Weirdhouse Cinema: Dungeons and Dragons (2000)

For Weirdhouse Cinema’s 200th film selection, Rob and Joe discuss a film from the year 2000: “Dungeons and Dragons,” starring Jeremy Irons, Thora Birch, Justin Whalin, Marlon Wayans and Bruce Payne.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema,
we've reached a milestone. It is our two hundredth film selection.
Rob did just have to correct me before we started here.
I was going to say it was a two hundredth episode.
It is not, because we had a couple of films
that went more than one episode, or multiple films crammed

(00:35):
into a single episode. But this is going to be
our two hundredth one, and we're keeping with a theme
we established last week where we looked at a film
for our one hundred and ninety ninth film selection. We
did a film set in the year nineteen ninety nine.
That was the cyberslop movie Virtuosity, starring Denzel Washington and
Russell Crowe. Today we decided to stick with that into

(00:58):
a movie I guess not set in the year two
two thousand, but that came out in the year two
thousand and that is so the year two thousand in
film in so many ways. And that is the movie
Dungeons and Dragons not the one from twenty twenty four,
the old one, the one with Jeremy Irons, Thora Birch,
Justin Whalen, Marlon Wayans, and Bruce Payne. What a cosmic

(01:20):
adventure into nostalgia and the mind this was. And we're
not gonna lie to you. It's not good, but it
is a good time.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yeah, I want to Some of you may have follow
up questions too. You might ask, well, how about some
of those films that the listeners suggested for the two
hundred we I think we'll get back to some of
those suggestions in later episodes, but I don't know. For
my part, I begin to just feel like, oh man,
it's so much pressure to figure out, like what is
like the weird movie to do for two hundred, and
falling back on the idea of like two hundred two

(01:49):
thousand just felt a little It felt a little easier
when it came to the decision making process. And another
question you might be wondering, perhaps cowering a little bit
in fear, are we going to do the next twenty
five episodes of Weird House Cinema related to the subsequent years.
I'm gonna say definitely not. I don't think we could

(02:10):
keep that up. I mean, we'll see what happens next week,
but it's definitely not going to be the next twenty
five episodes.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
Well next week we could do two thousand and one
of Space Odyssey and keep going.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
Yeah, oh that's true. Yeah, though I don't know.

Speaker 3 (02:22):
I think that's more in our category of a reference
text rather than subject text.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
But we did do a core episode of stuff to
blow your mind on two thousand and one of Space Odyssey,
so there is some Space Odyssey in the vault.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
Now, obviously we're gonna have a lot to say about
Dungeons and Dragons as a movie, but I think we
also need to appreciate right here at the top that,
of course it is an adaptation of the tabletop gaming
system Dungeons and Dragons. So Rob, maybe we got to
start just by talking about that, like you're a little
bit of the short, short version of your personal history
with D and D, because I know we could both

(02:56):
go into a lot of detail here.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
So yeah, first of all, just a remind Dungeons and Dragons,
which dates back to the mid nineteen seventies, is a
role playing game. It is I often try to explain
it to people who aren't that familiar with it as
kind of a communal storytelling game where you have a
dungeon master running the game, you have players playing characters

(03:19):
within that game. The dungeon master is running things and
is the final say on the rules, but the players
are also contributing creatively to it. They are not being
told a story. Everyone is collaborating on the story together,
and it's just a tremendous amount of fun. If you've
never played Dungeons and Dragons before, or some similar role

(03:39):
playing game, I highly recommend it. It is a great social,
creative hobby and pastime that is also connected to any
number of additional solo hobbies and past times. It's something
that has brought a lot of joy into my life.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
Collaborative storytelling is a good way to put it for
people who aren't familiar. Imagine that essentially, the engine master
creates the setting in scenario, and you create a character
within that setting in scenario. You say what your character
in particular does in reaction to that setting and scenario
created by the dungeon master. They tell you what happens
in return, and you go back and forth.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Yeah, yeah, so my don't I don't remember exactly when
I first started getting into it. I definitely had watched
the old nineteen eighty three cartoon at one point, but
that didn't like really pull me in all the way.
It wasn't until I was in Boy Scouts and I
observed some of the older Scouts playing Dungeons and Dragons.
The Dungeon Master kid was using his father's like pre

(04:39):
Satanic panic, like full demon monster supplements, and it was
just it looked like a lot of fun. So I
started getting into it, and I by the you know,
by the mid nineties, I was all into Forgotten Realms,
Raven loved Kara Tour, Dark Sun, Spell Jammer, all these
different worlds and subsettings within Dungeons and Dragons. I probably

(05:00):
read more than I played, but it was still a blast.
But then around the turn of the millennium, when this
film comes out, I went to college and for idiotically
didn't do any non video game D and D stuff
for more than a decade. So today's movie drops at
a time in which I was weirdly disinterested and out

(05:21):
of touch with all things D and D. I think
my main memory of the trailer was that, oh, it
looks like it has Jeremy Irons in it, but at
the same time I was at least slightly disappointed that
he appeared to not have a wizard beard or wizard hair.

Speaker 3 (05:35):
That's true, you know. I was trying to We'll talk
more about this as we go on, but I was
trying to class all the characters in the movie. I
was saying, Okay, what D and D class are you?
Because when you play the game, you pick a character
class that tells you, like what kind of skills and
powers you have. You could be a barbarian or a fighter,
or a cleric or a wizard. And I was like, man,
Jeremy Irons doesn't feel like a wizard because he doesn't

(05:57):
look like a wizard. He looks it looks like a warlock.
Maybe what do you think.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, yeah, maybe more of a warlock.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
Look, I mean they never mentioned a packed patron or anything.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
But yeah, And I don't know one I don't know
one hundred percent why it bugged me at the time,
because I'm not really bugged by it now. But I
think a big part of it was and I was
having to like piece together where things fell in the timeline.
I think part of it was that by April of
two thousand. Today's movie came out in like December of
two thousand. By April of two thousand, we already had

(06:29):
a trailer featurette for Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring,
which would come out December two thousand and one, so
we already had a visual taste of what was possible
with live action high fantasy, and even from the trailers,
it was obvious that two thousands Dungeons and Dragons was
quite obviously missing the mark God.

Speaker 3 (06:51):
That contrast is crazy to imagine that this was almost
like overlapping in time and that we're gonna try not
to just like be mean or rag on the movie
the whole time. But yeah, the comparison is so funny.
It's like imagining that trailers for The Matrix were already
out when lawnmower Man was in theaters.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
You know, Yeah, I mean, it's it's really not fair
because we're again we're talking about Lord of the Rings here,
one of and arguably the most important texts in modern
fantasy literature. It served as one of the one of
the primary inspirations for Dungeons and Dragons in general, and furthermore,
Peter Jackson's adaptations. No matter what your quipples might be
about the finished product, they were jaw dropping cinematic spectacles

(07:35):
that pushed the technological envelope, that energized fans and generated mainstream,
popular and critical success. So it's unfair to compare this
smaller picture that had I think, when all was said
and done, like half the budget. So but not that
small of a budget. You know, it is never going
to live up to what Fellowship of the Ring was

(07:55):
able to achieve.

