The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
The dragon is a creature from folklore. It is usually seen as large and reptilian in nature, able to fly and breathe fire. Dragons are frequently hostile to humans but can be tamed and ridden by a select few. Some depictions of dragons have them as intelligent and able to speak. In other versions, they desire to hoard treasure, while possessions of their teeth, blood or scales can offer magical boon.
Dragons have appeared in various works of fantasy and fairytale where they are fought by heroic adventurers and dragonslayers. The depiction of the dragon on screen goes back to at least the silent Siegfried (1924). There have been a number of animated examples but the live-action equivalent took flight with the CGI revolution of the 1990s. Following the boom in Epic Fantasy films in the 2000s onwards, there have been a number of fantasy works about and/or featuring dragons.
There is also the tradition of Chinese dragons, which are not reptilian or fire-breathing in nature but are more wisely creatures that often aid people in adventures.
Another lacklustre entry in the banal Lord of the Rings Lite franchise from C.S. Lewis’s books, a plodding run of the mill fantasy adventure for the most part. The mediocre reception killed off interest in the series
This was the third of the four BBC tv adaptations of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. The tv versions treats the books with quite reasonable faithfulness but suffer from extremely cheap looking effects
A cheaply made Arabian Nights fantasy adventure that came out seeking to copy ride the coattails of the success of Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
After the success of the motion captured animated The Polar Express, Robert Zemeckis turned his attentions to the classic legend. Armed with a Neil Gaiman script and a host of name actors in the mocap suits, the result is a soaring fantasy
Animator Don Bluth conducts a spinoff from his previous film Anastasia, focusing on the adventures of the talking bat sidekick
The second of the animated Barbie films, this casts her as the title character in the popular Brothers Grimm fairytale, which has been considerably embellished. This suffers the glassy plasticity of the early Mainframe films
One of the first of Mainframe’s animated Barbie films, this creates a fairytale where reasonable effort gone into the animation and characters
Hallmark tv mini-series adaptation of the classic tales has been granted a decent budget that allows the stories to emerge with lavish spectacle and the fantasy to fly with exceptional regard
Sequel to the 2010 Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland. This has even less in common with Lewis Carroll’s book sequel than its predecessor did – a total of two scenes. The sets and effects are just pretty eye candy
Tim Burton takes on Lewis Carroll but Carroll gets lost beneath Burton doing his usual quirky eccentric thing and a plot that seems to want to turn Alice’s adventures into a modern epic fantasy
A mockbuster from The Asylum that sets out to copy Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit such that Jackson and co sued, forcing The Asylum to change the title in several territories
This has a concept so ridiculous it might actually work – a fantasy version of Moby Dick. The sea captain’s obsessive hunt for a whale is transplanted to a fantasy kingdom and the whale made into a dragon
A children’s fantasy adventure that never strays beyond the environs of an American high school and comes with the lowbrow slapstick, excruciating comic caricatures and incredibly bad effects