Rebirth of the monster movie
Terribly good fun, with brilliant production design, and just the right mix of desperate situation and winking dialogue, "Reign" is survival horror as it hasn't been done since George Romero.
The film's accomplishment is to take the gritty stacked odds of Romero's "Dead" trilogy and pair it with the iron-plated biological terror of the "Aliens" series. Planet-wide agoraphobia!
For genre fans, "Reign" has a deft way of appealing to both the thirteen and thirty-year old in you -- this is that elusive pop culture mastery, a casual kind of genius about pushing narrative buttons, tightrope walking between hokiness and plausibility, stacking up menace and delivering thrills.
The script has some superb throwaway quips and the narrative a slower, more methodical pace than most contemporary junk (several nice detours for backstory and texture). The cast delights with plenty of bug-eyed seething, stomping, and screaming. And the dragons are hellish. What superior pop crapola "Reign" is! I wasn't displeased for a second.
The film's accomplishment is to take the gritty stacked odds of Romero's "Dead" trilogy and pair it with the iron-plated biological terror of the "Aliens" series. Planet-wide agoraphobia!
For genre fans, "Reign" has a deft way of appealing to both the thirteen and thirty-year old in you -- this is that elusive pop culture mastery, a casual kind of genius about pushing narrative buttons, tightrope walking between hokiness and plausibility, stacking up menace and delivering thrills.
The script has some superb throwaway quips and the narrative a slower, more methodical pace than most contemporary junk (several nice detours for backstory and texture). The cast delights with plenty of bug-eyed seething, stomping, and screaming. And the dragons are hellish. What superior pop crapola "Reign" is! I wasn't displeased for a second.
- RJC-4
- Jul 12, 2002