Robin Hood: Ghosts of Sherwood

I have to say, I was looking forward to see this movie since I first heard of it. Storyline seemed to be really interesting. Finally I was able to catch the German DVD release of 'Robin Hood: Ghosts of Sherwood' and I must say it was a huge letdown for me. The biggest problem with the movie is It's non existing budget. They shot it in 3D which was probably quite expensive alone but sorry to say, it was just a waste of money and those money could(and should) be spent on something else. You simply can't do a movie set in a medieval times with knights, sword fights etc without the real budget. It's not about putting 4 guys in the armors, give them fake swords and tell to 'make an impression'. I knew from the beginning that It's gonna be really bad movie, when I saw sword fights(well 'fight' is not an accurate word) in the first 5 minutes. There was no choreography whatsoever and it looked so amateurish it hurts. It reminded me various 'castle tournaments' I have seen many times. The difference is, those shows were done for 5 years old kids and no one cared how badly they looked but this is a movie, serious one....well at least it tries to be. IMDb states that budget was around 200 000 euros which is impossible, highly doubt it could be more expensive than 100k, rather less. It was shot in Germany and must I say - locations look great. The forest is really interesting, castle looks cool so does the river but unfortunately the locations and a score are the only good things about this film. Since it was shot in Germany, it has German cast and the director decided to go with English dubbing which unfortunately doesn't work and is superbly annoying. It would work better if the makers would go and hire German actors who could actually speak in English. Most of the cast are amateurs(director's friends I guess) and we have two exceptions. FX Legend Tom Savini plays sheriff of Nottingham and Kane Hodder plays Little John. I know that Savini likes to act in low and no budget movies and to be honest he can even give a nice performance but here, he's just awful like everyone else plus his screen time is extremely limited. Little better can be said about Kane Hodder who also has a strange tendency to appear in a movies as an actor lately. Well, I know he is Jason Voorhees, he is Victor Crowley etc but for God's sake he is a stuntman, without any acting talent. Surprisingly he's probably the best actor in the entire movie. Appears on screen 20 minutes before the end but from then, he is in pretty much each scene. If you are looking for a horror movie, better look somewhere else. It's being promoted as a horror movie but there are very few horror elements in the entire movie. For the most part It's just an adventure movie(boring one) with German woman and gay looking Robin Hood slowly falling for each other. The horror part starts in the last 20 minutes or so. Robin and his pals are turned into flesh eating zombies and run no budget havoc in the forest(which means they don't do anything really). There are few cheap gore tricks and two nice decapitations but It's just non existent for a movie which lasts for almost two hours. I really wanted to like this, I knew It's gonna be low budget but it was beyond bad, mostly because it was boring and English dubbing sucked big time. I know for sure that I won't watch this again in my life. I have seen worse movies but still it was very close to the bottom of filmmaking. I will give it three because of a beautiful locations, nice score and two names which were still kind of relief when compared with dubbed amateurs.

This movie is not even remotely good. I appreciate a good low budget or even micro budget film. This is not that! The acting is brutal, line delivery is like listening to a customer service line where the English is forced at best with extreme limited understand-ability, and there is no coherent direction for the film. It's a comedy ... no it's an action flick ... but wait it's a zombie movie. I mean it can be all three if meshed together and apparent. This is not meshed at all. It goes in one direction then another and another. Serious, scary, fun, silly, or just plain no good? Guess.. I'm not a big fan, but I did watch the whole movie & the special features which made me understand the quality a bit.

This really is a bad movie. Given how much dialogue and inane chatter the film contains honestly, the terrible dubbing (the film is German) that makes it even worse....though the dialogue (OMG, the dialogue--no the propaganda!)the dubbers babble on and on is definitely part of the problem. Plays like a bunch of medieval re-enactors who decided on a lark to put a movie together; in other words, amateurish. If anything it's a political communist manifesto--and I mean in the fundamental sense: they talk about the system; sharing and share alike (no need to set guards! We share everything here!), "everyone is equal and no one person is better than another" and on and on and on....."Snooze". And on. I rarely, and I mean almost never turn off a movie before it's finished, let alone write a review, but this one is just so....so.....so.....Ack!

This was a classic case of the DVD cover being vastly better than the movie itself. The DVD cover looked absolutely great and from it Robin Hood: Ghosts of Sherwood with decent execution had potential to be a guilty pleasure at least. However, the promise it initially showed was completely squandered by terrible execution all round to the extent that it is far too amateurish to remotely pass as a guilty pleasure.

Robin Hood: Ghosts of Sherwood is badly made for starters. The scenery is alright and the cinematography reasonably good but with such disjointed and confused editing and very drab lighting it was difficult to enjoy either. The music is completely overblown and a long way from rousing, in fact a lot of it is a monotonous bore. Further hindered by erratic sound quality, sometimes overbearing and sometimes distant, all the time drowning out the dialogue. Not that the dialogue is worth hearing, because it high in cheese and low in wit and fun and so awkward in flow that it sounds like it was improvisatory. The story is equally disastrous, too thin to sustain the running time and too many scenes like irrelevant padding, if you are looking for any entertainment or excitement both are nowhere in sight.

It is also interminably dull, the movie is less than two hours but feels like an eternity. The action is incredibly lazy in choreography and have no suspense or fun whatsoever, actually on par with poorly executed action from an Asylum movie and even worse. The direction is stunning in how inept it is, while the characters are devoid of any engaging likability or personality, almost like human robots. The acting across the board is stiff with line delivery that reads of just reading their lines or last minute learning. Overall, as much as I hate ragging on movies and try not to be too hard on low-budget movies, taking into account the inevitable flaws and what to expect, but Robin Hood: Ghosts of Sherwood was really pathetic. 1/10 Bethany Cox

I have only myself to blame...

A colleague said to, "last night I watched the worst film ever made", to which I replied "are you sure? I've seen some pretty awful films in my time".

He lent me the DVD... ...after 20 minutes I tried gnawing my own leg off while trying to hope that the film would improve, but it then performed the impossible accomplishment of getting even worse! DO NOT fall for this trap!

The ONLY person involved with this film that deserves any endorsement is the person who designed the DVD Box (which is really rather good).