Ah, the D&D films... by
Snowy the Sane Fangirl
on 2018-10-15 07:29:00 UTC
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I'm going to preface this with a disclaimer: I've never played D&D. But I think I can still recognize an awful movie when I see one. And spoilers, I guess?
Alright, so there are three of them: Dungeons and Dragons, Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God, and Dungeons and Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness. Dungeons and Dragons, amusingly enough, was produced by New Line Cinema and released only one year before The Fellowship of the Ring, one of the best movies and movie adaptations I've ever seen. I guess they were saving all the good stuff for that. So it follows the adventures of Ridley, your typical white boy fantasy hero except worse, Snails, your typical black fantasy sidekick except worse (this character was handled in a pretty racist way), your typical fantasy female love interest whose name I can't remember (but she was an idiot), and a bunch of other people who were super unremarkable so I don't even remember them. I think Halle Berry might have been there? Don't quote me on that, though.
I could go on at length about what makes this movie bad in all the most hilarious ways, but I'll just link you to the Nostalgia Critic review of it. I think he hits most of the main points. The only one I think he doesn't hit is that Ridley and the love interest do the do inside a map. Yup, you read that right. They go inside a map, and then they do the do, and then it's never spoken of again. The whole thing is pretty funny. I'd highly recommend it.
The second movie is kind of boring, honestly. It was made for TV and managed to be good enough that I found myself feeling the most apathetic stirrings of an emotion that just might have been interest in seeing the heroes succeed. The special effects are pretty terrible, though. If you're looking for hilariously bad this might not be the one for you because if nothing else you can tell they were trying. Its biggest failing is that they kept on trying to link it back to the first one.
So the third film completely ignored the existence of the first two. Good move, right? Jury's still out. See, the third film was by far the worst of the three. It starts with an opening narration that goes on for long enough that you start to wonder if the whole movie is going to be like this and it isn't some kind of poorly illustrated audiobook. It isn't, (un)fortunately. Eventually it ends and the characters show up on the screen. What then follows is roughly an hour and fifteen minutes of absolutely nothing being explained ever. It's trying to deal with issues of grey morality but instead of doing that it just kind of never addresses morality at all until something depends on someone's morality, and then it aligns them either good or evil as needed to move the shambling wight that passes for a plot along. Phrases like "purest knight" are thrown about liberally, and the writing is so lazy that the macguffin actually morphs into a different object about two thirds of the way through.
And then the rest of it is torture porn.
It's not horribly graphic torture or anything. It's like weird agony ray stuff. Personally I'm less uncomfortable with the torture itself than I am with the... ah... evident interest in the torture that the movie has. If you do want to skip that part it should be easy. You'll know where it starts. Just stop watching the movie at that point because I wasn't even joking when I said the rest of it is torture porn. There is literally less than two minutes of movie left after the torture stops.
But for all that it's a glorious train wreck if you like pain. My biggest impression is that it's like they stuck the end and beginning of one movie onto the middle of a different one with Elmer's glue and then released it before it had finished drying.