Speaker 3 (07:56):
You know, something I was just thinking about recently with
the Peter's Jackson Lord of the Rings movies is I
don't know if they often get enough credit for how
good of a job they did simply from a writing
point of view adapting the material. We can have our
complaints about, like oh, I wish Tom Bombadill had been
in there. You know, I don't like that they didn't
include this, or that they made this moment like, you know,

(08:19):
there were changes introduced, and a lot of times purists
can be upset by that. But I think they really
did a kind of impossible task of cramming as much
of the spirit of the story into film into reasonable
I mean long but still reasonable film. Run times as possible.
It really, I think, is a marvelous achievement of adaptation writing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
Absolutely, Again, it's just unfair to compare virtually anything, especially
this film, to Fellowship of the Rings and the subsequent
Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films. They just succeeded
in so many ways.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
But while we're on the subject of the differences between
Fellowship with the Ring and Dungeons and Dragons as movies
from around the same time, one big difference is that,
of course, Fellowship of the Ring is an adaptation of
a book. It's an adaptation of something that is already
a fixed narrative, which is like a you know, it's
a more familiar way of making a movie from existing

(09:20):
source material. The Dungeons and Dragons movie had a very
different kind of writing assignment, which is that it was
to adapt a game system or sort of a world.
There is no fixed narrative of Dungeons Dungeons and Dragons.
I think there are some like you know, pre written
campaigns that exist out there. Rob you can probably shed

(09:43):
more light on that, and there may be some like common,
commonly accepted sort of history things in the Dungeons and
Dragons world, But there's no fixed narrative like there is
in a book. Players make up their own stories. So
what your job is if you're adapting this into a
movie is you have to kind of make up a
story that packs in a lot of details about what

(10:06):
it's like to play the game and captures feelings of
common experiences that players have when they're playing with their friends.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
Does that make sense, Yeah, yeah, try it. You have
to attempt to try and nail the vibe of the
D and D world and the vibe of playing D
and D at the same time, which, to be clear,
are often in stark opposition to each other. You may
have like a really like very serious and even dark
set of events happening within the story of the game,

(10:37):
but yet a gaming session of Dungeons and Dragons might
be just full of goof off moments and laughter and
so forth, and yet they can still work together at
the table in a way that might be more of
a struggle thematically with a motion picture. I would argue
that twenty twenty three's Dungeons and Dragons Honor among Thieves,
the most recent Dungeons and Dragons film, did more of

(10:59):
a commendable job of pulling this off and watching today's movie,
it'd be easier to momentarily put that aside if they
didn't actually say honor among thieves multiple times in the dialogue.

Speaker 3 (11:13):
But they didn't know that was gonna sub title of
the later movie.

Speaker 2 (11:16):
They didn't know, but it's impossible to avoid. But but no,
you're right, it's like they're they're adapting a vibe. They're
adapting ip a world or multiple worlds and various creatures
within that world, but they're not leaning on like a
core text. But to be clear, even by nineteen ninety
and certainly by the year two thousand, there were plenty

(11:37):
of Dungeons and Dragons novelizations out there. I mean, they're
like a million Dragon Lance novels, So there was some
material out there that could have leaned on, though you know,
I don't I don't know, I haven't read most of
those books. Not everything is you know, reasonable for adaptation
and so forth, But you know, there were, there were,

(11:58):
and are plenty of Dungeons and Dragons stories one could
could go to for things like this.

Speaker 3 (12:02):
But one thing that makes those stories different is they're
almost like they're reading a story that someone has created
within the framework of the D and D world, but
they're not cannon for all players of D.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
And D, right, right, Like any given person's favorite moment
from Dungeons and Dragons is going to be a little
different from everyone else's moment if you're just talking about
the tabletop experience.

Speaker 3 (12:29):
Yeah, So, as you said, this is something that the
more recent D and D movie did a lot of.
You could tell there were a lot of in jokes
in the movie. And I still think the more recent
movie works pretty well. I mean, I don't know, I
have played D and D, but I can imagine it
still works pretty well as a film even if you've
never played it. But there are just a lot of
little treats in there for players because it will have

(12:51):
the characters in the movie getting into a situation that
players commonly find themselves in. And it's funny, too funny
to recognize, like, oh, I can't speak with dead and
I still have this many questions I can ask and
we've already got the information we need, you know, and
that sort of thing over and over.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yeah, And also I think the other thing that the
more recent film did well is that it had it
did have canonical figures that one could leave the film
and say, hey, I want to know about about that
Lich guy. I want to know more about these Red Wizards,
and there is material out there you can read about them.
They are part of a setting. This movie doesn't really,

(13:31):
I think, do much of that. You might say, oh,
that's a neat beholder I just saw float by. I'd
like to know more about those guys. Well, there's plenty more.

Speaker 3 (13:39):
But it doesn't really do much with the beholders. Doesn't
You briefly see one as a purple blob that flies
off screen and then I'm like, Oh, we're gonna come
back for a beholder fight.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Nope, Nope, nope. They're basically screen savers.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
But anyway, as I was saying, the more recent D
and D movie does a lot of that, I think
this older movie does a little bit of that. There's
a little bit of nodding towards kind of common player experiences,
but a lot less. It feels more like they were
just trying to create a story roughly within the D
and D universe.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, now I should say some nice things about this film,
I think, yeah, yeah, I think it has some excellent locations,
including the sedl Ossuary in the Czech Republic. Also, I
think that the Czech Republic State Opera House is used
as a location at one point, and multiple other Czech
locations that look really cool, and they make good use

(14:34):
of them.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
Gorgeous interior locations in fact, that are a quite ludicrous
contrast to like it'll cut from there to a like
CGI dungeon. It is just you could not imagine something
more like uglier and more dingy looking.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yes, the CGI is all horrendous, but I should also
point out there are some nice practical sets as well.
There's that the Eye Room and the labyrinth. The Evil
Layer is really nice. So there's also like anything that's
not CGI in this film has at least a reasonable
shot at looking okay.

Speaker 3 (15:10):
There there is at one point, it's toward the end
of the movie. I wish it had come earlier, a
quite lovely hand painted backdrop for like a like a
mad effect when they go to when they go to
like the Thomas Kincaid Lothlaurian you know, yeah, yeah, but
it's it's like very pretty yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
So, I mean, the practical stuff works pretty well for
the most part, and then of course we have the performances.
There are some definite duds in there, but who there
are some there are some really fun performances to be
hold on top of everything.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
Yeah, we'll have to talk about that. And speaking of
continuing themes from last week, a list actors getting in
a B movie and just giving it everything they've got
or maybe more than they've got actually, So, Rob, what's
your elevator pitch? First?

Speaker 2 (15:57):
D The main thing I came up with complete a
D and D movie before Y two K. Wh Yeah,
it comes out after Y two K, but you know
they're filming it in nineteen ninety nine, and and also
it comes at it's the end of a long journey
to make a Dungeons and Dragons motion picture. And I'll
get into some of those details when we talk about

(16:19):
the director.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
I think they had to roll a twelve or above
to achieve that goal, and they rolled a twelve.

Speaker 2 (16:24):
Yeah, yeah, at one point I think they rolled one
and then they realized they did have inspiration and they
were able to take that back nice. All right, let's
listen to a little bit of the Trayler audio here,
and hopefully you'll get to hear Jeremy Irons a little
bit in there as well.

Speaker 4 (16:38):
Yeah, in a faraway world.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
All people deserve to be free and equal.

Speaker 4 (16:47):
The child is not fit to govern an empire.

Speaker 3 (16:51):
The forces of darkness.

Speaker 4 (16:53):
You can control dragons for the dragon arm in my command.
I can crush the empress. This has gotta be some
twisted magic experiment. Seriously wrong. Have threatened to conquer a kingdom?

Speaker 2 (17:04):
What can I do to stop porfire? If you could
obtained a rod of Chevrial, you could control read dragons.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
I just we lay low that the whole thing blow.

Speaker 4 (17:12):
Come back, rob everybody.

Speaker 3 (17:14):
There's one small problem problem. I kind of committed us
to find it. Trust me.

Speaker 4 (17:30):
When you say that, now it's your time to die.

(17:56):
Dungeons and Dragons.

Speaker 3 (17:59):
You want to do? You?

