![]() ![]() SyFy’s mentality is show more, if they showed less and showed it at the right moments they’d have enough money to make their creatures look real enough. They’re not big budget perfect, but they move in the right way and look integrated well into the environment. Mythica’s makers were smart though when employing their CGI critters. I would’ve shut it off the moment I saw the first shitty CGI creation and never looked back. Had Mythica’s monsters looked as bad as SyFy’s creature features I would not have even reviewed the movie. Thank God for the SyFy channel’s shitty monster movies because now I have something to judge certain CGI creations against. Of the CGI created were the aforementioned Ogre, a Lord Of The Rings warg-type wolf and a giant cobra Marek conjures from a fire to scare some orcs. There’s only three, four technically, except for a couple of quick snippets the giant spiders (2-3 feet) were mostly practicical. The next thing Mythica gets right are the CGI monsters. The Book Of Vile Darkness looks too “shallow” in these departments, too clean, too comic-bookish almost and that’s not what you want from a sword and sorcery flick, at least not what I want. What I’m trying to say is what Mythica gets right is the realist feel of their world, from locations to costumes to weapons, it all feels authentic to that time period. The 14 th century was not a “clean” place. It’s generally one of two things I judge most sword and sorcery flicks by, at least the low-budget ones. The third, Dungeons & Dragons: The Book Of Vile Darkness (2012) is the only one I can watch repeatedly, but it would have been so much better if the world it took place in wasn’t as “clean” looking. The first two are shit, plain and simple. There are currently three movies in existence supposedly based on the D&D role playing game. But first one of the things I did like about it was something some of the worst low-budget sword and sorcery flicks don’t generally excel in. I’ll be honest I was not wowed by this movie, but I’ll get into why in just a minute, and its redemption. THAT’S A GOOD START FOR A BAND OF ADVENTURERS IN THIS D&D INSPIRED MOVIE. So there’s your D&D inspired band of adventures.įIGHTER, MAGIC-USER, THIEF AND CLERIC…. ![]() Enter fighter, Thane (Adam Johnson), and elven thief, Dagen (Jake Stormoen). Marek promises she can pull together a band that’ll help Teela and during the night she does just that. It’s a magical stone her sister has and in the prologue it’s the main cause as to why her temple was raided, but thanks to the Gods it has yet to fall into unsavory hands her sister has it and so far none of the orcs know it yet. Priestess, Teela (Nicola Posener), comes seeking a band of warriors to free her sister from a massive Ogre and his orc band, but there’s more at stake than just a captured sibling. Adventurers frequent this tavern and since Marek needs money as well, she arrives at just the right time. She ventures to a tavern ruled over by a dwarf called, Hammerhead (Christopher Robin Miller), whose nose I could not stop staring at. Around this time she gets fed up with being a slave and revolts after a series of events leaves her battered and picked on. Marek wants to join him but he believes her future lies elsewhere. He’s not a central character, at least not in this first installment), is her mentor, but he’s suddenly gotten paranoid and wants to leave his digs for a life bordering more on utter secrecy. Seasoned wizard, Gojun Pye (Kevin Sorbo who cameos in the film. Our main character in Mythica is Marek (Melanie Stone), a magic-user in training so-to-speak who’s also a slave. I’m going to assume Dungeons & Dragons was not on the mind of the creators of Mythica even though the band of adventures one of the main characters assembles feels very much like the kind of band one would put together in a D&D campaign, Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit trilogies are most likely the inspiration for this movie. It’s a good primer to understanding my love for thus sub-genre and why I wanted to review this movie when I stumbled upon on a trailer of it. I’m going to eschew that this time and just direct you to this article I wrote last December that pretty much recounts every thing I can remember about my time with D&D back in high school. Generally when I do a review of a “memory movie” or any movie whose genre harks back to childhood I like to chronicle those childhood memories as they connect to the movie. ![]() Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings tales came way before the creation of the Dungeons & Dragons role playing game, and I’m sure some of Tolkien’s elements were consciously and/or unconsciously integrated into Gary Gygax’s RPG, but every time I see a ‘sword and sorcery’ movie I always end up comparing it to that beloved RPG I used to be heavily into back in high school in the mid-80s.
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