A cocky sorcerer's apprentice (Peter MacNicol? the anxious lawyer in Ally McBeal? really!?) undertakes to kill the old dragon terrorizing a kingdom in Dragonslayer, a sword & sorcery movie that seems like family fare, but is at times a little gorier than you expect. Let me first commend the effects. They tease the dragon at first, a claw here, a tail there, and you think, okay, how cheap is this going to be? But it's so it can better surprise you when the animatronic monster actually shows up. The compositing/chromakey shows its age at times, but still makes for pretty great action, whether it's with hand-to-hand weapons or magic spells. As for the story, it's got a couple of interesting characters (like young Valerian) and twists you're not expecting, as well as a healthy dose of religious and political satire. Sure, there's a dragon, but the king's policies regarding that dragon are the real danger to the people we come to care about. It's a little slow at first, granted, and I question whether or not the "hero's journey" works (is Galen's flaw really sold to us, and does he actually overcome it?). There's a lot of stuff like this coming out of the early 80s (somehow even before Conan the Barbarian, which I would have thought would have originated the trend), and little of it is as worthwhile as Dragonslayer.
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dombrewer
Vermithrax Pejorative... still the greatest screen dragon after all these years....Siskoid
A cocky sorcerer's apprentice (Peter MacNicol? the anxious lawyer in Ally McBeal? really!?) undertakes to kill the old dragon terrorizing a kingdom in Dragonslayer, a sword & sorcery movie that seems like family fare, but is at times a little gorier than you expect. Let me first commend the effects. They tease the dragon at first, a claw here, a tail there, and you think, okay, how cheap is this going to be? But it's so it can better surprise you when the animatronic monster actually shows up. The compositing/chromakey shows its age at times, but still makes for pretty great action, whether it's with hand-to-hand weapons or magic spells. As for the story, it's got a couple of interesting characters (like young Valerian) and twists you're not expecting, as well as a healthy dose of religious and political satire. Sure, there's a dragon, but the king's policies regarding that dragon are the real danger to the people we come to care about. It's a little slow at first, granted, and I question whether or not the "hero's journey" works (is Galen's flaw really sold to us, and does he actually overcome it?). There's a lot of stuff like this coming out of the early 80s (somehow even before Conan the Barbarian, which I would have thought would have originated the trend), and little of it is as worthwhile as Dragonslayer.the3rdman
Close up dragon effects: awesome. Dragon flying around effects: not so great.