Speaker 2 (18:03):
All right? Now? Dragons against us? All right? If you
want to watch Dungeons and Dragons for yourself, you can
find this one in multiple formats, including some free streaming services.
That's where I watched this film. You can find it
on your your Plex and your two b's if those
are options for you.

Speaker 4 (18:24):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (18:24):
There also there also have been different DVD and Blu
Ray releases, including Dungeons and Dragons two movie collection on
Blu Ray. That's if you want to be clear, you're
not getting the more recent Dungeons and Dragons adaptation in there,
you're getting one of the crappy sequels to this film,
So bye with caution.

Speaker 3 (18:41):
Did any actors from this movie come back in that one?

Speaker 2 (18:44):
Bruce Payne, just Bruce Payne. He came back at least
for the initial sequel. I don't know who if anyone
came back for part three. I don't know if anyone's
seen Part three.

Speaker 3 (19:03):
All right, let's talk about the connections.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
All right. We're going to start at the top with
director producer Courtney Solomon born nineteen seventy. So to be clear,
there had been previous attempts to officially capitalize on D
and D's popularity as a film going back to the
early eighties, but nothing came together until around nineteen ninety.

(19:26):
That is when then nineteen year old Courtney Solomon with
basically only a passion for Dungeons and Dragons, some family
background I think on his on mother's side in Canadian
TV production, and also we should we should, we should
realize there's probably a natural twenty charisma role in here.
Because he managed to convince TSR, the parent company of

(19:47):
dn DA at the time, to give him a shot
at producing the thing.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
Had he made a movie at this point.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
No, he had not, as far as I can tell, No,
nothing like that had occurred. So yeah, we may rag
on this film a little bit in this episode, but man,
that was roughly my age when this movie came out,
and looking back at myself, I was barely capable of
any level of adulting, you know. Solomon, however, at nineteen

(20:13):
and in subsequent years, won over TSR and then traveled
around the world seeking financial backers and scored one in
Hong Kong business magnate Alan Zamon. And so by the
mid nineties, the plan, with Solomon as producer was to
do this up as one hundred million dollar production with
a big director.

Speaker 3 (20:35):
One hundred million dollars in the in the nineties.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
Yeah like that. I mean, you know, you're talking about
Fellowship of the Ring range in terms of your budget.
But of course that's you know, years later. So yeah,
they were talking about having the likes of Francis Ford
Coppola or James Cameron produced. I think Stan Winston was
also attached at one point, but as often occurs in Hollywood,
plans changed.

Speaker 3 (20:58):
Coming hot off of pump Head, I shall make the
D and D movie.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
Wow, imagine what the effects would have looked like though there.
You would have gotten a good beholder in that one.

Speaker 3 (21:08):
I want to see that Francis Ford Coppola version. Would
it have had al Pacino in it?

Speaker 2 (21:14):
Oh? Yeah, Oh that would have been a different That
would have been a different evil Mage villain, wouldn't it.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
Oh, my lord, imagine wizard, Yes, evil wizard al Pacino.
He's like like he is in heat, you know with the.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
We joked, But I don't know, there's there. I can
see a version of this film that would have worked
with al Pacino, but I don't know, and we never
got to have it, so, uh, plans changed. Hollywood producer
Joel Silver came on board. There was talk at one
point of doing it as a TV series instead. This
was the natural one that I mentioned earlier. Then, No,

(21:49):
I guess the natural one was when they were considering
doing a low budget direct a video project. But they
were able to push through and get things back up
to a thirty to thirty five million dollar budget, and
at this point was clear Solomon himself was going to
have to direct it again. This was his first directorial gig,
but he did it. He pulled it off.

Speaker 3 (22:09):
It's like the artifact has attuned to you and you alone.
You're the only one.

Speaker 2 (22:14):
You are the only one who can wield it. You
were the chosen one, and so he did. Now as
a director, he followed this up with two thousand and
fives in American Haunting and twenty thirteen's get Away, but
It's mostly remained active as a producer on such films
as two thousand and nine's Universal Soldier Regeneration, twenty twelve's
Universal Soldier Day of Reckoning, twenty sixteen's Mister Church the

(22:37):
Strangers Chapter one from recent years, and I think there's
some sequels on the way, and he's listed as a
producer on an upcoming red Sonja film.

Speaker 3 (22:44):
Well, despite the criticisms I've already made, I do want
to say this story makes it even more impressive that
this film got made and is as fun as it is.
I mean, it's bad, but you're not going to be bored,
I think when you watch this movie. So yeah, hats
offt Courtney Solomon, and I do want to echo what
you said earlier. We may rag on this film, but
we rag with love.

Speaker 2 (23:05):
Yeah. Yeah, we've said before it's a miracle that any
film gets finished, and you know, kudos to him for
bringing this one home. Now the writing credits, there are
two credited writers Topper, Lillian and Carol Cartwright. Lillian screenwriter
and director who also had a small part in the
Conehead movie nineteen ninety three's Coneheads, and then Carol Cartwright

(23:31):
was also one of the writers on twenty twenty two's
Missus Harris Goes to Paris, which was well received and
even earned her and her co writers an Australian Writers
Guild Award. Oh cool.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
As for the Coneheads connection, I don't know how I knew,
but I felt a little bit of Conehead's juice on.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
This, Like, I don't think they were involved with writing
it at all, but they showed. They're credited as showing
up as one of the pilots in the code, and
it could be an IMDb error, but I'm going to
assume it's real.

Speaker 3 (23:58):
Now, I think we're about to start discussing the cast
and the characters. I mentioned at the top that D
and D the game has character classes in it so
you can cheer you know, your rogues, your rangers, your
your clerics, and so forth. Should we take a stab
At saying what actual D and D class the characters
in this movie are supposed to be? If anything?

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Yeah, yeah, we should beginning with our chief antagonist. This
is Profion, a high level mage, I would assume, now, Rob.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
You know the D and D lore better than I do.
But the way I sort of understand it is that
your main magic user is in D and D are
your sorcerers, your warlocks, and your wizards. The wizard is
sort of the intellectual magician who learns their powers through study.
The warlock is the sort of bound to a demonic

(24:50):
entity magician who gains their powers through this relationship with
you know, something that grants the power. And then finally,
your sorcerer sort of has magic in their blood. They
you know, they come from a magical background and they
do it on instinct. It's kind of hard to fit
Jeremy Iron's character in this movie into any of the three.
He fits the esthetic of a warlock the most, but

(25:13):
they never mention anything about a patron. So I'm gonna say,
even though he feels more warlocky, he's got to be
a wizard, right.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yeah, Yeah, I think he's definitely a wizard. Yeah, he
is the puppet master as opposed to the puppet or
the conduit as you would have in those other two classes.
M okay, that being said, no beard, and not that
a wizard has to have a beard. But again, at
the time this spotted me. So Jeremy Irons born nineteen
forty eight. This is I believe our first Jeremy Irons film.

(25:44):
I've read that he joined the film during its filming
at the behest of Joel Silver and according to Irons,
out of a need to help pay for a castle
he had just purchased.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Amazing. It reminds me of that a quote from Michael
Caine about Jaws the Revenge. Somebody asked him about it,
he says, I haven't seen the film. I've heard it's
quite terrible, but I have seen the house it built
and it's lovely.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah. So, Irons has a long and ongoing career on
the stage, TV and the big screen, with credits going
back to nineteen seventy one. He really began to skyrocket
with TV's Brideshead Revisited in eighty one, which earned him
numerous nominations, and his nineteen eighty six was pretty stellar,
seeing him play twin gynecologist and David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers

(26:28):
and also Father Gabriel and Roland Jeffy's masterpiece The Mission,
and he then went on to win the Academy Award
for Best Actor for his portrayal of Klos von Buloh
in Reversal of Fortune, opposite Glenn Close and Ron Silver.
Subsequent notable credits include David Cronenberg's m Butterfly from ninety three,
The Lion King from ninety four, in which he voiced Scar.

