Il signore degli elfi

Some movies defy reviews.

Think "Zardoz." Think "Myra Breckinridge." Think of any time you've said, "What the hell planet is this movie from?" That's this movie.

The gorgeous location shooting, along with the grand adventure narrative, give the impression hack filmmaking house The Asylum's goal here was to evoke a John Milius' "Conan the Barbarian"-type epic.

What turned it to gold was the decision to populate the cast almost entirely with Thai midgets. And they fight giant spiders and battle cavemen who ride flying Komodo dragons. Because yeah. And all of this takes place, the beginning of the film instructs us, in "Indonesia, 12,000 years ago."

Shoehorned into the story are some dude from "Stargate SG-1" and every-man's-Asian-girlfriend-nightmare Bai Ling, because the movie needed star power and Bai Ling probably needed the money for bail or booze.

But they don't matter, because what this movie is really about is wildly overacting, violently gesticulating little people who have been dubbed, apparently, by the same people who dubbed all those "Godzilla" movies in the 1960s.

Folks, they're WONDERFUL. They chew through the scenery, barking their lines and flailing their arms like Ewok Shatners.

They turned what might have been an above-average adventure offering from The Asylum, like "Princess of Mars," into an astounding Munchkinland/Lord-of-the-Rings/tiny-chicks-in-the-box-from-"Mothra" mashup.

It's pure movie crystal meth. You know it's poison. You know it's rotting your brain. But you just can't resist it.

And despite the cavemen's obvious joke-store fang teeth, despite the second most poorly rendered digital woolly rhinoceros ever put on screen (the first being, of course, Zach Galifianakis), despite your wanting Bai Ling to just stop yapping and take her clothes off (she does neither), you'll watch it again. Then you'll rent it again. Then you'll buy the DVD. Then you'll start selling "Clash of the Empires" DVDs just to support your viewing habit.

This is your brain. This is your brain on overacting Thai midgets. Any questions?

the story line is there ,some of the acting was good but the directing and the writing was some the worst I have ever seen. who writes this stuff.you take a hand full of good actors and make them look like clowns.when i know they are better then that.i understand people have to make a living but before you destroy peoples careers learn how to write you hacks

Most of The Asylum movies are terrible, but I keep watching them because there is something compulsively entertaining in how bad they are that you have to keep watching. Lord of the Elves or Age of the Hobbits is not particularly good as a movie, but The Asylum have done far worse than this. The scenery is spectacular, some of the best of any movie to come out from The Asylum, and the camera work is at least orchestrated competently. Christopher Judge's resonant voice and Shakespeare-like delivery of lines makes for a nicely enigmatic performance. Bai Ling, as beguiling as she looks, is too subdued however, and the rest of the cast are significantly hindered by the truly cheesy dubbing. The dubbing also makes the dialogue awkward and not very easy to understand. The special effects are a mixed bag, the giant spiders and lizards look good and are well above average for The Asylum but the flying lizard-dragons and enormous rhino are less good, the rhino actually was rendered very badly. The story is thinly structured and unexciting, never really getting a chance to properly open up. The choreography for the fight sequences is lacking in tightness and the performing of it likewise. The music is on the generic side, the characters are rather cardboard and never really developed enough to make us care for them and the direction shows a director not putting enough of his own style into the movie, coming across as rather flat and characterless instead. To conclude, could have been much worse and has the scenery and Judge's performance to thank for that, but while somewhat entertaining really rises above mediocre in my opinion. 3/10 Bethany Cox

donniedark in his review said "some flying crocodiles with men riding them like horses" not even close! More like flying newts!

Fortunately I also downloaded this to see if it was worth buying.

Buying!!!????? Are you kidding??

It wasn't even worth the download time and has now been deleted from my drive.

Definitely a close contender to replace "Plan 9 From Outer Space" in the position as the worst ever SF movie and as for putting a spoiler in the review? Believe you me, this film doesn't NEED any help!

Whatever you do, give this a miss. Maybe in twenty years or so it may reach "cult classic" status and be hailed for it's dire plot but it's definitely not a "pizza and beer" or a family night in movie.

You can't help but laugh throughout most of this movie when you sit down to watch it, provided you actually can endure sitting through it. This is another wonderful movie production from The Asylum, and given the title of the movie "Age of the Hobbits", though I can't start to fathom how come the movie's original title "Clash of the Empires" managed to mutate into "Age of the Hobbits", aside from a lame attempt to cash in on the recently released Peter Jackson movie "The Hobbit", because this movie has absolutely nothing to do with hobbits in any sense of the word.

What went through the minds of the people at The Asylum when this movie was dished out of the creative think-box? Let's go to wonderful Indonesia, round out a heap of little people and make a semi-fantasy movie that is set somewhere in between ancient time when men were just beyond Neanderthal stage and a world with dragons and other gargantuan creatures (lizards and spiders). Seriously? But it actually works out, because it is so hilarious to watch that the movie actually grows on you.

Let's start with the people in the movie. There is a lot of little people on the cast list, and there is nothing wrong with that. But their speech is dubbed into English with a thick American accent. I didn't know that they spoke picture-perfect American in Indonesia 12,000 years ago. But I guess I was proved wrong. For some reason, then the 'enemies' of the heroes of the movie all looked like Neanderthals and were less intelligent as well. You just had to love the unibrow that they all had and the wonderfully fake teeth.

Then there were Christopher Judge and Bai Ling. What were they thinking, taking on a production project like this. Are they not familiar with the previous work of The Asylum? Or are the line of work for actors in Hollywood that far pressed? Regardless, I can only guess or wonder, and it is not really my place to question this. I was just at a loss to see these two people in this movie. Normally Bai Ling do manage to perform fairly well in movies, but her performance in this movie was just awful.

The fight scenes were adequate at times, but then there were moments where it was painfully staged and horribly executed by the performers.

But take this movie for what it is, a hilarious production from The Asylum, and as usual, you know what you are getting yourself into with this movie and their usual stuff. It should be said that The Asylum manages to spew out the occasional great movie once in a blue moon, "Clash of the Empires" (or "Age of the Hobbits") was not one such star moment. Far from it.

What really worked for the movie was the spectacular landscapes and wilderness surroundings in which the movie was shot. Plus, the hilarious entirety that is the movie.