Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness
Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness
aka Dungeons & Dragons 3
2012
Written by Brian Rudnick
Directed by Gerry Lively
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The horrors of Lasik!
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Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness. D&D: The Threequel. D&D: Chipwrecked. Known by many names, Dungeons & Dragons 3 still manages to become a SyFy original and pack in some fun. While there is no comparison to big budgeted blockbusters where characters slice down armies of orcs, for a small adventure things are peachy keen. +2 axe keen.
Where do we stand? Well, it is still a hell of a lot better than Dungeons & Dragons. But Dungeons & Dragons 2 is slightly more charming. That isn’t to say Dungeons & Dragons 3 isn’t good. It’s actually pretty entertaining. I would say it is equally as good as the second one, if only because they switch things up and have us follow around a gang of evil adventurers who aren’t afraid to slaughter innocent people and rob and kill each other. It’s the cool things like this that make you want to watch more films that follow around a bunch of amoral people. And it’s also how some of the funner D&D campaigns go, as your characters just loot, murder, and plunder the countryside while becoming the most powerful and the most wanted people out there.
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This dragon is ET!
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We see the return of the director and writer of Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God for this new installment, Gerry Lively and Brian Rudnick. Their familiarity with the subject matter and how to make a film that isn’t terrible helped save this franchise from becoming the gigantic joke the original installment made it. The Book of Vile Darkness is an actual book for D&D as well as being an item in the game. The book was controversial upon release, as it was the first D&D book for mature audiences and some claimed it validated the old complaints about Dungeons & Dragons being evil. Others were a bit more rational with their reception.
In the film, each character gets effects and has their own motivations for why they are doing what they are doing. Some have tragic back stories, some are just in search of interesting lives, and some are just giant dicks. Akordia has neat effects where she can teleport her hands to far away to do things, which are put to great use like when she needs to slap Grayson for being an idiot again. It’s fun seeing how such powers would actually be used as opposed to just them being used in random battles. There is some great flavor, and some neat concepts for some of the monsters, particularly the very creepy undead child, and the disturbing evil Lord who has his mouth sewn shut, but still speaks through his chained twin female slaves.
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Mrs. Gollum!
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Grayson’s quest to save his father and thus save the world forces him into positions that betray the oaths he swore, but they are the only way to do the job of saving the world. Grayson’s choices (and eventual reveal as being way more powerful morally than his father because he compromises on his principles) is an interesting story branch, and makes you wonder how it plays out in a grander scheme. Do Grayson’s choices to kill people and ally with bad men equate with some of the awful things the US does on its War on Terror? Is this like a Jack Bauer situation, in that Grayson truly doesn’t have another alternative? Grayson does do bad things, but they are done to bad people who are planning to do even worse things. In a matter of principles, his hands aren’t as dirty as they might be, but to the values that the Knights he belong to, he doesn’t measure up to the oaths. But that doesn’t matter, as his commitment and character is what activates his magic amulet, something more pure members of the Knights were never able to do. Following the Dungeons & Dragons alignment system, Grayson moves from Lawful Good to Chaotic Good, but he never really steps outside of the good sphere. So it isn’t an abandonment of the Good principle, even if he isn’t the pure Lawful Good he wanted to be.
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The worst modern dance ever.
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The Extra-Terrestrial Cat In Boots (Review)
The Extra-terrestrial Cat In Boots
aka O Gato de Botas Extraterrestre
1990
Directed by Wilson Rodrigues
Written by Rubens Francisco Luchetti
Ladies and Gentlemen, TarsTarkas.NET was served. We were served by Todd at Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill, in his review of the Mexican Puss in Boots, and he danced a deadly dance of death while everyone hooted an hollered and yelled “Damn” at the backflips and foreflips and flips that were made up of tiny flips with cream filling and cherries on top. When the dust was settled and TarsTarkas.NET was critically wounded by the serving, there was but one choice. Never backing down, TarsTarkas.NET is going to serve back! The gauntlet is thrown…and by gauntlet, I mean the boot! The boot-let, if you will. Yes, we’re serving FourDK with our own live action Puss in Boots! And this time…there’s spaceships!