(26:51):
Now that's also a very juicy voice role.

Speaker 3 (26:54):
And also, I think the way that a lot of
kids come to learn who Jeremy Irons is. Yeah, you know,
when I was like, I grew up watching The Lion King,
and then when I was older and like learning about movies,
I was like, why is this this weird guy? His
voice is so familiar? Oh it's Scar Oh okay, And
so you make the connection that way.

Speaker 2 (27:13):
Yeah, long Live the King, I'll say always back in
ninety five with Diehard with a Vengeance plays the villain
in that he's in two thousand and two is the
time Machine, playing like a super intelligent morlock. He's in
two thousand and five's Kingdom of Heaven from Ridley Scott
two thousand and eight's The Color of Magic. That's a
Terry Pratchett adaptation, TV's The Borgias, the Snyder DCU Batman films,

(27:38):
TV's The Watchman. He's quite good in that, and then yeah, yeah,
and then twenty twenty one's House of Gucci, which I
haven't seen, but of course that was a lot of
people like that as well.

Speaker 3 (27:49):
So of course Jeremy Irons is a terrific actor and
I love him in so many roles. One that stands
out to me is a kind of kind of one
of his unsung roles, but is really good. He plays
a a nasty financial CEO in the movie Margin Call.
I don't know if you've seen it.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
Oh, I haven't seen that one.

Speaker 3 (28:06):
Yeah, he doesn't. That a character that he often does
very well, which is a deeply morally compromised and scummy
but quite charismatic man.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yes, scummy charismatic aristocrat is a role that he plays
very well. And I would say his performances there's often
a kind of quiet subtlety to them, like he gets
into higher energy zones. I don't want to, you know,
make it sound like he's just you know, like just
a certain energy level for the rest of his performances,

(28:36):
but it's generally not high energy and certainly not like
this film.

Speaker 3 (28:43):
I don't know if I've ever thought to describe a
movie performance this way before, But what I realized is
Jeremy Irons came into this film with the idea, what
if I were to approach acting with the goal of
maximizing not quality, but quantity. So is this good acting
from Jeremy Irons? I honestly don't even know how to

(29:05):
answer that, But what I am sure of is you
cannot complain about the portions of acting. You will be
taking leftovers home from D and D like. His performance
will leave you full and you cannot consume it all.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Yeah. If a normal Jeremy Iron's performance is like a
subtle knife, this one is a chainsaw. He's on full
blast the whole time. It's glorious to behold. He's snarling,
his skull is about to pop through his face. His
presence absolutely makes this film more watchable than it would
have been otherwise, And so I think the energy level

(29:40):
is absolutely the right choice for this film. I honestly
don't know if this was Jeremy Iron's choice or if
this was the director's choice or some compromise between the two.
But I cannot imagine this film without it.

Speaker 3 (29:53):
We shall have to modify our plans. Yeah, just chewing now.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
I'm not sure his performance really lifts everyone around him
up in equal measure, which is something you sometimes see
when you have a high caliber actor working with younger
and less experienced talent. But I also have to acknowledge
that maybe this film was not exactly the sort of
workshop environment for that sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
Yeah. I don't mean this as a slight against the
great Jeremy Irons, but I would say a lot of
his scenes they don't feel very collaborative. They feel more
like he is a mad bull that has been unleashed
on the set and they've started filming. Yeah, and everybody
else is just kind of they've got to kind of
deal with it.

Speaker 2 (30:39):
Yeah. Yeah, that's very much the vibe I get here too. Now,
behind every mad villain there is a henchman, and the
hinching here is provided by Bruce Payne, who plays Damadar,
who I guess he's a sword made. I think the
exact terminology changes from one edition of D and D

(30:59):
to the next, but it's like a wizard a magic
user who also swings a sword around, which I mean,
it's definitely in the rules, but it always feels to
me like, come on, dude, you can choose to be
a fighter or a wizard. Why do you have to
try and be both share the love with the table.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (31:19):
I was trying to place him as well. I was
having trouble. He's got big he's got big scary armor. Okay, so,
and he's got a big sword, and that does seem
to place him in the kind of physical fighter class,
but he's also yeah, peripheral to a bunch of dark magic.

Speaker 2 (31:34):
Yeah, and when he shows up at one point, Richard
O'Brien's character is like, get that mage out of here.
No mage is allowed, So I guess he's a mage.

Speaker 3 (31:40):
But also that goes on something in the movie where
it treats mage not as a character class in the game,
but as an economic class. Like in the world of
this D and D movie, if you are a mage,
that means you're rich.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Right. The mages control everything, as we'll get into. But
then this duds like walking through portals and granted, magical
portals are really thrown around in this movie with reckless abandons.
But I'm not entirely sure who's casting them. Is Damadar
casting them or does he have like a travel wizard
with him at all times.

Speaker 3 (32:13):
It's like they can cast misty step without being able
to see where they're going.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
Yeah. But Bruce Payne, Yes, we've talked about Bruce Payne
on the show before. Born nineteen fifty eight, British actor,
stage and screen. He was in Alan Clark's snooker musical
Billy the Kid and the Green Bays Vampire, a glorious
film and a fine supporting and singing performance by Pain
as the one akat O. He's great in that, and

(32:42):
I'm to understand he's also really good in nineteen eighty
six is absolute beginners. But man, the nineteen nineties Bruce
Payne that I think most of us are familiar with
are it's this Bruce Payne. It's like looming British villain.
Bruce Payne, like he really found his niche niche in
the nineteen nineties. Numerous films we can reference here in

(33:04):
which he's playing some variation of this bad guy.

Speaker 3 (33:07):
Sometimes feels in this movie like he's trying to match
or compete with Jeremy irons, like they were literally like
betting which one could overact more just stunningly inappropriate line
deliveries taking four or five times longer than necessary to
spit out function just very functional lines like placecards at

(33:29):
every gate.

Speaker 2 (33:32):
Yeah, exactly, like really drawn out. And the look of
this character too, we have to I mean you mentioned
the armor he has. He has some cool looking armor,
you know, neat cape, big sword, but he also has
bright blue lips electric blue. Yeah, like like he just
had some sort of like really bright slushie or something

(33:56):
or that. It is like just really bright blue lipstick
that I kept expecting it to be explained one way
or another or another, Like there's some sort of like
mintat wine that he drinks, but I don't think they
ever really make any sense of it. It's just a
bizarre visual choice.

Speaker 3 (34:11):
He's one of those bald guys with blue lips.

Speaker 2 (34:14):
Yeah. And then a later part of What's in This
World and later as he's infected by a bizarre CGI
brain parasite, he also begins to boast increasingly inflamed ears.
So most of the scenes you end up with having
like close in on his head bright blue lips, big
red ears. It's ridiculous.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
Yeah, the ears look painful.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
Yeah, but he manages to push through all this and
make you believe in the character's cardboard villainy. You know,
he's a cardboard villain, very much a henchman. But you
know he does a commendable job here.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
He gets to do the classic. You know, the hero says, hey,
you said if I gave you the artifact, you'd free
my friends. What does he get to say? I lie?

