Change Your Image
jay_042
Reviews
The Dork of the Rings (2006)
That hurt...
This movie is little more than a five minute joke. Too bad nobody seems to have mentioned this to the creators. Five minutes is about how long you can suspend a sketch about Lord of the Rings characters with moronic puns for names and scatological humor. Ten minutes of this you are starting to stretch your audience's attention pretty thin. Fifteen minutes you probably start getting some glazed looks. The creators of Dork of the Rings dragged a full length movie out of this idea. This means they are either film making sadists or, more likely, they are aspiring to direct the next Police Academy movie.
I'm sure you can go look around Youtube and find plenty of Lord of the Rings parodies. I'm sure some of them are even funny, I'd definitely recommend that over wasting money acquiring this thing.
Steel (1997)
Worst. Comic. Book. Movie. Ever.
Batman and Robin, Catwoman, their awfulness pales in comparison to this turkey. Shaquille O'Neil wanted to be an actor and Hollywood was happy to enable his fantasy. Much like the terminally ill cancer child wanting to go to Disneyland, the gave Shaq a free ride through the studio. It's bad nobody told him to not to touch the equipment.
With TV movie production values (Kenneth Johnson just is not meant to work on the big screen), a ridiculous premise (yeah sure, Shaq designed these highly advanced weapon systems), and a cast that found themselves literally overshadowed by the star of the film (you have to feel sorry for Richard "Shaft" Roundtree) it's amazing the movie ever saw the light of day. I notice that even today the movie has not made it's way onto DVD, and maybe that is for the best.
Star Wait (2005)
Makes an hour and twenty minutes really feel like six weeks
I saw this at the store the day Episode Three came out on DVD. Previously, another documentary called Starwoids had followed buildup and line wait for Episode One, and this one follows the lineup for Episode Two (plus a follow up on the Episode Three lineup) so I thought it might be a good followup.
What I got was little more than someone's home movie. A dull, and completely uninteresting look at the highly overrated "experience" of spending six weeks of your life waiting for a movie. The "colorful cast of characters" as promised on the package were a bunch of exceedingly typical fanboys who'se efforts at trying to be eccentric and/or just seemed exceedingly forced. They were trying far too hard to prove how cool they were to the camera. For the most part the people came across as crass, unpleasant, and not the kind of company you would'nt want to keep for a month.
The filmmakers just had so little to work with in the first place. Trying to make an event like this interesting at all is a difficult endeavor. . The emphasis on the day to day events building up to the first showing just made the whole film drag along at glacial pace. The unfortunate truth is that none of these people are really that interesting and the film just failed to make the event of waiting for Star Wars seem like nothing but a colossal waste of time.
Most fandom documentaries don't focus on just one little facet such as this. By doing so the filmmakers missed a lot of chances to explore the truly interesting elements of fandom. The narrowness of the movie ended up being it's greatest flaw and ultimately not worth the effort.
Max Magician and the Legend of the Rings (2002)
So this is what Ed Wood would be doing if he were alive today.
Like just about everyone who got this flick, I found it in the Wal-Mart bargain bin, stuck near the bottom with to several copies Howard the Duck. I'm a sucker for a cheap bad movie, so I got it on a whim. I was expecting cheese, I got some really smelly Limburger.
Opening with the two low rent Rennisance Festival Fugitive Elves (with lots of shots of their sneakers cleverly disguised in gunny sacks) running through the forest. Ugly Axe Guy is in pursuit, and throws a long handled battle axe into the back of the RFFE carrying a scroll. RFFE number two picks up the scroll and runs once again. Ugly Axe Guy decides to deal with Number Two with his flail, throwing it with the grace and technical skill of a William Shatner fight scene.
Shatner naturally comes to mind when I see this movie. When Ugly Axe Guy pulls his axe out of the back of the dead Elf, We see that the highly abused elves in this scene happen to have GREEN BLOOD. So, does that mean we're on Vulcan? Elf Number Two is now crawling, apparently he couldn't get his leg untangled from the flail that is loosely wrapped about his foot. He shambles to a conveniently placed door (in the middle of an otherwise uninhabited forest according to the numerous tracking shots in the opening) quickly, Elf Number Two tosses the scroll through the door as Evil Axe Guy brings his might axe down and mercifully leaves the movie for the next 45 minutes.
Then we see the scroll "magically" appearing in a flurry of cheap digital sparkles at the feet of an old gardener who looks sorta like old Obi Wan Kenobi. He picks up the scroll and starts reading, and a young girl's voice-over tells about the ongoing struggle with the UnSeelies in the BlueBell forest and how things look bleak and grim at the moment and how it would be a good time to bring that savior here and all. All the while the scene is cut with pointless closeups of a mouse and a hawk. You expect the hawk is going to swoop down and eat the mouse, and seeing how the mouse starts talking and won't shut up later in the movie, I so desperately wished that was the case. The voice over ends with "Help us, you're our only hope" at which point Sorta Kenobi looks up to the sky and we fade out.
Then things quit making sense....
Seeing how the past few paragraphs represent the first five minutes of this flick, I can tell you it just goes downhill from this point. From the introduction of the villain Dagda (he looks sorta like Tim Curry as Darkness from "Legend" but acts like Tim Curry as Frankenfurter from "Rocky Horror Picture Show") to the big showdown between good and evil (evil being armed with foam rubber hammers) this movie is nothing but a slow, agonizing, descent into cinematic masochism. If it wasn't for the presence of multiple friends to help riff on this movie, there is no way I could sit through it. After showing this, I've had friends refuse to never again let me pick movies for us to watch. This movie is pain, watch it at your discretion.