Hola all. Massawyrm here.
When I was 10 years old the first Blockbuster Video opened in our city, just a few miles from my house. It was enormous. No longer was I stuck being confined to what they were renting at the Circle K or at the small, hole in the wall mom and pop shop that I had long picked clean of gems. No. This place boasted over 8,000 titles. 8,000. The mind boggled. And while I often perused the many titles and dreamed of what might be behind those mysterious covers, there was only one movie I ever went home with. Fuck the other 7,999 movies. I was gonna rent The Barbarians.
Hell. Yes. That was the shit. To the 10 year old Massawyrm The Barbarians was awesome on a stick, deep-fried and served up with a heaping side of kick ass. It was everything a movie should be. Funny. Exciting. And rated R. I could never quite figure out why the Barbarian brothers had never made another movie, a follow up to their stunning success. I always assumed their wrestling careers were more important.
Flash forward 15 years and I'm having another one of my movie arguments with one of my video store buddies when The Barbarians comes up. Much to my dismay there was a furious bout of laughter at my beloved sword and sandal epic. Silly? Retarded? Gawdawful? Oh yeah? I'll show them. So I took it home that night, popped it in the VCR…and my jaw dropped. And my testicles climbed so far up into the trunk of my body that I could almost taste them. What in God's name was this happy horseshit? This wasn't the awesomeness I remembered. This was Dogshit on a stick, deep-fried and served with a heaping side of WTF? But there it was. The Barbarians. In all its suckass glory. A little piece of my childhood died that day and I learned a valuable lesson about the all too important line between the movies we love as a child and movies that are actually childhood classics.
So why the memory lane preamble? Because later today, somewhere, out there in the real world, some ten year old is going to plop his weekly allowance down on a movie theatre counter and will make his way into a dark and exciting theatre…to watch his generations The Barbarians. As my childhood favorite capitalized upon the success of Conan the Barbarian, so too does this strive to capitalize on the Harry Potter craze. And to someone who doesn't know any better, this will no doubt be that awesome on a stick I was talking about. He will wonder allowed why they never make a sequel. He will never question why it is never rented out when he goes to the video store. But one day that 10 year old will grow up, he will go to college, he will argue movies with his buddies…and he will get laughed at for so much as even mentioning The Seeker: The Dark is Rising.
This movie isn't just awful – it is ri-goddamned-diculous. It is a nonsensical attempt at constructing a fantasy film out of the flimsiest of fantasy concepts, spackled together with one of the lamest, most comical mythologies to date. But it isn't just the ideas that make this an atrocity to anyone who knows better – because if the ideas aren't bad enough, the dialog attempting to convey them is positively criminal. There's a scene in which the dialog is so clumsy, so deliberately stubborn, that I swear to god Ian McShane had downed an entire fifth of whiskey to lubricate them out. You don't underssstand…you're the ssseeeker. I about wet myself it was so fucking funny. Sadly this was one glowing moment in a drab, uneventful film.
One can forgive bad mythologies and even worse dialog if something interesting happens. But here it never does. And despite its excellent casting choices for a few key roles, namely McShane and Christopher Eccleston, no one is given anything to do but speak to our hero, who in turn waits around for things to happen to him. What the whole movie boils down to is a 14 year old kid wandering around his hometown waiting to see trippy fractal patterns before he magically shifts through time, picks up a trinket that is never all that hard to get then returns to his own time where Christopher Eccleston is waiting to ask him for it. He says no. Eccleston glowers then rides off menacingly. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
That's it. That's the whole fucking movie. Boring, unbelievably derivative in both story and storytelling and there isn't even a single sequence that made me say Well at least this part was cool. Nothing. Okay, so the big black CG cloud following around Eccleston was pretty neat – in the way that it was nice to see the cloud from Lost getting some work. But that was it. If Tom Rothman strapped me down to a chair, put a gun to my head and forced me to watch this or Eragon, I wouldn't hesitate for a second. I'd watch Eragon. At least that had some fucking dragons. This movie just talks about them.
I'm embarrassed that I wasted the gas to drive to this thing. Its memory cannot fade fast enough as it so inevitably will. This is a film only to be enjoyed by those who don't know any better. I envy them. I almost wish I could go back in time to a point which a movie this diabolically terrible could amuse me to no end. Not even REMOTELY recommended to anyone who has even so much as heard the word puberty.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
Something's rising all right. But it ain't the dark.