Speaker 2 (35:01):
Now. Other Bruce Payne performances the nineteen nineties that I
think cemented his place as a go to villain. He
does have a role in nineteen ninety one's Howling the Freaks,
in which he plays a hideous dart Nosferatu character under
a lot of makeup. I don't know if I would
have ever recognized this as Bruce Payne. But then, more
to the point, he was in nineteen ninety two's Passenger

(35:23):
fifty seven, in which he plays the villain opposite Wesley Snipes.
His subsequent credits included the likes of ninety three's Necronomicon
Book of the Dead, Tales from the Crypt, Warlock three,
The End of Innocence, taking over the part from Julian
Sands Highlander endgame in two thousand and the two thousand
and five D and D sequel that we referenced earlier,

(35:44):
in which he was I believe the only cast member returning.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
Good to stay busy.

Speaker 2 (35:48):
Yes, all right, so those are our chief antagonist and
the henchman. Let's get into the actual adventuring party here.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
Yeah, our heroes.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
So this is one of those encounters where the dungeon
master didn't really tell everyone that they needed certain roles.
They didn't. He didn't explain that somebody needs to be
the cleric because there's no cleric in the party.

Speaker 4 (36:16):
No.

Speaker 3 (36:16):
In fact, you have two rogues, two rogues. Our main
two characters are both rogues. That is imbalanced.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
Imbalanced though I don't know. Anytime i'm dungeon mastering, I'm like,
just play what you want to play. If we're all rogues,
we'll roll with it. We'll find a way. But in
general you're supposed to sort of steer everyone towards a
balanced party. So I guess our main rogue here are
ultimately our lead character. Our protagonist is Ridley Freeborn and

(36:46):
a generic rogue I guess played by Justin Whalen.

Speaker 3 (36:48):
My name is Maximus Protagonist. Oh boy, Yeah, he's got
such like hero kid energy in this Yeah.

Speaker 2 (37:00):
Yeah, all of his scenes feel like they were directed
by uncle baby Billy, you know, like major Tinges energy here.
It's not a character that I ever found myself liking
or rooting for. Not that it's the actor's fault, but
it's just like, this is our hero. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (37:18):
Boy, you didn't like the Dark Knight of the Soul
scene in the late movie when he's like, why are
bad things bad? And yeah, well, why do we have
to fight evil?

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah? At that point I was more like, get on
with it to the scene where you fight the evil.
Obviously you're going to fight the evil, dude. Come on.
So this actor American actor who previously worked as a
child actor on such films as nineteen eighty eight's The Deadpool,
nineteen ninety one's Child's Play three, and various TV shows
including The Wonder Years and Blossom, and he was active

(37:52):
through I believe around two thousand and nine when he
retired from acting.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
Okay, but as we said, it's it's not just one
rogue in the lead. It's a bloody rogue movie. Yes,
so we got the other one, played by Marlon Wayans.

Speaker 2 (38:05):
Yes, Marlon Wayans of the Wayans Brothers plays Snails. Snails
is another generic rogue. I believe he uses the comedic
sidekick specialization within the rogue.

Speaker 3 (38:18):
Archetype here arcane prankster.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Essentially, but no magic. Yeah yeah so. Born nineteen seventy two,
Wayn's brother, actor, writer, and comedian who's best known for
wildly over the top comedic performances in such films as
The Scary Movie Franchise, which he also co wrote and
co produced two thousand and four's White Chicks and two

(38:43):
thousand and six Little Man. And I haven't seen this one,
but this is the one where he plays like a
CGI face assisted baby, Like it's Marlon Wayans face on
a baby. Oh no, So, I mean it's what put
him on the map and people enjoyed the films that
made him a success, And that is mostly the vibe

(39:04):
we get in D and D. He is the comedic relief.
He has one, maybe two scenes but most likely one
scene in this movie where he mostly plays it straight,
but for the most part it's full scary movie mode
for the rest of the picture.

Speaker 3 (39:18):
Yes, He's doing comedy, physical comedy and character comedy for
most of the film, which makes it rather jaring. In
the scene where he gets murdered by the villain, which
is suddenly very serious, and all his friends are like, no, dead,
and I kept thinking, well, surely he can't really be dead.
That would be so tonally weird, especially given how just

(39:40):
he's like joking all the time. But no, he's just dead.
They just killed him.

Speaker 2 (39:45):
He pulls such faces in scenes where he's not even
talking that reminded me of some of the supporting performances
by this particular vaudevillian actor in Santa Claus versus the Martians.
Like it's that level of just over the top intens yes.
But the crazy thing for me though, was I was like,

(40:05):
I was looking at his filmography and I realized, you know,
the year two thousand, that's also the year that Marlon
Wayans appeared and was widely considered a really solid, serious,
dramatic performance from him. And that's Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for
a Dream.

Speaker 3 (40:18):
Oh yeah, I had forgotten he was in that, but yeah,
he's great in that. This is around the same time. Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, So I mean you know, the man has and
had the tools. But I mean, obviously there's a lot
more money to be made in the comedy business. But yeah,
that's snails, more on snails than in a bit, all right.
The next character I think is obviously an NPC. I
don't think she has any marketable skills other than she

(40:47):
is the Empress, the Empress Savina played by Thora Birch.

Speaker 3 (40:52):
Now we're gonna we're making a habit of having to
say this as we talk about every actor playing a
good character in this movie. But no offense to the
actor here, no offense to Thora Birch. But yeah, there
is not much going on with this character.

Speaker 2 (41:04):
Yeah, I think they were maybe going for a childlike
empress vibe here from the never ending story, except what
if we weighed her down with like two tons of chainmail,
because she just ends up looking uncomfortable in most of
these scenes.

Speaker 3 (41:19):
Well, but also forced her to make speeches like engage
in political rhetoric. Essentially, the childlike empress does not do.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
That, right. So, born in nineteen eighty two, she kicked
things off as a child actor and at this point
had already appeared in such films as nineteen ninety two's
Patriot Games. Ninety three's hocus Pocus ninety four is clear
and present danger and very important one episode of the
nineteen nineties Outer Limits. But this film is also sandwich
between two of her most critically acclaimed films. I believe

(41:50):
when they filmed Dungeons and Dragons, they'd already shot nineteen
ninety nine's American Beauty, but then it comes out before
D and D comes out, obviously, and then after American
Beauty came out, of course, she received a lot of
acclaim for that performance, and then she would go on
to have a really solid performance in two thousand and
one Ghost World opposite Scarlett Johansson and Steve USIMMI It's

(42:11):
been a long time since I've seen either of those films,
but I do remember her as being rather good in
Ghost World.

Speaker 3 (42:18):
Yeah, I don't think I've seen either of those since
the early two thousands, but yeah, same like thor Birch,
I like with much of the cast. I would be
curious to hear her thoughts and what she remembers about
making this film.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
Yeah, because yeah, I you know, again, solid actress, but
this is not the picture, all right, Let's move back
to the actual adventuring party. We also have Marina Pretensa.
She is a human mage and she is played by
Zoe mcleland born nineteen seventy four, American TV actress best

(42:57):
known for this film I think, and I have to say,
I thought she was actually pretty good in this role,
despite the flat misogyny gags that were kind of shoehorned
in there, I don't know. She was more alive, Her
character felt more alive, and her performance therefore followed in
ways that other characters did not.

Speaker 3 (43:14):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Well another example of not a great,
not a wonderfully written role, but she's doing what she
can with it.

Speaker 2 (43:22):
Yeah, she as. She appeared on such TV shows as
Star Trek Voyager, and I think she was main cast
on Designated Survivor. All right. Next up, we have Ellwood Gutworthy.
He is a dwarven fighter and he is played by
Lee Arenberg born nineteen sixty two, possibly under celebrated American

(43:42):
character actor. You might not know his name, but you'll
instantly recognize him from such projects as the Pirates of
the Caribbean movies, which he played. This character's name is
Pintel or Pentel.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
See one of the two sort of comedy Pirates, The
bad Guy Comedy Pirates.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
Yeah, he's the bald one, the bald bearded comedy Pirate.
He also has appeared on TV shows like Friends and Seinfeld,
But I think the first place I saw him was
a nineteen ninety Tales from the Crypt episode titled for
Crying Out Loud, which co starred Katie Segal, Iggy Pop
and Sam Kennison as the voice in Arenberg's head.

