Dragon Fighter (2003)

REVIEW BY: Bobby Lepire

Company: UFO International

Runtime: 90 mins

Format: DVD

Plot: A secret government facility in Alaska clones a dragon, which then gets loose and wreaks havoc within the secret facility. Newly appointed security chief, David Carver, and the other personnel must fight to try to outsmart this ancient beast and stop it before it can escape out into the world.

Review: Before anything else, let’s break Dragon Fighter down to its core elements - Dean Cain (yes, Superman from ‘Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman’!) fights a cloned dragon. Superman? Cloning? Dragons? Sold! Done! Movie must be awesome! And fortunately, it mostly is.

Before I oversell it, let’s get the flaws and issues out of the way. During the opening title sequence we get a prologue set in medieval England, in which some knights fight a dragon. This is the worst part of the film, and I promise it gets way better afterwards. None of the main scientists, researchers, security personnel, or Superman himself are related to any of the knights/dead villagers and kind of makes this portion a bit pointless. While there are some nice shots of the surprisingly decent-looking dragon, this robs later scenes of the movie of some weight, as a build-up to the full reveal later after it's cloned would have been more impactful. We honestly don’t need to see the dragon in action right off the bat, as we're able to believe that the scientists were able to find some dragon DNA without seeing any of this. Also, the movie’s worst special effects are here during this portion. During a cave in sequence, the falling CGI rocks look so bad it hurts a tad bit. A decade ago when the movie first came out it might not have been so noticeably bad, but for contemporary viewers, it’s an eyesore.

While there’s some great banter throughout, the expository dialogue is very matter-of-fact, feeling like a forced explanation as opposed to real world speech. This makes some of the dialogue exchanges bland and quite frankly, pretty boring,, no matter how good the cast is. Finally, there’s one scene where the editing is too frenzied and spliced up, making things disorienting for no real reason. Trying to escape the not-yet fully grown dragon, our cast is hiding in an elevator and the dragon manages to damage the electric circuit the elevator was connected to, causing the lights in there to flash on and off like a poorly done horror trailer. Nine out of ten times, this way of editing only serves to undercut the very thing the filmmakers wanted to achieve by using it- tension. By being able to cut to any random section of the blacked out area when the lights go down, it creates a ‘boo scare’, which is always the lazy route to go and is rarely effective. Luckily, it’s just the elevator sequence that does this, and it doesn’t last too long.

Now onto the good stuff: Dean Cain plays helicopter pilot/newly hired security chief Captain David Carver, and he brings quite a bit of easy-going charm to the role. He’s easily relatable and likeable from the get-go. When things get crazy, which is fairly early on, he just gets angry at the dragon and the gruffness is also quite believable. The script is a big help here as Capt. Carver is always the smartest person in the room; His intellect is showcased early on in a great bit of Holmesian deductive reasoning, by examining “what’s not on his manifest”. Within one minute of the audience meeting him, he knows about the cloning and that it’s a new specimen being brought to the facility. The scientists are led to believe it’s a dinosaur of some sort, but Carver swiftly figures out it’s a dragon. Having a genuinely intelligent lead makes for a fun hero to root for.

Kristine Byers plays Dr. Meredith Winter, a ‘cloner’, as Carver calls her. Byers is somewhat believable, and plays it straight, even though she has the most ridiculous, goofy dialogue of the entire movie. She is the requisite love interest, but it actually kind of works here. She and Cain have a good rapport and chemistry. As a hobby, she’s an amateur pilot (because, well, of course she is!). Robert Zachar plays the mad scientist that cons everyone else into cloning the dragon, Dr. Ian Drackovitch (yes, ‘Dracko’-vitch - Dragon is in his name! Hilariously awesome!) Zachar is good and clearly having fun, which is nice, but the character never comes off as all that menacing. Considering the amount of screen time and his importance to the plot, Drackovitch’s characterization amounts to nothing more than ‘evil scientist’. A twist involving him and the dragons falls 100% flat, due to no build-up or exploration afterwards. Still, Zachar is fun here, and that definitely livens up the movie at times.

The rest of the cast is solid, with no stand-outs other then Dean Cain, but no one is particularly bad either. Aside from Carver and Winter, all the characters are broad stereotypes, but this works fairly well in this movie, because this is a movie where people fight a cloned dragon, I don’t want or need a lengthy backstory for each person. To help with that though, when we are introduced to each character, a military dossier file pops up and gives us all the pertinent information that we would need to know on them. While cheesy, it adds to the fun of the film and does make each character a bit more distinctive.

