Dragonslayer (1981)

Posted on June 8, 2015 at 7:49 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Dragonslayer 7

I wanted to follow up my review of Excalibur (1981) with Dragonslayer (1981), not just because it’s another sword & sorcery film released the same year, but because it’s trying to do much the same thing thematically, albeit with a much simpler story. Like John Boorman’s Arthurian epic, Dragonslayer is about a transition from the “Dark Ages,” with its magic and mystery, to modernity and the rise of Christianity. In both films, the past is represented as being the time of dragons: in the case of Excalibur, “The Dragon,” referenced many times as the sort of nature-energy that unites everything, and to which Merlin and Arthur are uniquely in tune. And in both films, the dragon is dying, and organized religion is taking its place. As Gawain discovers the Holy Grail, he also sees a vision of Arthur as Christ, and declares his worship of him. (Yes, Excalibur is a pretty strange movie.) In Dragonslayer, the fall of the dragon is associated with the rise of the Church – or, as one character puts it, “Isn’t it strange that the very moment that the beast was put down there should be a holy man in the village?” That character, Greil (Albert Salmi, Escape from the Planet of the Apes) is baptizing the desperate “Urlanders” by the climax of the film – this, after the visiting priest was reduced to ash by the dragon, which possesses the most wonderful of names, Vermithrax Pejorative. That priest’s death is the film’s homage to George Pal’s War of the Worlds (1953) – not even God can save these men, and it’s magic which ultimately destroys this very magical creature. But the dragon is the last of her kind, like Smaug in The Hobbit, and described as old, “pitiful and spiteful.” Once she has passed, so passes an age.

Galen (Peter MacNicol), the sorcerer's apprentice.

Galen (Peter MacNicol), the sorcerer’s apprentice.

The one who devises the plot which ultimately slays the dragon is Ulrich (Ralph Richardson, who played God in the same year’s Time Bandits). Ulrich is an old sorcerer, and he, like Vermithrax, is in his autumn years. In fact, he appears to die in the film’s opening minutes; accepting the challenge to prove his magical prowess by a test, he allows the king’s champion Tyrian (John Hallam, Flash Gordon) to plunge a dagger through him. This leaves the fate of Urland in the hands of his young apprentice, Galen (Peter MacNicol, Ghostbusters II) and a girl disguising herself as a boy, Valerian (Caitlin Clarke). But Ulrich is playing the long con, as we learn in the film’s final act, and in his greatest trick of all, he slays Vermithrax and himself (with Galen’s help), thus ending the time of magic with a fiery explosion, and allowing the modern world to replace it. The king (Peter Eyre, Mahler) poses over the dragon’s corpse with a sword in hand, like a St. George – and steals the credit. Galen and Valerian are left with nothing but a horse to ride into the sunset. There isn’t room for their kind anymore. But it’s interesting that director Matthew Robbins (*batteries not included), who co-wrote the film with his Sugarland Express screenwriting partner Hal Barwood, treats his magicians like modern-day illusionists and con artists, with just enough self-taught, authentic, primal magic. To introduce Ulrich to his visitors, Galen plays the drums ominously and manipulates a sheet of metal to sound like thunder, as though he were running the sound effects on a radio play. During a festival, he’s seen playing a shell game with a child. And when he presents his mighty powers to the king, he’s like a low-rent David Copperfield, and apologizes to his bored audience when he fails to levitate a table. Usually when this film is brought up, the casting of prolific character actor Peter MacNicol as the hero is criticized; perhaps it’s just because I’ve known this film since my parents rented it on laserdisc when I was a child, but I’ve never had a problem with him. He’s not supposed to look like the traditional hero. He is awkward and bumbling, full of vanity and pride; but he has just enough curiosity and bravery to save the day. It is a bit off to have a medieval European fantasy whose two central roles are played by Americans: MacNicol is a Texan by birth, and Caitlin Clarke (who, sadly, passed away in 2004) was born in Pittsburgh. But they play their roles with conviction, so it’s not as distracting as it might be. Neither of them are as out of place as a Kevin Costner Robin Hood, I’d argue. Only when Valerian has to express her love for Galen does Clarke stumble, but that has more to do with the film’s utter inattention to their love story. Dragonslayer is more concerned with other things. For example, how incredibly awesome that dragon is.

A virgin Urlander (Yolande Palfrey) is sacrificed to the dragon Vermithrax.

A virgin Urlander (Yolande Palfrey) is sacrificed to the dragon Vermithrax.

