Most of The Asylum movies are terrible, but I keep watching them because there is something compulsively entertaining in how bad they are that you have to keep watching. Lord of the Elves or Age of the Hobbits is not particularly good as a movie, but The Asylum have done far worse than this. The scenery is spectacular, some of the best of any movie to come out from The Asylum, and the camera work is at least orchestrated competently. Christopher Judge's resonant voice and Shakespeare-like delivery of lines makes for a nicely enigmatic performance. Bai Ling, as beguiling as she looks, is too subdued however, and the rest of the cast are significantly hindered by the truly cheesy dubbing. The dubbing also makes the dialogue awkward and not very easy to understand. The special effects are a mixed bag, the giant spiders and lizards look good and are well above average for The Asylum but the flying lizard-dragons and enormous rhino are less good, the rhino actually was rendered very badly. The story is thinly structured and unexciting, never really getting a chance to properly open up. The choreography for the fight sequences is lacking in tightness and the performing of it likewise. The music is on the generic side, the characters are rather cardboard and never really developed enough to make us care for them and the direction shows a director not putting enough of his own style into the movie, coming across as rather flat and characterless instead. To conclude, could have been much worse and has the scenery and Judge's performance to thank for that, but while somewhat entertaining really rises above mediocre in my opinion. 3/10 Bethany Cox