Director/co-writer Phillip J. Roth employs a lot of style and starts the action early, keeping it coming at a brisk pace. The most effective tool he uses is a split screen method. Implemented throughout, he shows us the master wide shot, then splits it into smaller compartments to show close-ups of the people’s reactions, as well as the action that is still going on. I have seen so many movies, big budget or otherwise, completely misuse split screen, turning it into a laughable gimmick (*cough* X-Men: First Class *cough*), but that does not happen here. It effectively shows us everything we need to see and know about the action taking place, without cutting away. Therefore the audience is fully immersed into the intense situations and action. Thankfully, it never becomes old hat or boring.

Along those same lines, it’s time to talk about the things on everyone’s mind about this movie - How does the dragon look? Is there a lot of the dragon? Is the action fun? The dragon, in terms of design, looks like a typical classic European dragon. Nothing special or inventive about the design here, but on the other hand the actual CGI itself of the dragon is pretty good. Mind you, this movie is a decade old now, but for the most part the dragon effects surprisingly still hold up pretty well. This is especially an excellent thing, as we get lots of long looks at the dragon during different age cycles, seeing it rapidly grow and mature.

The action scenes as well are well-executed, though a bit typical of made-for-TV movies that were made around the same time and in the same vein (the awesome split screen usage excluded). My personal favorite of the action set pieces in the facility is a cat-and-mouse hunting game, that comes right after the dragon escapes its holding cell. The dragon goes into a long corridor, where Capt. Carver and the animal wrangler follow him. Going from one end to the other, they don’t see it, but on their way back the dragon drops from the ceiling and kills the animal wrangler. It’s a nice introduction to the dragon’s tactics, and the best thing about the action is the movie’s willingness to kill characters off - Seriously, the dragon racks up quite a body count, which does give the whole shebang more of an edge that it might not have otherwise. The best action scene though is clearly the big finale: The now fully-grown dragon is chasing our survivors through the sky n a helicopter and the aerial battle eventually involves fighter jets, and the whole sequence is just an absolute blast to watch.

If you can get through the terrible prologue and can overlook some one-note characters and occasional bland dialogue, then you’ll find a fun, stylish, action/fasntasy/sci-fi film in which Superman fights a dragon! This is a fun B-Movie, with a solid cast, and would be ripe for some solid MST3K-style commentary.

 7/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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Manticore (2005)

REVIEW BY: Jeffrey Long

COMPANY: UFO International

RUNTIME: 88 mins

FORMAT: TV

PLOT: A squad of American soldiers in Iraq are sent on a rescue mission when a news reporter and her cameraman go missing, however during their mission they come across an ancient mythological beast that has to be stopped at all costs.

REVIEW: Over the last couple weeks, I've watched quite a large number of SyFy Channel's original movies. I'm not doing reviews of all of them because quite frankly, I just don't have the time. But I did want to pick at least a couple to do so I had something to update my blog with, so here's my review of the SyFy Original Movie titled Manticore.

To be honest, I wasn't really digging this movie too much right off the bat. When I watch a monster movie of any kind, I hate having a human villain thrown into the mix. It takes away some of the impact of the monster, and when I discovered there was to be human villains in this, I instantly got a frown. Luckily, I soon forgot about that and found myself really enjoying the movie.

A large reason for that enjoyment is due to some of the characters. We have 3 somewhat well-known names in this; we got the guy that played Chakotay from Star Trek Voyager as the commander of the group of marines that this movie focuses on, the girl from The Blair Witch Project showing definitively that she is indeed alive and well as one of the soldiers in the group, and Jeff Fahey (Lepidus from Lost) as the person in the military chain of command above even Chakotay's character. Now, I didn't really much care for the Commander role as played by Chakotay. He was pretty bland and didn't really inject any personality into the role. They could have cut him out from the movie mid-way through and I probably wouldn't have even noticed. A cardboard cut-out would have had more screen presence then he did in this movie. Now Heather from Blair Witch as the trust-worthy tomboy female soldier of the group – that's where the acting in this movie truly shines. She played the role perfectly and shows that her acting has really improved greatly since SyFy's epic 20-hour-long alien abduction mini-series Taken, where I didn't much care for her character or acting. In this movie though, she does excellent (I myself know people almost exactly like her character) and she really makes you care for her without having to give us any sort of lame cheesy backstory that these movies tend to get into the habit of giving. Other then her, we also got the always-fun Jeff Fahey, and while he didn't really have much to do other then stand around in the control room, looking over the shoulders of computer techs and barking orders into a phone, he did what he could with what he had and did it most excellently. No contest: he is by far the best actor in the movie and steals the show whenever he is on screen, as rare and short as those scenes are. I wish he could have been in it more, and had more to do, but oh well. After him, we also have the abrasive 'No such thing as No' reporter that has a knack for getting into trouble. The character herself was pretty interesting and I liked where they ultimately went with her, but I felt the actress gave a pretty 'Take it or Leave it' performance. There were times she's was great, but then there were times she was eye-rollingly bad. Whenever she had to act scared or the least bit human - bad. Whenever she had to act like the strong 'Won't Take No For an Answer' bitch, she was excellent. All the other characters in the movie were mostly the typical SyFy Channel soldier cannon fodder characters and they were pretty forgettable. They all have the exact same personalities as one-another and with their hulking helmets and military desert warfare uniforms on, they pretty much looked exactly the same for most of the movie as well, so I was never quite sure as to which ones just died and which were still alive, but it didn't really matter too much come the end anyway as all of those characters were only in the movie to create a decent body count.