And Vermithrax does bring the awe. Robbins is smart to keep the dragon off-screen for most of the film, building his presence much as his mentor Steven Spielberg did with the shark of Jaws. First we see one of the many virgin sacrifices which Urland maintains to satisfy the dragon and keep her from burning their villages. A young girl is bound by manacles to a pole with dragon carvings at the top, and the ground rumbles and steam hisses from the rocks as she struggles to loose her bloody wrists from the irons. We see its tail and its claws, but we don’t see the dragon’s head when it rises above her – just the girl from the dragon’s point of view, smaller and smaller as the neck extends, and then the screen is bathed in flames. When Valerian explores the dragon’s lair, she encounters one of its young, lunging at her with a squeal before the smash cut to the next scene. Much later, when Galen discovers the Lake of Fire where the hellish creature lurks, we see its outline looming behind him before he catches a reflection in the waters; and then he turns and Vermithrax is revealed spreading her wings – inhaling deep, chest puffing up, as we can feel all the oxygen drawing out of the room. Then comes the blast as Galen lifts his shield. Vermithrax is an astronishing creation, a stop-motion puppet designed by Phil Tippett (Jurassic Park) at Industrial Light & Magic. Technically it is Go Motion, a tweaking of the old Willis O’Brien/Ray Harryhausen technique by adding a more realistic blurring to the model’s motion. He previously used the method for the Imperial AT-AT Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Even all these years later, Vermithrax looks really damn good. For one thing, she is really there – the same night I watched Dragonslayer, I watched an episode of Game of Thrones, and as much as I enjoyed the sight of dragons guarding Daenerys Targaryen, they did not look physically present. Vermithrax looks real, because she is real. The seams only show when this miniature puppet must be matted into the background. For example, you might not notice that when Vermithrax shoots fire at Galen in the Lake of Fire, the neck doesn’t convincingly merge with the water. That’s because your eyes aren’t going to that spot – understandably. Put simply, Dragonslayer is one of the best-looking FX pictures of the 80’s, and still holds up admirably today. But it is more than just an FX picture. It is beautifully shot, for one thing: Matthew Robbins hasn’t made very many films (though he’s written the upcoming Guillermo del Toro thriller, Crimson Peak), but along with his director of photography, the late Derek Vanlint (Alien), he has made a fantasy film that is one of the best-looking of its era. The forest glades are green and lush; the mountains and villages mist-shrouded and forbidding; the dragon’s lair the stuff of nightmares, littered with bones and the mutilated corpse of a princess, feasted upon by baby dragons (in a scene usually cut for the TV showings).

Galen witness the resurrection of Ulrich (Ralph Richardson).

Galen witness the resurrection of Ulrich (Ralph Richardson).

The grittiness is surprising, because this is a Disney co-production with Paramount Pictures. For a Disney film, the mutilated princess is downright shocking. There’s even some brief nudity when MacNicol goes skinny dipping with Clarke. But most of all the film is terrifying for youngsters (I can attest – as a child I was terrified, and loving it). The deaths of the virgins and the priest are played to maximum horror-movie effect. The score by Alex North (Cleopatra, Spartacus) is atonal at times, Viking-like, but often simply ominous, enough to instill discomfort or dread. Refreshingly, North doesn’t try to impersonate John Williams in Star Wars or Superman mode – as most fantasy scores of this era did, to sometimes grating effect. So the film has integrity; about the only time the Disney roots are evident is when Ulrich stands atop a mountain, late in the film, and commands the heavens, like Mickey in Fantasia – the original sorcerer’s apprentice. Actually, perhaps Disney was too concerned the film might be thought of as another children’s film – the poster, self-consciously, proclaimed “Not a Fantasy.” But of course it’s a fantasy. A brilliant one.

Dragonslayer poster

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Excalibur (1981)

Posted on June 3, 2015 at 8:20 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Excalibur