Speaker 3 (44:20):
Sam Kinnison as the voice in his head.

Speaker 2 (44:22):
Yes. Wow. He also played the Eternal Flame in the
nineteen ninety three cinematic Marvel Freaked, and you'll also find
him in some other bits as well, like he plays
a hold up man in RoboCop three.

Speaker 3 (44:36):
As for his role in this movie, I mean, I
hope you like seeing food in people's beard's that's the
yuck yuck. You know they're gonna go for that joke
many times, and you will actually be quite impressed how
much food they can fit in his beard.

Speaker 2 (44:52):
Yeah. They just kept saying it's not funny enough. Let's
add more chicken wings to the gag.

Speaker 3 (44:57):
More chicken Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:58):
Yeah, you know, I remember being a little grumpy about
the dwarf as comic relief elements in Jackson's Lord of
the Rings, but gut Worthy here is ten thousand times
worse than any of that. Like, this film's vision for
a dwarf is that of a kind of drunken, bearded
umpah lumpa whose main character traits are alcoholism, gluttony, and

(45:19):
poor hygiene.

Speaker 3 (45:20):
Yes, he drinks, he fights, He has chicken and beard.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
Yeah, and that's that's pretty much. Yet it's kind of awful.
And I think like he is painted orange or I
don't like it's like he has like an orange beard,
like a bright orange beard, and I think there's like
orange pain on his face. It is. It's just everything
is wrong about this presentation.

Speaker 3 (45:41):
Okay, But no confusion about class here. This is our
standard fighter. He's like got a battle axe, that's what
he does.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
He specializes though, in background fighting, not like key villain fighting,
but just background stuff.

Speaker 3 (45:54):
Doing it doing a leg sweep and uh, well, I
think he legs sweeps damodar one time.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
Oh pretty, I guess you know. It's a team effort.

Speaker 3 (46:02):
Yeah, but mostly you're right. He's back there slamming around
while our more prominent characters are in the foreground.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
All right, up next we have Norda, an Elvin ranger
played by Kristin Wilson born nineteen sixty nine, American actress,
best known for playing Lisa Doolittle in nineteen ninety eight's
Doctor Doolittle and It's two thousand and one sequel. Interestingly enough,
she's married to makeup affects artist Martin Estells, who worked
on Chronicles of Riddick and also worked on this film.

(46:30):
So it's very possible that dungeons and dragons brought this
couple together.

Speaker 3 (46:36):
What better way to find true love.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
As for her performance, I mean, I think it seems fine.
They have her wearing one of those ridiculous fantasy female breastplates,
but that aside. You know, I totally bought her as
a no nonsense Elvin Ranger.

Speaker 3 (46:53):
She has a good funny moment when Snails is trying
to flirt with her and she's like, how old are you?
And he says twenty three and she's like, I'm two
hundred and thirty five.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
That was pretty good. Yeah, all right. Next up, we
have just really a couple of kind of fun cameos,
a little side characters that are encountered. The first I
already mentioned in passing that Richard O'Brien shows up, and yes,
Richard O'Brien shows up as Zilious, a master thief born
nineteen forty two. This is, of course the mastermind behind

(47:26):
the Rocky Horror Picture Show, in which he also played
riff Raff. He played He played Mister Hand in nineteen
ninety eight s Dark City, and we previously mentioned him
in our episode on nineteen eighty's Flash Gordon, in which
he played a character named Falco. We're going to come
back to O'Brien in the future when we talk about
a film in which he's more central, So you know,

(47:46):
I'll keep this brief and say that, yeah, he does
bring his signature charisma to this small role, but he
still manages to feel a bit out of place as well.

Speaker 3 (47:56):
I'd say, once again doing what he can.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
Yeah. Oh, but then Tom Baker shows up as hal
varth An Elvin Kleric kind of late in the film.
He attempts, but what fails to resurrect Snails. Who's he healing?

Speaker 3 (48:12):
He's healing justin well, he's he's healing Ridley. He's like
he's apps him with yellow Zippy's apps.

Speaker 2 (48:18):
That's right, Yeah, Snails is just all the way down
at this point.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
He Snails is dead. Well, Snails does resurrect at the
end of the movie. Oh okay, remember they like they
put a thing a jewel on his grave, and then
it suggests he's still alive somewhere else and they could
go meet him.

Speaker 2 (48:32):
I think, oh, okay, well, all right, there's so there's
some hope for Snails. Yeah. So yeah, okay, so he
heals our main protagonist.

Speaker 3 (48:39):
Yes, uh, he's not. We've been saying about a lot
of people. They do what they can. I don't know.
Tom Baker feels like he's kind of sleep walking through this.
When he says his lines, it feels like he's saying
him for the first time.

Speaker 2 (48:51):
Oh I don't know. I mean that may very well
be the case, but maybe I just find tom Baker
captivating enough that that was enough for me where I'm like, hey,
he's this guy's doing it. This guy knows what he's doing.
Look at that.

Speaker 3 (49:02):
I mean tom Baker's Don Baker. Yeah he so he
brings more doctor Who energy than rasputant energy.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
I'd say here, Yeah, so, Tom Baker, if you're not
from here born nineteen thirty four, still active, I Believe,
a British actor of stage, screen and TV, best known
as the fourth and longest serving incarnation of the Doctor
in Doctor Who from nineteen seventy four to nineteen eighty one.
And there have been so many great doctors over the years,

(49:31):
but I think Baker still stands out as one of
the most iconic. And I think for me, he's like,
this is my Doctor Who. If I'm ever if I
remember in a room and there's a Doctor Who episode
playing and it's Tom Baker, I'm just drawn in. I've
got to see what he's gonna do. What's he's gonna says?
He's my go to.

Speaker 3 (49:48):
Uh yeah, I think I know way less Doctor Who
than you do, but I do think of them. I
do think of him as the doctor among many doctors.

Speaker 2 (49:56):
Yeah, so you know he's he can play it all.
He can be sick, obviously. He can also play malicious characters,
such as in seventy three's The Vault of Horror and
also The Golden Voyage of Sinbad from the same year.
He can also play serious really well. And you mentioned
his role as Resputant and Nicholas and Alexandra from nineteen

(50:17):
seventy two, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe.

Speaker 3 (50:19):
He is mesmerizing in that role.

Speaker 2 (50:23):
That's one I still need to see. I haven't seen
that one, but I have seen The Golden Voyage of
sindbad D.

Speaker 3 (50:28):
That's a good one. It's got some great monsters in it.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
All right. And finally, the composer for this film is
Justin Cain Burnett born nineteen seventy three, American film and
video game music composer who apparently worked under Hans Zimmer
early in his career, and he's gone on to score
numerous genre pictures such as two thousand and fives in
American Haunting and some fairly big TV projects as well,
like The Patient, in addition to working in the musical

(50:53):
department on some pretty big films by the likes of
Michael Bay and Tony Scott and Ridley Scott.

Speaker 3 (50:59):
I don't think the music and this is bad, though
sometimes it's kind of a funny fit. Like the opening
fanfare sounds to me a lot like the music from
a sports movie. It sounds like, oh, you know, Johnny's
running for the touchdown. You know they finally put him
in and he's gonna save the team season.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
Yeah, or it's just kind of like I mean, it's
like I've said before. You know, sometimes the film's musical
score needs to kind of feel invisible. It's just working
in the background doing its thing. And you know, I
guess that's basically what the score here does.

Speaker 3 (51:40):
All right, Well, are you ready to talk about the plot?

