HerrSupahz

5.5/10

A lot of the reviews here are clearly nostalgia influenced. I can understand that... I have been a Tolkien fan for a long, long time, and having this movie (as well as the animated LOTR films) was great at the time because there wasn't much else apart from the books themselves. But if you're watching in 2025, it doesn't really stand the test of time so well.

Some of the good points are: the background/scenery art is very good. Some of the voice actors do a great job (Huston, Conreid). Theodore Gottlieb gives a rather unforgettable Gollum performance (what I wouldn't give to see a video of him recording the voice overs).

As for weak points, they include the usual complaint of omissions from the book (same with Jackson's films). Bilbo looks childishly illustrated and bizarre, and the dwarves are not much better. Oddly, the men of Dale, Elrond and Gandalf (minus that nose) seem super-realistic in comparison. A lot of the music is grating. The goblins and trolls look terrible. Smaug's hairy-faced Chinese dragon design is questionable. The wood elves look like devils, and using Otto Preminger with his strong German accent as the VA seems a very strange choice (his war gear is bewildering). And Gollum... He looks like a sort of turtle/frog, and is presented as an outright monster, not the pitiable twisted victim of the One Ring for centuries.

As a reader of the books since 1980, and consumer of all the Tolkien media (audiobooks included) countless times, I'd put this below the Jackson Hobbit movies. The animation of the main characters is just too childish to take seriously, even for me as a child. Bakshi's LOTR adaptation (while clearly riddled with issues) is far superior to this in every way.

Just happened to stumble across this while browsing the Internet Archive. It's a bizarre, unpleasant time-capsule of the early video age in sketch comedy form. Viewing it with modern eyes, it immediately screams poor quality, bad effects, weak writing and all around strangeness (similar to watching the animated Coneheads pilot from 1983). While not as bizarre as Mr Mike's Mondo Video (1979, which was also mostly awful), watching it was definitely an unusual experience.

The familiar names here are Phil Hartman (doing the best he can), Tress MacNeille (Simpsons, Futurama etc), Elvira and Pee-wee Herman.

The first half of the show is terrible. You get the feeling that while the cast was enthusiastic about what they were doing, deep telling you that it wasn't really hitting at all. The second half gets a little bit better, with the highlights being Pee-Wee's video and Phil Hartman's German/English International cruise ship talk show. Maybe a point or too for the Barbie skit, which feels quite 2025.

Apparently this was made for pay cable TV. This explains the swearing and glimpses of topless women peppered throughout the show. Despite it's poor quality, it's an interesting watch because it's reflective of the early 1980s and how entertainment was fully shifting to cable TV, music television, video production and Public Access television. The oft-used and quite cheesy video effects speak strongly to this. It almost feels like an experimental college project, a program put together with the faint hope that it will catch on somehow. Clearly, it never did.

You could probably watch worse videos, though not many are as bad. There's at least some nostalgia effect if you were a teen or older during that time period. But basically, it's an oddity that is rightly forgotten.

Watched this on Netflix. I love horror films, but realistically I never expect to find too many good ones. Usually average is fine for a watch, but this one had some hype to it. Ultimately I found it ridiculous and the characters uninteresting. Just another horror movie in the end.

First of all, the whole concept of people doing this is just ridiculous. They're all clearly playing with some supernatural and terrifying cursed item, yet they just act like it's a drinking game. I get that teenagers in horror movies are generally not portrayed as being the smartest people around... after all, if they were smart then most of the events in these movies would never happen... but these kids are just not very bright. And their taste in music is horrible.

They're not really developed as characters. Honestly, they're more irritating than anything. Couldn't get invested in the personalities... there's no sense of worry or fear for any of them . It's amazing how many horror films have characters that make you end up hoping they get killed off. Didn't really care enough about any of them one way or the other here.

The film gets some points for being kind of creative. But ultimately the storyline isn't that difficult to predict, and there's plenty of the usual horror movie tropes that we've all seen a million times. This movie is just different enough from the usual fare that it seems exceptional compared to a lot of other horror movies.

For me the movie was just kind of there. There's no real sense of fear or investment in the characters, there's some creepy imagery but nothing exceptional. Thankfully I saw it on Netflix and didn't pay for it because it's definitely disappointing compared to the hype.