Dragon Kingdom

Let's start with the positives. There are some decent special effects. There has been some respectable fight choreography. Some of the top cast do their best with the execrable material, singling out Richard and George, and maybe Elizabeth for this. Even the King recovers some credit in the last scene.

But: the design, the ludicrous story, the feeble connects, the lowest of low budgets and some of the worst acting ever seen on the silver screen make this a near total waste of time. Prince Favian's character acts as if he is in a nativity play, but is conscious he's not the best thing in that nativity play. The story doesn't hang together for thirty seconds at a time. You can always forgive a low budget, but that is usually covered up by tight scripts and good acting. Not here. It's as if so much of the budget went on a couple of dragon scenes there wasn't any left for writers, designers, or actors.

Don't waste 90 minutes of your life on this.

Ive been in several big budget films and a bunch of low budget and student films and of course watched thousands. Ive never seen worse.

As suggested elsewhere, they did in fact sneak into heritage reconstruction sites to film or got permission. I've been in that very village I believe.

They dont even bother to try to hide the 21st century signs though they do film from the back side of them but you can clearly see their shape and the modern bolts.

Even worse as they enter the first village look to the left of the screen as they pass the very small shed thats the size of a one man toll booth.

Plainly visible on the door is a modern calendar with a picture of a slice of pie on the top.

Then the circular seating area on their left as they enter is clearly made of planks sitting on modern concrete blocks.

Perhaps worse still. Look at any seem with farm animals and take not of the modern wire fencing.

It just gets worse and worse.

The acting is so incredibly lame, especially the pathetic troll called Prince Favian.

They should be ashamed they wasted their resources on this when 100 bucks of stage muslin could have fixed all the stuff I mentioned other than the acting.

This movie is living proof of what you can achieve with £1000, a dozen Halloween costumes off of ebay and a camera. I genuinely believe they snook into a couple of heritage sites before any visitors came in and quickly shot some scenes. Really don't bother.

Hokey, poorly acted, poorly scripted, poorly directed, lousy wardrobe, comical creatures. What else could possibly go wrong? Just about everything. A waste of time.

I eventually ended up sitting down to watch the 2018 fantasy movie titled "Dragon Kingdom", as I like fantasy sword and sorcery stuff. Granted, I had not heard about this 2018 movie from writers Aston Benoit and Ben Loyd-Holmes before sitting down in 2020 to watch it.

Notably, I must admit that I didn't really have much of any expectations for the movie, as this had pretty much come and gone well under the radar. And a great number of fantasy movies tend to be badly produced and having ludicrous props and costumes. But still, it might just happened that "Dragon Kingdom" was an entertaining movie, one that wasn't just going to be another failed fantasy movie.

So I sat down and watched "Dragon Kingdom". And I managed to get through the entire movie, just dozed off once or twice along the way.

While the storyline in the movie was actually decent enough, albeit pretty generic and stereotypical for a fantasy movie, then the movie suffered terribly from a lack of proper effects and costumes.

I mean, some of the costumes, especially those for the heroes and their allies was good. Some of the foes were adequate, although it was just painstakingly obvious that it was people wearing latex masks, as the masks lacked facial expressions and movement. And then there were the creatures in black, ghouls perhaps? I have no idea what the props department were thinking here; I mean, putting people in black spandex suits that weren't even form-fitted and then adding latex masks and odd plating on the back. It was just so obvious that it was just spandex suits, given the way the garments folded up when they moved. It was just abysmal to watch, and I wonder how this ever made it past the concept table.

Director Simon Wells didn't manage to present an overly impressive fantasy movie here with "Dragon Kingdom". But while overall a terrible movie, there were bits and odd pieces here and there that actually worked out quite well. Just a shame they drowned in the mediocrity of everything else.

I am rating "Dragon Kingdom" a mere three out of ten stars, because this was by no means an outstanding or particularly memorable fantasy movie.