Speaker 2 (51:43):
Oh? Yes, let's do it.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
So the movie starts with something that absolutely feels tacked
on in post production. It's some voiceover narration playing over
a dismal gray screen with some wisps of CGI missed,
and it's just an old man's voice. I don't know
who's talking here, but it says the Empire of Ismir
has long been a divided land ruled by the Mages,

(52:08):
an elite group of magic users. The lowly commoners those
without magic, are little more than slaves. Izmir's young Empress,
Savina wishes equality and prosperity for all, but the evil
mage Profion has other intentions.

Speaker 2 (52:25):
No, I have to admit it's intriguing. Imagine if they've
shown us any of this.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
Yeah, so the horns start blasting. This is the part
where it sounds like football, and then we zoom over
a bunch of CGI. So we're zooming over bridges spanning
a waterway with a mini towered castle rising beyond, and
real question when we get a look at this castle,
I was genuinely wondering, is this CGI model based on

(52:50):
the Disney Castle image, the more elaborate one, because it
looks like it.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
We are like swooping in on it. It feels like
it very much the same trajectory as we do the
Disney Castle, and the opening Disney logo sequence feels a
lot like it.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
But then, perhaps fittingly for the theme, does the camera
fly into a window in one of the majestic, lofty
towers in the sky. No, it does not. Instead, we
plunge down over the surface of the moat and then
straight through the heavy iron bars of a gate leading
into a dungeon.

Speaker 2 (53:24):
It's fitting. It's you know, we didn't really get into this,
but it's called dungeons and dragons, so you can imagine
producers are like, Okay, there needs to be a dungeon,
and there needs to be a dragon, and really, if
you could fit all of this into the first ten
minutes of the film, that would be great.

Speaker 3 (53:39):
So the environments here, again to emphasize, are at this
point CGI, and the animation is murky and hideous. It
was trying to describe what these environments look like. It's
a little difficult, but like in nineties computer game terms,
imagine the CD ROM game Missed, but make it fugly
instead of mysterious. So it's like mist but with the drab,

(54:03):
depressing color palette of the original quake. Yes, so we
fly through a tunnel in this dungeon into a room
where a bunch of hooded occult servants are toiling in
the dark. There are chains, ladders, gears, lanterns, and skulls.
Lots of skulls just sitting around in random places. There's
one thing that looks like a kind of a ramp

(54:24):
or a gangway on top of a pipe that's pouring
water into a big stone pool. And on the ramp
there's just a skull sitting right in the middle of it.
Somebody's gonna step on that.

Speaker 2 (54:34):
Like, oh, this one fell out, just put it on
top of the box.

Speaker 3 (54:37):
There's some kind of big machine being operated, so we've
got cultists. They're pulling chains and working levers. There's a
big cog wheel revolving, and then in the middle of
the room there is a three axis gimbal. So you
might have seen these with like I don't know, used
for astronaut training, where it's the rings that spin within
rings along the different axes. And what's in the the

(55:00):
middle is not an astronaut. It is a large black
scepter fixed with a green jewel.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
You know, I need to throw in here. I was
able to get my kid to watch the first like
thirty minutes of this film with me because they're about
to turn thirteen and they're already super into dungeons and dragons.
You know, they've read the books, they're playing the game,
and so it was fun to watch part of this.
I really didn't expect or demand that they watch all

(55:26):
of this film with me, but at like this point,
they were already like, oh, it looks like they're making
a making a magical item there, and they started spouting
all the rules for how long it's going to take
to make a magical weapon and so forth.

Speaker 3 (55:38):
Did this lead to frustration.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
That they did quickly realize this is not a good film,
but they didn't seem bored. And I have to drive home.
At this point, we are into the physical sets, practical sets,
and it's a totally different vibe, like, yeah, I'm buying
this as a real place and I'm intrigued what's going
on here?

Speaker 3 (56:01):
And then also, hey, so, yeah, we've come out of
the CGI into the real sets and we get our
first glimpse of the main attraction, Jeremy Irons.

Speaker 2 (56:10):
Oh what an entry. It's so good. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:14):
So he's like an evil mage dressed in black, wearing
a burgundy cloak, and from the very first second he appears,
he is just squealing with raw ham energy. He comes
waltzing down the dungeon stairs towards the scepter machine, and
he's got his arms stretched out to the sides like
he's doing ballet. And also off to the side, you've

(56:35):
got Bruce Payne playing the henchman Damnadar, and again yeah,
he's like bald and haughty with the with the muscle
morph armor and the big sword and the electric blue lips.
And then we get a close up of Profyon the
mage here looking evil, and it's a close up like
his face fills the entire frame and you can see

(56:55):
all his pores. You can see that this must have
been filmed in the afternoon because his mustache stubble is
starting to come in, and you can see the way
someone appears to have combed his eyebrows so that the
hairs all flare upward. And then the evil music swells
and it's clear he wants that scepter, so he steps

(57:16):
forward and he sticks his hand out and zaps the
rod with force lightning. Also you can see rob I've
got a screenshot for you to look at here, But
it's like he has to step over some little moats,
little like gutters on the floor in order to get
to the thing. He's gonna get his cloak wet.

Speaker 2 (57:34):
That's true. I mean you've got to just expect to
get your cloak muddy and bloody and wet in these scenarios.

Speaker 3 (57:40):
Yeah, So Profion starts chanting a magic spell. It's a
bunch of nonsense words, and we see the little Cgi
dragons flying around inside a kind of portal in the
gimbal machine. And then Jeremy Irons keeps ratcheting up the
intensity and his face bones so it just goes in
on him and he's going off. His face is getting
weirder crazier, and something finally works with his magic. The

(58:04):
machine stops spinning and Profion can approach and remove the artifact,
and it's glowing green. It casts a sickly green light
over his face. And oh, my lord, the expressions he
is making here, Like he projects a quivering, overtly sexual
ecstasy as he takes hold of the magic scepter. So

(58:25):
he like grabs the rod with this electric zapping effect
and then he holds it up in the air screaming
yes and just like Folks, even if you don't want
to watch the whole movie, I recommend you watch this
scene at the beginning, just to do like the Jeremy
Iron's Face survey, you know, add little tasting notes at all,

(58:47):
the little moments where you get to see his teeth
doing this, his tongue doing that. What's that sound he's making?
Why is he going bad?

Speaker 2 (58:57):
It is so good. Yeah, if you watch nothing else,
watch the fifteen minutes because you will get so much
of this performance. Yeah. It is just oh, it is
just a like a stiff shot of absolutely like one
twenty percent to Jeremy irons Ham.

Speaker 3 (59:13):
Yeah, and of course it's it's Bruce Payne approved. He's
sitting there like the you know, his lips tight together
like yep, yep, that's my boss.

Speaker 2 (59:22):
Oh god, those lips.

Speaker 3 (59:24):
So Profion says, come Damadar, and they walk up the
steps to a big door that has what can only
be described as a dragon logo on it.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like.

Speaker 3 (59:34):
Behind this door it's dragons are us. And Profion calls
out to his terrified hooded servants. He says, release him.
So the guys in hoods they're trembling with fear. They
start cranking a bunch of wheels and levers and the
door opens up to dragons r us and what do
you know, there's a dragon inside and it starts coming out,
and what a dragon this is. As I've said many

(01:00:00):
times now, we're trying not to just hate on the
movie too much, but we've got to tell you straight
that this is some of the worst CGI I can
think of in any major motion picture.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
Yes, oh my goodness. I mean, the dragon does not
look good. I mean, the CGI is not good. And
then just it's just such a generic looking dragon as well.
I mean, especially when you consider what's already come before.
Practically we talked about Verma Thrack's pejorative in The Dragon
Slayer on a previous episode of Weird House cinema, like

(01:00:32):
one of the greatest dragons ever brought to life on
the screen. To go from something like that to something
like this, it's just it's a travesty.