Yes, it’s true, The Extra-Terrestrial Cat In Boots (O Gato de Botas Extraterrestre) features a spaceship. And a robot. And other weirdo things. But most of all, it features a guy in a cat suit running around doing things. That’s weird enough by itself. The Extra-Terrestrial Cat In Boots largely follows the plot of the original Puss in Boots story by Charles Perrault (though the film erroneously credits it to the Brothers Grimm!), except for the few random goofy things that make this Puss in Boots freaking crazy. The last time we went to Brazil, TarsTarkas.NET was tortured by Os Trapalhões’ Brazilian Star Wars (Os Trapalhões na Guerra dos Planetas). We haven’t been back since, despite an ever-growing pile of Os Trapalhões and Xuxa films preparing to destroy my body and mind. But I’m back, and this time, there is a case of cat litter and a laser light acting as backup. So, Puss, get your boots…it’s dance-off time!
WR-Filmes brings us this Brazilian take, and the credits are primed to tell us that Burman Studios created the cat makeup, while Dr. D. Wes Wheadon did the visual effects of the cat’s eyes. This cat is complicated! And yet, it still looks creepy as hell.
To add more weirdness to things, director/writer/actor Wilson Rodrigues is well known for directing a bunch of softcore Brazilian productions in the early 1980s. He even brings along a pack of the stars of those films, including Puss himself, Heitor Gaiotti! This was Wilson Rodrigues’s last film.
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Haunted House Elf (Review)
Haunted House Elf
1990
Directed by ???
Haunted House Elf is what the title of this film translate to. There are little to no records of this hardly anywhere, especially records in English. Whoever did the subtitles decided that the vampires would be called “The Living Dead” He also decided that checking spelling was for pussies and that he was a real man. I’m here to tell you this guy is no real man and probably couldn’t spell “man” correctly if it was tattooed on his hand, much less any other word.
There was a period of time where tons of hopping vampire flicks popped up in the shadow of the Mr. Vampire films. Because hopping vampires are wacky, kids loved them, and it was inevitable that hopping vampire kid movies appeared. There was a ton of them at one point, you couldn’t shake a magic paper tract without it hitting the forehead of some hopping vampire kid. Then, like most fads, it quickly died and was replaced with Pokemon or something. Hmph…kids.
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Hopping Vampires, Lin Hsiao Lan, Monkey King, Taiwan, wizards and witches playing with wands, Wu Ma
Beauty’s Evil Roses (Review)
Beauty’s Evil Roses
aka Se jiang II zhi xie mei gui
1992
Directed by Lam Wah-Chuen
Written by Chan Hiu-Bing
Beauty’s Evil Roses is somewhat famous in the circle of people who watch Hong Kong cult cinema because it is pretty darn weird. Besides being a weird Category III film, it also falls into the genre of movies that have weird S&M-type scenes, creepy tentacle stuff, and goofy Thai witchcraft battles. The creepy tentacle stuff is the types of things you expect to see out of Japan, not Hong Kong. The best stuff is the crazy goofy witch effects, especially when the Taoist priest is battling the Thai witches (why to all the evils in the universe in Hong Kong films come from Thailand? Because the city fears the wild frontier!)
So we have crazy witch cults, girls getting kidnapped, lesbians, cops doing cop stuff, more characters than you can shake a rape tentacle at, confusion, goofy effects, lesbians, gender-neutral evil deities, lesbians, Taoist priests, battles in outer space, lesbians, and lesbians. Seems like a winner to me.
Despite this being a VHS copy, the film did get a cheap DVD release at some point. But we don’t have it, so you can’t see it! Nyah nyah nyah!
The cast list is very sketchy, I did my best but make no promises as to the accuracy. So if there are errors, it is your fault for noticing them, and I will use my Lathe of Heaven powers to alter reality so my guesses are correct. That’s what you get for doubting my cast listing skills!
