Movie Review: Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness (2012)

(Note: This movie is part of the Dungeons & Dragons Movie Series. For more movies, see the entries for the 2000 movie and its 2005 sequel).

I had no idea this was in the works, so I was pleasantly surprised when SyFy decided to premiere the movie on its channel.  It cased a buzz in my gaming circle, and I also wanted to watch it as well.  I eventually got to watch it, and it was worth my time, unlike some D&D movies.  The best part of this surprise was the subject matter of the movie: the Book of Vile Darkness.

To be fair, the movie is not about the singular artifact called the book of vile darkness--a tome suffused with so much evil from its human-skin book cover to the foul contents penned in blood that it makes whomever reads it turn evil--but about the quest to stop it from being recreated by a dark cult bent on having darkness rule the lands once again.  This monumental task is taken up by one paladin of Pelor named Grayson Azrael (Jack Derges).

When his paladin order, the Knights of the New Sun, is nearly wiped out save for himself and his captured father, Grayson must go undercover and join a group of evil adventurers:

• Akordia (Eleanor Gecks), a female shadar-kai witch
• Vimak (Habib Nasib Nader), a male goliath barbarian
• Seith (Lex Daniel), a male human assassin
• Bezz (Barry Aird), a male human vermin lord

THE PARTY ASSEMBLED (from l-r):
Vimak the barbarian, Seith the assassin,
Bezz the vermin lord, Akordia the witch,
and Sir Grayson the paladin. That is not a typo.

Sir Grayson braves the depths of depravity while holding up his morality, sleeping with an evil spellcaster (that means Akordia; he's doesn't go boning dudes to save the world), even slaying a red dragon in the process to get closer to the...I'm not sure if I can really say this..."mind flayer" Shathrax.  This strange creature is responsible for trying to recreate the book AND for capturing Grayson's father.  Grayson will travel very far to reach his goal, from his home kingdom all the way to the Elemental Plane of Air--or was it the Plane of Shadow?  I couldn't be sure, but wherever they were there wasn't a lot of ground to work with.  At the end of it all, this movie was a lot better than its predecessors despite being based on the rules for the 4th edition D&D.  I was riveted to my seat for a great deal of the movie, mainly because of the attention to detail about the technical game stuff.

(actual product, written for D&D 3.0 rules)

They got most of the races and monsters right--the fire archon, red dragon, and especially the slaymate (an undead creature from Libris Mortis).  I almost crawled over the back of my chair when I saw it in action.  The mind flayer was no mind flayer at all, but some guy with his mouth sewn shut.  The magic items used were pretty on the nose, like the javelin of lightning, and the collars of obedience combined with the belt of the emperor that Shathrax wore.  Vorpal blades, necklace of fireballs, bag of holding; you name it, it was in there.  The film even had a fun time with the spells, namely invisibility.  And I was amazed.

It can be said that anything worth doing takes time, practice, and a whole lot of stress.  In the case of Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness, the 7 years between live-action projects was worth it.  I recommend this movie, not because it's all that good but because someone had the balls to make another one even after the first two films were critically panned in the theaters and the direct-to-video market.  I hope someone is as care-free to produce and direct the next D&D film, because I will watch it.  And I hope you will too.

RATING: 8/10

Movie Review: The Lost Future (2010)

I was working on a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that involved an entire orc nation with human slaves, and looking for visual ideas to work from.  I read the manga JAPAN drawn by Berzerk's Kentaro Miura for some ideas.  I had watched the old 70's movie At The Earth's Core with Doug McClure, Peter Cushing and Caroline Munro for even more ideas.  Upon a trip to Blockbuster Video (yes, they still have those), I picked up a copy to watch, since they didn't have a copy of the sequel to Uwe Boll's In The Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.  When I reached a certain point, I realized I had seen bits of this movie before on SyFy Channel, and hadn't watched the whole thing.  Now I had paid or it, and I would watch this joint South African-German production and review it.

Our story concerns a caveman tribe called Grey Rock, containing the very manly Savan (Corey Sevier) and the not-so-manly Kaleb (Sam Claflin).  Both live in a wild untamed wilderness with their tribesmen, hunting giant mega-sloths of the Ice Age and bring back the spoils to their mates: Savan to his yellow-haired mate Dorel (Annabelle Wallis) and Kaleb...not so much.  Kaleb pines for Dorel, and his sister Miru (Eleanor Tomlinson) makes a point to make fun of him for it.  While they live in relative safety, they are still in danger from the Mutants: a subhuman race that roams the forests and mountains.  They are savage and if they bite you, you're infected and you'll turn into one of them.
The lives of these cavemen is turned upside down by an invasion of Mutants.  Most of the tribe locks themselves away in a cave, but Kaleb, Savan and Dorel are left outside to make their way to go for help.  They are almost killed by a Mutant when they are saved by a mysterious stranger named Amal (British actor Sean Bean).  He is a member of an elite group of protectors of various other tribes and bears strange artifacts with him.  He says that no matter if they were bitten or not, if a Mutant breathed on you then infection would set in.  With that, Amal leads these cavemen into the real world -- the world AFTER the fall or mankind -- to find a cure for the disease.

Playing with the idea of cavemen in the future is not a new idea.  It has been explored in films like America 3000, Battlefield Earth, the remake of The Time Machine, and even Planet of the Apes (both original and the remake).  The thing that makes it such a fertile playground is how exciting it is to get the reveal.  When people see that the world is changed so much, save the visual landmarks that have stood the weathering of time for familiarity's sake, it can awe a person or shake them to the core.  It's one of those moments that make a passable movie great.  The same could not be said of this movie.
When the reveal comes, it's in the friggin' title: THE LOST FUTURE -- as in "the future in the past."  If you missed that on the cover of the DVD, it comes up again as the title card.  Understandably the movie was set in the future, but if they had tried to let us know that in the movie without a whole lot of exposition at the 2/3 mark, the movie would have done a lot better.