John Boorman is not after realism with Excalibur (1981). The dialogue, the characterizations, the behaviors – none of these are intended to replicate real life, but are deliberately outsized, almost predetermined. The characters behave as they are intended to behave: as the story demands. Lancelot and Guenevere fall in love at first sight because they must. The Queen gallops out of Camelot for her illicit tryst because she is compelled to do so, and one gets the idea it’s more than just burning desire that speeds her along. It is a film told from Merlin’s point of view. Merlin knows all that will occur, and King Arthur and his Round Table are just players on the stage. Boorman drives the action from a similar perspective. The Arthurian romance is well known, and many times retold. Boorman is after myth. He was well suited to the approach, even if his cinematic mythmaking had produced mixed results in the recent past: Zardoz (1974) is a science fiction film that could be called purely intellectual if it weren’t so reliant upon its dazzling cinematography, and it keeps the viewer at a distance, telling its abstract story in symbols; but it’s much, much harder to love Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), in which a city-block-destroying tempest of psychic energy does nothing to bring us closer to the supposed emotional turmoil of its characters. (But Richard Burton does seem to be very upset about something, doesn’t he?) Excalibur began life as an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, and in the wake of that project’s collapse, he was able to recycle much of the same preproduction work, including set designs. Although The Lord of the Rings would have been tricky to pull off in the pre-CG age, it might have been easier to emotionally relate to Frodo and Samwise instead of Arthur, Lancelot, Guenevere, and Merlin, who are so archetypal that at times they hardly seem to breathe. T.H. White cracked the problem with his novel The Once and Future King. The behaviors of these characters suddenly made sense: Arthur keeps himself in denial of his wife’s affair with his best friend for the sake of maintaining stability, until his own insistence on law and justice undoes the trio; Merlin’s prophetic talents are expanded to reveal a man living his life backward, resigned to the immobility of fate while sardonically engaged in what are actually the events of his own past; so much of the behavior of the children of Morgause the witch – later Knights of the Round Table – depend entirely upon their tragic family history and Arthur’s role in it; and so on. But Boorman’s approach would not be psychoanalytical, like White’s. He reached back to Thomas Mallory’s 15th century Le Morte d’Arthur, and embraced the larger-than-life quality of the Arthurian cast. Arthur, here, is more than just a boy seeking peace and righteousness. He is England itself, from its haunted forests to its stony shores. When he falls into depression, so does the very land.

Young Arthur (Nigel Terry) discovers the Sword in the Stone.

Young Arthur (Nigel Terry) discovers the Sword in the Stone.

As with Zardoz, a lot of the film’s success depends on how great it all looks. This nascent England is covered with seeping mist, moss-draped trees, and a shimmering green light that seems to reflect off anything remotely shiny. I tried keeping a tally of everything glittering green, in hopes of deciphering a meaning behind the motif; but eventually I gave up. There’s green light shining off damn near everything. The best I can suggest is that it represents the landscape’s very unreality. This is not historical England, but a land of primal legends. The green light reminds of that departure from logic and reality; it is the magic of nature, of Merlin, inherent in everything, which must ultimately fade away with the forward march of the modern, and the departure of Arthur to Avalon. Excalibur also fits neatly into the string of post-Star Wars fantasy films that burnish retro storylines (in George Lucas’s case, Flash Gordon serials; in Boorman’s, material much, much older) with state-of-the-art visual spectacle. Fantasy escapism now had cred. But even though Boorman knew how to deliver the spectacle, he was less interested in the escapism aspect. Even with its potent additions of R-rated sex and violence, Excalibur has a bit of an “eat your vegetables” quality. It takes its source material seriously, and is intent on condensing hundreds and hundreds of pages’ worth of Arthurian myth into a relatively lean 140 minutes. The first cut was about three hours long. That still doesn’t seem long enough; but regardless, the final version of the film feels rushed and confusing. It helps to have more than just a passing understanding of the original tales to follow along. The film is downright scholarly.

King Arthur duels with Lancelot of the Lake on their first meeting.

King Arthur duels with Lancelot of the Lake on their first meeting.

Boorman’s take begins with Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne), wielding Excalibur and taking counsel from Merlin (Nicol Williamson). Uther is a man of brutal rage and selfish lust, the opposite of the man that Arthur will become. He wages war in scenes framed constantly by flame, as though all of England were burning. His truce with the Duke of Cornwall (Corin Redgrave, brother of Vanessa and Lynn) is threatened by his attraction to the Duke’s young wife, Igrayne (Katrine Boorman, the director’s daughter), and he persuades Merlin to use sorcery to satisfy his carnal desires. The result of the union is Arthur, but even after Cornwall dies and Uther claims his castle and territory, Merlin takes for payment the young boy to raise on his own. Uther, mortally wounded in battle, plunges Excalibur into a stone. Years later, a teenage Arthur (Nigel Terry) accidentally pulls the sword from the stone, fulfilling Merlin’s prophecy that only the true king can do so. Among his first allies is Sir Leondegrance (Patrick Stewart), and after helping him lay siege to a castle, he seals the alliance by marrying the man’s daughter, Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi). Soon he meets Sir Lancelot of the Lake (Nicholas Clay), and begins gathering his Knights of the Round Table, including Gawain (Liam Neeson), Uryens (Keith Buckley), and Perceval (Paul Geoffrey), who introduces himself to Lancelot as a starving thief but soon proves to be the most pure-hearted of all. Meanwhile, Merlin recognizes the growing threat of Igrayne’s daughter Morgana (Helen Mirren), who uses magic to seduce her half-brother Arthur, intending to give birth to a powerful son, Mordred, that she can place on the throne.

