Dean Crap: Dragon Fighter

Are you man or Superman?  This Holiday season- suck it, Jesus- a friend of mine was given a slew of Dean Cain movies as part of an elaborate joke.  Not sorry, Dean.  He unloaded a bunch of them on me- at least temporarily- so I figured that I'd do one.  It came to this film or a rip-off of Rollerball.  I'm sure that they both suck, but this was on Syfy first (I think).  The plot is simple: people clone a dragon.  The reason: why not?  There's a little more reason than that, but we have a half-baked Jurassic Park rip-off to make- dammit!  What reasons are there to watch this movie?  The cheesy effects, the goofy acting and one other reason.  To find out that reason, you'll just have to read on...

The film begins in 1100 A.D. with a Dragon killing some knights before terrible, CG rocks fall and trap it in a cave.  Wow, you suck, monster!

The movie has a weird gimmick early on of showing the character and their bio.  It means jack shit, but I guess it's supposed to make the exposition less dull.  It doesn't.

This movie's gimmick: doing the super-split-screen effect constantly during early scenes.  The first half-hour is full of this shit.  Just to note: this was released after Ang Lee's Hulk.  Coincidence?

Is this annoying you yet?  If not, the movie has about 2,000,001 of them left...

About 30 minutes into the movie, they begin to clone the creature from the bones.  They don't know what it is yet...but they'll soon find out.

Now with a Dragon on the loose, it's time for random characters to die.  If you aren't friends with Dean Cain or actually Dean Cain, you're lizard-dinosaur food.

Eventually, Cain learns that the lead scientist is obsessed with Dragons, including him having a 900-year old sword in his room.  Cain takes it...but this amounts to nothing.

After blowing up the lab- after a fake-out or two-, the climax comes when the Dragon chases our heroes in the helicopter.  Damn you, Terrible CG Model!  On the plus side, it moves more smoothly than in Lair.

In The End, our heroes kill the Dragon by shooting it with a flare, making it an easy target for some F-16s.  Yes, our heroes win because of someone else.

However, there's the sequel-bait ending...which has a second complex underneath the first one.  How did that work?  Did the lead scientist spend time at both of them?  Also bear in mind that this experiment covered the span of less than 24 hours.  Oh yeah, The End.

Rock this Dragon!  What is there to say about this movie.  It's stupid.  They try to disguise the stupid and generic nature of the film with some odd Directorial flourishes.  It doesn't work.  There's been a trend over the last few decades to take Music Video Directors and give them films.  Some of them turn out to be good- i.e. Russell Mulcahy- but many of them just make silly movies.  Using this same logic, I could take the most generic rock song ever, put some rap in it and make it completely-unique.  Really-distracting Directing aside, the movie is not terrible.  The problem is that the interesting character moments are really-forced and everything else is just kind of there.  For example, one guy is revealed to be faking his deafness, since the job would only hire someone with a disability.  The whole thing is kind of interesting...but nothing comes of it.  He just randomly dies in the movie like many other characters.  Speaking of missed opportunities, what was the point of the sword?  I thought that they would stab the thing at some point and it would help them kill the beast.  It would be a parallel between Ancient and Modern technology slaying the beast- too interesting, I guess.  That's what this movie is: a collection of ideas that just aren't all that interestingly-executed.  Take us away, overly-elaborate split-screen...

Next up, an Uwe Boll sequel that is not related to Bloodrayne.  Will his actual input on the sequel make a difference or will it suck just as much?  Stay tuned...