L'attaque du griffon

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 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.

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.

After so many reviewers butchered the flick, I'm almost reluctant to say I think it's not all bad (voted 4/10). To start with, it's a C movie with cheap actors, cheap effects (the monster looks crap, no arguing about that), shot in the cheapest location they could find (Bulgaria or Romania, depending on whether you believe the opening titles or the ending titles). Obviously, it can't look like 'Bored of the Rings'. But under the production circumstances, it is acceptable. I liked the two kings who have personal difficulties to overcome their hatred for each other. They would rather not join forces to attack the wizard. Also the princess was cool because she always has blood or mud on her face, had to do the dirty work with sword in hand, not just look pretty, sit around and scream 'OMG, it's the monster' all the time like in the old days of C movies. Except for the visible problems due to low budget, some problems also lie within the script. The evil wizard seems terribly clichéd as a villain, while many things are poorly explained or not at all. There you go, it surely is somewhat silly, but OK to watch once.

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...