Young Mordred leads Perceval astray on his quest for the Holy Grail.

Young Mordred leads Perceval astray on his quest for the Holy Grail.

Excalibur, in its present form, condenses characters and plot (“Morgana” has elements of both Morgause and Morgan Le Fay, and Boorman focuses on but a small number of Knights of the Round Table). It also rushes forward from one episode to the next; at times it feels like King Arthur: The Cliff’s Notes. Novices to the story can be forgiven for being mystified as to why, late in the film, the knights are suddenly looking for the Holy Grail. But it’s the love triangle which feels most rushed; the Grailquest, by contrast, stands out for its cinematic qualities. Boorman goes full Zardoz, telling the story of Perceval’s lonely journey through hallucinatory imagery and surrealist flourishes: the ghastly corpse of a knight in a cabin on a mountainside; a laughing boy in a golden mask standing beneath a tree of strangled knights in armor like a grotesque mobile; a castle whose drawbridge lowers to glowing light and the image of the pouring Grail, and Arthur behind it, a shining figure of Christ. Best of all is Arthur’s Fisher King-like restoration at a sip from the Grail. To the strains of Wagner he and his company ride through new-blossoming trees, and fluttering white petals – the country restored along with its king. As with Zardoz, the film is dominated by classical music (“Siegfried’s Funeral March” forming the ominous main theme), as Boorman shrinks from anything too contemporary. Still, the battlements of Camelot shimmer metallic like something in a science fiction film, and Nicol Williamson’s eccentric, almost anachronistic portrayal of Merlin feels like a Pythonesque choice. Those are the anomalies. Everything else here is stilted by design. The dialogue is direct and lacking any subtlety; the characters are what they do. Excalibur bears the Arthurian myths like a colorful cloak, but it’s all surface. It’s gorgeous, admirable, and, at its best, stirring. But it never catches its breath, and in the film’s race to squeeze in as much story as it can, I find myself missing T.H. White’s patience, insight, and wisdom. Admittedly, Boorman’s characters are meant to be what they are: archetypes that are little more than suits of armor, but reflecting everywhere that inexplicable green light.

Excalibur

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The Flight of Dragons (1982)

Posted on May 24, 2015 at 1:19 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

Flight of Dragons

There’s a good chance that if you grew up in the 80’s and you loved fantasy, you remember The Flight of Dragons (1982). For years, my memory was extremely selective – I recalled an early scene set in a bookstore in which the main character plays a “Flight of Dragons” prototype board game with the shopkeeper, and I remembered the last half hour, which involves battles with various monsters. I remembered those scenes because they encapsulated the appeal to a child obsessed with fantasy: the Dungeons & Dragons elements, basically. (Not that I was allowed to play Dungeons & Dragons, because my mother thought it was a cult. The 80’s also brought us that hysteria, and for more information I would point you to the early Tom Hanks film Mazes & Monsters, which is the Reefer Madness of D&D.) What I did not remember was the fact that the film is mostly expository set-up, and it’s only the last half-hour when it actually gets going. What I did not remember were the endless scenes of scientific explanation for dragon flight, dragon fire, and so on; nor the theme of science vs. magic which is not so much a subtext but as upfront and face-scorching as dragon’s breath. In recent years I’ve watched the film a couple of times, driven by nostalgia, but there must also be an element of masochism, for my eyes glaze over until that last half hour finally comes, and our laboriously-assembled band approaches the “Realm of the Red Death” to battle a three-eyed ogre, a worm bathing in acid, an army of dragons, and an evil sorcerer voiced by James Earl Jones. So let’s face it, The Flight of Dragons is a bit of a slog. But it’s also unique and odd, to the point that I am still not sure exactly why it exists.

The wizard Carolinus (Harry Morgan) introduces himself to Peter Dickenson (John Ritter) - based on "Flight of Dragons" author Peter Dickinson.

The wizard Carolinus (Harry Morgan) introduces himself to Peter Dickenson (John Ritter) – based on “Flight of Dragons” author Peter Dickinson.