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Categories: Movie Reviews, Ugly Tags: Category III, Hong Kong, Lam Wah-Chuen, Tentacles, Weird Asia, wizards and witches playing with wands
Legend of Eight Samurai (Review)
Legend of Eight Samurai
aka Satomi hakken-den
1983
Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
A classic Japanese tale gets a reworking and then is dubbed and imported into America. Like many Asian epics, there are a lot of characters and a complicated plot, which is made more confusing with the bad dubbing. Even worse, this is an adaptation of an epic tale that is condensed into a film so huge chunks of back story are either disregarded or glossed over in less than a sentence. Any movie boasting giant centipedes is worth a look. Unfortunately, the 80’s soundtrack does a wonderful job of dating the film, despite it being a period piece. Originally I thought that the songs were added by the American importers, but with the release of the Japanese language original since I originally wrote this review over a year ago, it has become known that the songs where already added in the original version. It’s a deadly blow, imagine the worst of hair bands and love ballads, more deadly than any martial art. The film loses some of the fun factor as the emotion turns to hating the soundtrack. This version of Legend of Eight Samurai that we are recapping is the full screen original American dub, one day we will try to get a hold of the Japanese widescreen version for comparison.
The story is a Japanese mythology that originated in China (like many things Japanese, including the Japanese writing scripts (the kanas are simplified versions of the kanji they “borrowed” from China.) The story of a princess, the last of her clan, given eight warriors to protect her, selected without their knowledge. Magic crystals are found by those selected, the crystals created by a dog (thus giving the story its name:Hakkenden or “Dog Warriors.”) Each crystal has a different Confucian virtue, which is only used in this film as the kanji symbol on each crystal (we have gone through the trouble of translating each one.) Takizawa Okikuni (also known as Kyokutei Bakin or Takizawa Bakin) created the version used in this film from 1814 to 1842 (Edo era) a 106 volume story called Nanso Satomi Hakkenden that took 28 years to complete. Almost as long as the Wheel of Time series is taking. The serial was then updated in 1982 by Toshio Kamata in a novel called Shin Satomi Hakkenden. Many of the stars are part of the Japanese Action Squad, a group founded by Sonny Chiba that practiced martial arts and seemed to star in many movies together. In fact, they previously starred in a futuristic version of this very same tale called Message From Space over here (Uchu kara no messeji in Japan) that even featured the same director!
These are the eight who have Confucian Virtue Jewels:
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Dragon Dynasty (Review)
Dragon Dynasty
2006
Starring
Federico Castelluccio as Marco Polo
Aaron Hendry as Giovanni Polo
Dion Basco as Gao Ling
Stana Katic as Ava
Peter Kwong as Shang Sei
James Hong as Emperor
Directed by Matt Codd
Welcome to the second run of the team-up between TarsTarkas.NET and FantasyFilmscapes.com known as The Dragon Slayers. Today, we will be taking on the 2006 SciFi Channel original movie Dragon Dynasty, because we can. The original team-up was Dragon. Also, before we begin, check out this cool graphic whipped up to celebrate the event:
As usual, the beginning section is co-written between Tars Tarkas and Iain Norman, and then the movie is divided into 15 minute chunks, alternating between each other, where our contributions are color coded. Iain’s version on his site is located here
Dragon Dynasty is one of the more recent SciFi Channel Original movies to air. Like many of their other films this ones features some big CGI monsters and a basic chase and hunt monster scenario – in this case the settings range from China to Italy in the late 13th century A.D. Usually SciFi puts about $1 million USD each into their ‘originals’ and uses Bulgaria for locations because it costs next to nothing to produce a film there. While not sure of the exact nature of the Bulgarian tax setup it is probably made quite affordable for foreign products to use the country in their shoots by way of tax credits in return for employing local actors and related industries. They usually drag over a few actors who are looking to make house payments and sleepwalk through their roles, but the supplemental local actors have been known to do bang up jobs.
