dannym-3

It's not just cheese. It's the best of cheese. The mixed fighting really is virtually unmatched even from a big budget film. Well, OK Jackie Chan can top it. It's fun but not actually that fake for the most part, she's really doing a tough girl act to intimidate the entire crowd so they don't all take her on at once. Also most clashes are done with in a couple of exchanges as opposed to typical never-ending sword-on-sword fight scenes.

The pre-fighting dialog is bold, clever, witty, over-the-top banter. Of course I loved it, it's outstanding! I'll take this over the rather stock dialog in most action movies any day.

"Oh what- am I on FIRE now? GREAT!!!"

First off just fast forward past the first 5 or 10 min where all the Cyborgs are meditating around a cyberhookah thing and Nea's talking to a crazy woman. The only thing you need to know is her little brother has a crescent birthmark on his wrist. Start where Nea's village gets raided, only a couple of min before Gabriel shows up.

Sadly the movie kinda ran out of budget before ending. They allude to some sort of sequel, certainly no budget to make Cyber City this time around, then they didn't even know what moment to end it with and narrated in Nea giving some rambling epilogue. Bummer. You just want the fun-filled center of this film twinkie.

It's got some great sets and costumes, a fantastic, frankly groundbreaking soundtrack of calling vocals, and spectacular deeply theatric moments, basically any time the characters aren't actually speaking is OK. The dialogue is fundamentally awful, Romans are one-dimensionally bad, absurdly condescending and arrogant, and barbarians good. Obviously the writer wanted to make this a commentary about current politics, referring to Icenians as "terrorists", a concept which did not exist at the time. In fact, many lines such as "For God's sake!" would not exist for this setting.

I don't suppose anyone could tell me the reason why all the Roman soldiers have cockney accents either.

To watch this film, you've got to have a sense of humor for the dialogue which is utterly painful. The Romans are written so badly on such a deep level one can take amusement in it. But it can't be described, laughed at, and appreciated as a bad B-movie, there are quality stirring dramatic moments there and any humor you see in it is killed by the prolonged gang rape scene, which is not a gratuitous addition but a serious, fundamental part of the historical accounts of the real Boudicca.

This film is without compare in its strengths and weaknesses and I'm wholly at a loss to classify it or say exactly how one should appreciate it. You will have to decide for yourself and tell me.

Mazes and Monsters was the made-for-TV special at the head of the anti-Dungeons-And-Dragons movement, spearheaded by Patricia Pulling who blamed the game for her son's suicide the same year. I know people whose parents confiscated and threw out/burned all their gear as a result of this film, which suggests such games cause loving, sensitive kids to go insane and suicidal.

For a made-for-TV, it's pretty well done, despite the fact that its premise is rather, well, inflamatory. It's wholly designed to make parents fear their kid's imagination. Still fun to watch and laugh at. Although it launched Tom Hank's movie career, I've heard he won't acknowledge having made it.