The plot involves a “man of science” – who is also an aspiring fantasy author – transported from modern-day Boston to a medieval fantasy world where he becomes trapped in the body of a dragon. The film is just as unlikely a hybrid. For one thing, it was a collaboration of American animation studio Rankin-Bass with the Japanese studio Topcraft. Topcraft’s best known film is Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), and the studio would soon become the celebrated Studio Ghibli. Topcraft and Rankin-Bass collaborated on many animated productions, most notably The Hobbit (1977), The Return of the King (1980), and the feature film The Last Unicorn (1982). Though released the same year, in many ways The Flight of Dragons feels like a test run for The Last Unicorn. But Flight was also a hybrid adaptation of two different books: the title is drawn from British author Peter Dickinson’s 1979 book, but some of the plot (a man’s consciousness inserted into a dragon’s body) is taken from Gordon R. Dickson’s The Dragon and the George (1976), the first in his Dragon Knight series of novels. This combination is a little odd, not the least because Dickinson’s book isn’t a novel at all, but a discursive coffee table book arguing for the historical existence of dragons. Dickinson takes as his premise that dragons were real, so his essay, illustrated by Wayne Anderson, goes to great lengths to justify dragon chemistry (the fire-breathing), aerodynamics, and dietary habits (well-born maidens), all the while treating fictional accounts – including Dickson’s The Dragon and the George – as factual. Fantasy was flourishing in the 70’s and early 80’s, and the Flight of Dragons book was of a piece with other coffee table art books exploring the life cycles of mythological creatures, including Gnomes (1976), Faeries (1979 – by Brian Froud and Alan Lee), and Giants (1985). Gnomes, the Dutch-imported phenomenon, eventually led to a 1980 TV-movie, and Faeries became a half-hour special in 1981, so maybe this is why Rankin-Bass targeted The Flight of Dragons for a 90-minute television film, with a title song crooned by Don McLean of “American Pie” fame.

The archer Danielle discovers a wood-elf, Giles.

The archer Danielle discovers a wood-elf, Giles.

But a dry explanation of a dragon’s use of hydrogen in flight doesn’t quite sustain a feature length story, so The Dragon and the George forms a rough outline of a plot. No worries, we get plenty of Dickinson’s pseudo-science in the first half of the film, imported from his book and delivered by none other than Dickinson himself – well, as voiced by John Ritter. Ritter’s “Peter Dickenson” (as it’s spelled in the film) is now an American scientist longing to write a Flight of Dragons book, but can’t find the time, so he’s made a board game instead. When he’s teleported by the good wizard Carolinus (Harry Morgan of M*A*S*H) into a magical realm, his firsthand experiences with dragons will give him all the knowledge he needs to finally complete his book. Accidentally merged with the “house dragon” Gorbash, he embarks on a quest to retrieve the red crown, the source of power for Ommadon (James Earl Jones), who wishes to destroy all technology with magic and an army of mind-controlled dragons. (At one point, Jones chants “Doom, doom, doom, doom,” as though cross-promoting the same year’s Conan the Barbarian.) Peter has been chosen because he is a man of science, and only science can thwart magic. In his quest he’s joined by some fairly typical fantasy tropes including a wise, elderly mentor (a dragon), a valiant knight, a red-headed female archer, a talking wolf and a wood-elf. Princess Melisande is the love interest, but she remains at home with Carolinus throughout the quest, which means one potential source of drama and character development is briefly teased and abruptly removed. Surprisingly, many of the characters die; unsurprisingly, most of them are resurrected when evil is defeated.

A three-eyed ogre must be overcome to enter the evil wizard's lands.

A three-eyed ogre must be overcome to enter the evil wizard’s lands.

The animation is good, even if the styles are jarringly varied. Wayne Anderson, illustrator of the original book, receives a credit for design, and his influence is clear in the dragons, as well as many of the background paintings. Other characters, such as the princess with her large, quivering eyes, seem to have stepped in from one of Topcraft’s anime films, and the wood-elf Giles looks just like a Rankin-Bass hobbit. More intriguing is a brief glimpse of the realm occupied by the wizard Lo Tae Zhao – his is a traditional Chinese dragon, and his mountaintop castle is built of pagodas. The theme of science vs. magic had been previously explored in a much edgier animated film, Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards (1977), but this family-friendly treatment spells out its themes gently – and repeatedly. It’s Peter’s science and logic which defeats sorcery, but it also expels Peter from the realm, sending him back to Boston. (“I deny all magic!” he shouts.) Carolinus is wistful that the days of magic are coming to an end – technology is inevitable. His plan is to remove all magic to one safe haven where it can live undisturbed while time marches on. It’s a pragmatic message for a children’s movie: science is more important than fantasy, but fantasy has its place. Yet somehow it still didn’t fully connect, because all I ever remembered were the monsters and the dragons.

Flight of Dragons

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