La belle au bois dormant: La malédiction

The Script: Horrid and Stilted. The Acting: Horrid and Stilted. The Costumes look like a cross between "bring your own" and bad Renaissance Faire rentals. The Music was ridiculously melodramatic, as though they thought that would help the audience to care about what was happening. The castle set looks like they were filmed in someone's backyard with about half a dozen extras trying to look like a "kingdom". There is about as much emotion as a chess match. While the Sleeping Beauty story is one of my all time favorites and I have seen and read almost every Sleeping Beauty story, book and film, I couldn't get past the first 20 minutes of this awful, awful film. Don't bother.

I was hoping for something along the lines of a Disney type kids drama but the fact that the leading characters had messy hair and had dialogue as wooden as a 70's robot made me realise this was something unique. I managed to last about 15 minutes until I wanted to gouge out my eyes and drill a huge hole in my head to make it all stop.It is such a long time since I have seen a movie so awful, how it managed to to get a 4 I will never know, I would have given it less than 1 but there is no option. Today in this financially challenged time I find it incredulous that this type of junk direct to DVD rubbish keeps being made, I would have hoped that the financiers had closed off the lines of credit, the sooner the better in my own opinion.

Sweet Christ, this movie is awesome! It also has no production values whatsoever and is generally just very badly made. I honestly don't know how to rate something like this. I was entertained pretty much from start to finish, but I guess for all the wrong reasons. Writer/Director Casper Van Dien (Johnny Rico from "Starstip Troopers") shows some real audacity in how he handles the story: the evil witch has an army of zombies, gives shelter to a murderous sea monster AND rips a guy's head straight off (a guy who bleeds awful effects), that really ought to count for something. If you get to make your debut as a director with a movie about Sleeping Beauty and the first thing that comes to mind is "hey, let's put in zombies", you are entitled to some of my respect. "Sleeping Beauty" will have tremendous trouble finding an audience though: the movie's way too creepy and gory for the kiddies, but the title won't attract many fans of terrible B-movies either. It'll probably sink into obscurity very quickly like everything else The Asylum Studio makes, but I would say...unjustly? This terrible movie has something I can't put my finger on, something that makes me want to see it again someday (and I'll never ever find out what).

So So Bad. Waste of money and time. Acting is so bad it makes you cringe. So many plots and plans that just do not make sense. It's comical but in a very bad way. How can EVERY Actor in this movie get it so very wrong? Who wrote the Lines, 6 year old? Most probably the worst movie I have ever seen and believe me after going back to watch the old Batman & Robin Drama with the 'BOOMS' & 'CLASH' that is saying something! Ridiculous from start to finish. Maybe for 4/5 year olds but certainly not for anyone older, let alone teenagers or adults. The movie industry must have a lot of money to waste to bring out this trash. So much potential just wasted.

Sleeping Beauty is far from great, far from good even, but for The Asylum it's okay. The costumes and scenery do look quite nice and the photography while rushed in places certainly could have been far worse. Maya Van Dien is very endearing as one of the more interesting characters while Finn Jones is good carrying the movie, and the ending is fun with some goofy suspense. Sleeping Beauty starts off very well too with a great classic fairy-tale atmosphere. However, much of the rest of the acting is not very good, Casper Van Dien and Catherine Oxenberg is rather wooden as underwritten characters; Grace Van Dien is beautiful but never rises above okay due to not having much of note to work with; Olivia D'Abo's performance is very inconsistent and not in a good way with hammy moments and bland ones, and worst of all Edward Lewis French plays the Prince as a truly annoying idiot. The characters are fairy-tale clichés and that would not have been a bad thing- characters can be clichéd and still be good enough- if they didn't have such cardboard personalities or acted so inconsistently. The script is the very meaning of clunky with parts that come across as really cheesy and in a way to make anybody hearing it cringe. The story feels very dragged out in places as well as structurally rather muddled and while it starts off well it later goes over-the-top with the violence and gore that it feels like a completely different movie and makes one question who the movie is aimed at. The music does sound pedestrian, the narration while delivered in a very distinguished manner by Michael York wasn't necessary and at times over-explanatory and the special effects do often look cheap with stilted movement. All in all, Sleeping Beauty is not good but it is not that terrible either, nowhere near among The Asylum's worst. 4/10 Bethany Cox