Cerberus : Le Gardien de l'enfer

S10 Rating: * * 'Cerberus' is a pretty typical SciFi Channel presentation. An interesting premise of the infamous mythical three-headed dog protecting a sword that render the possessor invincibility. The sword was used bu Attila the Hun so that explains his conquering of the little people of his time. As usually a nefarious scheme is hatched by an equally nefarious madman who then sends some mercenaries to grab the little party favor. Of course the lead merc enjoys his taste of power and commences to do his thing while the good guys and girl deal with the dog and now the greedy merc turned madman. Oh the joys of paint-by-numbers made-for-TV cinema. The acting was ho-hum and the direction is plain. The effects were bad as you'd expect but for whatever reason I found it still watchable.

Emmanuelle Vaugier, Sebastian Spence and Brent Florenece star in this surprisingly good film which blends action, adventure, horror and fantasy competently. The premise is simple, Vaugier's Dr. Samantha Gaines is a leading historian and is forced into helping a villainous collector find the sword of Attila the Hun which would grant him even more power. Gaines is forced to help the villain as he has kidnapped her brother, Zach, played by Brent Florence. Gaines is helped by Jake Adams (the handsome Sebastian Spence) and his fellow adventurers, who also delve out most of the comic relief in the film. Naturally, the heroes - and the villains - eventually come across the legendary Cerebus, the three headed dog that guards Attila the Hun's tomb. From then on in, the heroes have to deal with stopping the villain and staying alive as Cerebus is hot on their tracks. The acting is decent from the leads, the scenery is okay, however the Cerebus CGI could have been better. All in all though, a fun 90 minute adventure.

In Bucharest, Romania, the priceless breastplate of Attila, the Hun is robbed from the National Museum of Antiquities by a gang leaded by the despicable Marcus Cutter (Greg Evidan), and the curator Radu (Gelu Nitu) is killed by one of the thieves. Meanwhile, in New York City, the former assistant of Professor Radu, Dr. Samantha Gaines (Emmanuelle Vaugier), is waiting for the valuable piece for an exhibition. The agent Jake Adams (Sebastian Spence) visits Samantha in the museum to tell about the heist and the death of her friend, and she tells about the legend that the breastplate would have the inscription of the location of the Sword of Mars, which is guarded by Cerberus and made Attila invincible. When Samantha's brother and addicted gambler Jack (Brent Florence) is kidnapped, she believes his debt of US$ 2,000.00 could be the reason, and travels to Romania invited by the evil kidnapper Kul Jae Sung (Garret T. Sato), getting involved in a supernatural adventure with Jake.

"Cerberus" is a reasonable and entertaining adventure, unfortunately "sold" to the viewers as a horror genre by the distributor. I bought this DVD expecting to see a trash movie, and actually it is an action movie with a supernatural dog and sword. The screenplay is flawed and predictable, and also too serious while it should have jokes and humor with the unbelievable situations, but this film is not so bad and does not deserve the IMDb User Rating of 3.9. I only believe that it does not reach the target audience with the scary monster and tagline inducing to horror genre on cover of the DVD. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Cerberus - O Guardião do Inferno" ("Cerberus - The Guardian of Hell")

This movie could have been fairly good. I wasn't expecting something spectacular, but there was, I think, potential for it to be quite good. Unfortunately, this movie turned out to be just awful. The first thing that jarred me was the camera work. The acting, editing, special effects and camera work were all just terrible. I'm not one to usually pay particular attention to things like editing and camera work, but those elements were so bad they stood out to me very quickly. As a result, I was often distracted from what was happening in the movie. As I said, I wasn't expecting a masterpiece, but I was severely disappointed by this movie. I would not personally recommend it to anyone. I didn't find one redeeming factor in this movie.

This film is a poor mans cross between James Bond and King Kong. I'm do believe this movie could have a great action horror movie, if most of the movie was related to Cerberus its self, than bothering with crime lords, spies, CIA, etc. The first half of his movie was more of a b-grade spy movie, and the second half is horror.

It seems in these sort of movies that Romanians don't have much in a police force, why aren't the local police called out when people start to drop off?? Why do local Romanian townspeople must always take the law into their own hands to protect themselves, were they simple can called out the police or even the military if need be.

The movie is rather stupid and I'm seriously question, the mentally of the director, like this mother couldn't even film a kids birthday party with-out screwing it up.

A great idea, screw by a low budget and a dumb director.