey Andrew Prowse, who once in a while made me wonder if the soul of Uwe Boll slipped into his own. It simply leaves a residue that wont go away very soon after, even with its own likely self-knowledge of its many flaws. It was made on a quick buck, and for all its exploitive gestures, hopefully most, if not all, of the regular sci-fi movie channel viewers will recognize it as a new standard which other movies in its wake may not live up to even if they try (or lack trying). It's simply one of the very worst made-for-TV movies I've ever seen...albeit with a hell of a goofing-on-it time all the way.