DVD Review : Dragon Kingdom (2019)

"To save their kingdom from the dark Lord army, a small group of warriors must travel through the Forbidden Lands fighting the fearsome monsters of the Dragon Kingdom to rescue their king."

 While essentially correct - besides there not being a Dragon Kingdom - the above blurb fails to mention a fairly major point.

  When I popped the DVD in,  I was a little surprised to see the title screen come up as The Dark Kingdom.
  Not necessarily a sign of a bad film but it did set off a small alarm bell.  But not half as much as what happened next. You see, the traditional opening prologue was accompanied by clips from what looked suspiciously like a previous film before we immediately get dumped into a story .well in progress.

  Tuns out that Dragon Kingdom is the second film in a series.

  I can't help feeling that this is the sort of information that should have been on the DVD cover.  How hard would it have been to slap a simple "Part II" on there?  Christ knows you had time and space for a lot of other stuff that fools nobody.
  I would also have been less annoyed when the action cut off with a lot unresolved.  Because this is film 2 in a 3-part series. 

  Moving on past all that, does Dragon Kingdom/Dark Kingdom/whatever stand up on it's own merits?

  Well it does suffer from being low-budget and while some of the actors do a decent job certain others made me wince every time they opened their gob.  Special effects are a bit hit and miss too.  Monsters look less impressive when it's obviously a bloke in baggy trousers on a pair of stilts.
 Also, aren't knights supposed to have horses?  Couldn't afford them either.
 My main problem is that to all intents and purposes I'd just switched on a film that was already an hour plus in so I'd missed a lot of important stuff - character introductions, back story, why they needed to get travelling in the first place.
 
The thing is, for a No Horse Fantasy ( a term I just made up for this whole  film genre) Dragon Kingdom isn't horrendous. Not great but not without some OK bits.  So if you do decide to check it out make sure you watch the first film -Knights Of The Damned  - beforehand.

Or maybe you ought to wait for the inevitable £7.99 three-disc collection.

Verdict: Approach with caution and don't expect too much. 

Film Rreview: Asphalt Angels (2014)

Genre: Adventure. Allegedly

  An all-female heist gang take on an ill-fated  jewel snatch that goes wrong. Meanwhile a gang of bikers are looking for the woman that killed their ex-boss. 

 So while gang-leader Chase languishes in the tiniest prison ever, her BMX -riding sister is great danger

 A woman with big boobs shows up from time to time to keep the viewers interested.  

  When I saw the cover to Asphalt Angels my inner 13-year old was suitably impressed. "Hot chick with a gun" he said, bouncing up and down "Gonna be awesome"

  However, my inner movie fan was a lot more cynical.  From painful experience, most movies that use boobs and guns as the big selling point rarely have  put any effort into important stuff like story, characters or not sucking.  

 But I went ahead and watched it anyway. 

I'm dumb.

Describing "Asphalt Angels" as low-budget cinema would imply there was a budget to begin with.  The whole thing is shot in the hills outside LA (I think) so after a while you start asking "Do any of these people actually have homes?"  

 Other awkward questions include :

Why do the badass bike gang only have four members? 

Why do none of them ride  a bike at any point. Or even seem to own one?

If the BMX races are a big enough deal, that there's a report present, how come there's no crowd whatsoever? 

Why doesn't the prison have more than one guard?  The invisible snipers don't count. 

  At times this film feels more like some sort of low-budget porn without the porny bits.  That might explain the terrible acting, story which jumps from scene to scene without any flow, the dialogue which seems to have been generated from a list of cliches and the occasional close-up of a busty woman zipping up her tits for no apparent reason. 

  The pacing is also way, way off - way too much nothing happens in between bits that matter and the crucial showdown is so tacked-on it isn't even funny.  Did we really need so many scenes of Chase looking moody and staring into the distance? 

To sum up: Asphalt Angels is dull and has nothing whatsoever to recommend it.  Avoid.