Another aspect of the movie that I was able to get behind pretty quickly is the landscape. Normally SyFy movies take place in either a city/town or a woodland area, and while that's all fine and good, it was really nice to get a different kind of landscape for once. It added a different feel to the movie, and it was much appreciated. With that said however, they did drop the ball a bit with it. Part way through they make this big deal about an approaching massive sandstorm, which would have been really neat to see utilized, considering you can't have that in either of SyFy's other two main landscapes...but nothing ever comes from it. We either never get it, or we do but it's so mild that I missed it. Certainly not the big bad terrible sandstorm of doom that it was made out to be. That alone would have been a nice bit of added atmosphere, but it seems like the writers forgot all about it shortly after mentioning it.

Characters and terrain types are all well and good, but I know the real thing everyone is wondering about is what most SyFy movies have – the monster, with the one in this movie being some kind of giant flying wolf thing with a scorpion stinger tail that can shoot thick needles; the title creature called The Manticore. As far as special effects go, they're both good and bad. The first 60 minutes of the movie, we only get quick flashes and quick cuts of the monster, and those look excellent, and surprisingly, adds some genuine suspense to the movie at times. In the last 30 minutes though, we get quite a bit longer, lingering, shots of the creature and those don't look quite so remarkable – usual SyFy fare. However I didn't mind it as much as I normally do with say, their snake effects (as one example), because the design of the creature is just so awesome and unique that I never got sick of seeing it, no matter how crappy the effects got at times. And really, the only shots that truly looked dreadful were close-ups of it's weirdly square-shaped head, which thankfully there wasn't too many of. I was also surprised with how accurate the creature was portrayed. Now I'm no mythology expert by a long shot, and the only knowledge I have on the Manticore is from trivia cards that came with certain Monsters in my Pocket boxsets I would get as a kid from time to time, but based off the knowledge I have from that, this version of the creature hit every point. So often SyFy makes up their own rules, even with already-established monsters, so it was nice to see them follow the mythology proper with this one. And as an extension of me being happy with SyFy's handling of the creature – for the first time that I have ever seen, they finally did not kill it by blowing it up. I won't reveal how they do it, but rest assured, it's for once not due to heavy explosions (though it's not for lack of trying; seriously, sometimes I think the execs at SyFy really work for Divatox of Power Rangers Turbo fame).

They did seem to miss an opportunity though by only having the one Manticore in the movie. Most SyFy movies seem to have either just one monster, or a large group of monsters, but never a small multiple number such as just 2 or 3, and the first little bit of the movie made me think there would actually be two this time, but they do away with that idea pretty quickly. It's not such a bad choice overall though, as it does make the climax pretty suspenseful by having just the one creature (due to the way it has to be destroyed, it wouldn't have been nearly as suspenseful with the two of them around). I also wasn't so fond of the whole amulet sub-plot and whoever holds it has control of the Manticore. As I said at the beginning, I hate having human villains in a monster movie, because it takes some of the threat off of the monster, and that exact thing is what happens here. Although thankfully it's not really touched upon at all until towards the end. Even then, that entire sub-plot pretty much went nowhere and had no impact on the movie whatsoever other then to add a said human villain into the mix which, like the amulet itself, pretty much went nowhere anyway, so really, what was even the point in having it?

The human villain's mundane murder of a couple characters aside, the deaths turned out to be pretty brutal and gory, which surprised me for a TV movie, and especially for a SyFy movie which normally have pretty generic death scenes. The surrounding action scenes that most of those deaths happen during were also pretty intense and suspenseful; the movie certainly had no problems displaying awesome action scene after awesome action scene. Even though some were seemingly taken directly out of Aliens, they were still quite enjoyable, with one of my favorites being a shot of the Manticore, wings spread wide open, flying through a giant stain glass window to attack the people inside; such an amazing shot.

Out of the almost-dozen SyFy Channel movies I've seen in the last 2 weeks, Manticore is definitely above average for them, and one of the better ones so far. It'll be one I can easily see myself re-watching in the future.

8/10 rooms in the Psych Ward

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