Speaker 3 (01:00:41):
Now. It doesn't look quite so bad at the very
first moment because it's farther away and partially hidden in darkness.
But then it like lunges out and it starts spitting
fire on all the hooded cult guys and it roars
into the camera. I think they were actually going for
a callback to Jurassic Park. There are a couple of
moments where it does where the CGI Dragon does a

(01:01:03):
kind of body motion or something almost exactly like a
shot in Jurassic Park, and it seems not accidental.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
It is often sobering to realize how early Jurassic Park
comes out in relation to some of these films with
bad CJI monsters. Later on.

Speaker 3 (01:01:20):
Yeah, but yeah, so this dragon is not finished baking,
but no more time, it's out of the oven.

Speaker 2 (01:01:26):
Yeah, we gotta keet this out before Y two k.

Speaker 3 (01:01:28):
Yeah, and so Profion commands the dragon to approach him
and he starts gloating. He says, yes, I control dragons now,
and Damodar is just dripping with obsequious flattery. He's like,
you have the power of the immortals, and Profion says
he's snarling. He says, with a dragon army at my command,
I can crush the impress I can control what is

(01:01:51):
rightfully ours. I'm not gonna keep trying to do the
Jeremy Iron's voice when I quote him. So he just
keeps doing amazingly weird stuff with his face, voice and tongue. Here, Rob,
this is the part where you were talking about his
skull trying to escape, and so he's oh, and he
also he says things that are echoing kind of the

(01:02:13):
Emperor in Return of the Jedi. He's like, I can
use every ounce of your rage. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah yeah. And unfortunately nothing gold can stay. There's
a little pun because this is a gold dragon. Apparently
something goes wrong and Profion.

Speaker 2 (01:02:29):
Keeps do they say it's a gold dragon?

Speaker 3 (01:02:32):
They say, they say that the impresses dragons are gold dragons.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
Well that's not right. I'm not going to get into it.
That's that's I mean, that shouldn't be gold dragons are special.
They're nobody's dungeon.

Speaker 3 (01:02:43):
Well, no, I think we do need to get into
this later because also they bring up like red dragons
in contrast to the gold dragons, as if like it
was like, oh, oh red dragons, that that would be really,
that's really something, okay.

Speaker 2 (01:02:58):
I mean in short, like gold ragonagons are good and
red dragons are bad. Okay, So it's weird that we're
dealing with a gold dragon.

Speaker 3 (01:03:05):
Like this, well the gold dragon here. That makes sense
because the gold dragon does not want to obey profion
and so it starts backing up into it cell. It's like, no, no,
I'm not working with this guy. And then the door
slams shut on it and like stabs it and a
death recalling almost exactly in another callback to Return of
the Jedi, the Demise of the Rank or in Return

(01:03:26):
of the Jedi. That's right, they rank or it, And
then we get to watch the dragons cgi blood spill
out and pool on the floor and then run down
the stairs, which looks absolutely hilarious. And I have questions
about shots like this in the movies, like how expensive
would it have been to actually just pour some red

(01:03:47):
krosyrup blood down a staircase versus the cost of computer
animating flowing blood in the year two thousand. Why would
this be done?

Speaker 2 (01:03:56):
Yeah, I mean, I guess we have to be at
that tipping point here where the digital effect is cheaper
than the practical effect, even though the digital does not
look nearly as believable.

Speaker 3 (01:04:06):
How could that even be? Though? Like how much does
it cost to make a bucket of fake blood? And
just I mean, I guess the cost of the labor
to clean it up after you've spilled it?

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Like yeah, I don't know. I mean maybe it's it's
there in the budget cheek where they're like, we're already
paying for these digital effects, let's have them do the blood.
I don't know, they can't afford some just good Kensington
Gore whip stuff on the spot.

Speaker 3 (01:04:27):
Bizarre anyway, Jeremy Ironsy like groans with frustration. It's like
not again, and he puts his head in his hands.
He just foiled. So he says, this is the part
where he says, we shall have to modify our plans.
He says they're going to summon the High Council of
Mages and that he's going to try to turn them

(01:04:48):
against the Impress, and Damadar says it will be done.
And then oh, when the cgi blood hits the water below,
the water catches fire, and then the fire runs out
of the dungeon into the moat. All aroun on the castle.
So the whole city can see the fire, and they
gather around the moat to look at it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):
But they're not like super concerned. It's kind of like, oh,
the river's on fire again. You know, It's just this happens.
This is just the kind of ecological nightmare we're living in.

Speaker 3 (01:05:15):
It's the Cuyahoga. Yeah. So on the banks of the
moat here we meet our two protagonists. This is our
pair of buddy rogues. This is Ridley and Snails, Justin
Whalen and Marlon Wayans. Ridley's first line commenting on the
water catching fire, he says, I'm telling you it's got
to be some twisted magic experiment gone seriously wrong. And

(01:05:40):
you know, Snails is less He's got less of a
bee in his bondet about this. He's just like, you know, Ridley,
why are you always mad at the Mages? And Ridley says,
I'd just love to find a way to give those
mages some payback. So, as I said earlier in this movie,
Mages seems to be an economic class are the rich,

(01:06:02):
seemingly whether or not they're personally really like a wizard.
And Ridley and Snails, on the other hand, are representatives
of the common people. Ridley is a sort of idealistic
class warrior who wants to fight for the poor and
stick it to the mages, and Snails is less idealistic.
The way he explains it, he's like, the world's never
going to change. There are the haves, the have nots,

(01:06:23):
and the gotta gets and we two rogues. We are
in the last group where the gotta gets. But Ridley
comes up with an idea of what they should do
to punish the mages for setting fire to the river.
They're going to pull off a heist at the magic school,
which is in the highest tower in the castle. And also,
I'm not going to narrate all this as we go

(01:06:44):
on throughout the movie, but just be aware that in
every scene with Ridley and Snails, there's a lot of
what is supposed to be comedic banter and like you know,
comedic back and forth and zany character gags, and I'm
trying to be generous, but most of it does not
work very well, and it is rarely very funny.

Speaker 2 (01:07:01):
So they have decided that they are going to get
their revenge by breaking into the stronghold of some of
the most powerful and dangerous people on the planet.

Speaker 3 (01:07:11):
Okay, yes, and they're gonna steal from them, all right.

Speaker 2 (01:07:13):
Sounds good, sounds like a good plant.

Speaker 3 (01:07:23):
So from here we move on to a scene that
looks like it was filmed in the opera house in Amadeas.
It's like a beautiful interior location, but this is the
Council of Mages, and it's got box seats full of
old men and cloaks, and there appears to be a
sort of floor debate going on between Profion and a
guy who's sort of Impress Savena's ally named Asmath. So

(01:07:46):
there are a lot of old men yelling in the background,
but basically the gist of the scene is that Profion
is saying the Empress is going to dissolve the Council
of Mages and seize power for herself. He explains that
she wants to do this because of her naive belief
that she can bring justice and equality to all the people,
and then as Math tries to calm him down, he's like,

(01:08:09):
oh no, no, no. In time with our council, she
will come to see why things cannot be changed. And
then Profion says, maybe so, but is that a risk
you are willing to take? Her revolutionary ideas have already
taken root among the people. In time, her influence will
grow as the months go by. She will learn to
master the powers of her scepter, and when she does,

(01:08:30):
I have no doubt she will use it to enforce
her changes upon us. And so, you know, they're arguing
about this political situation, but I feel like we need
to go one step of we need to go one
step back. What does the Council of Mages do?

Speaker 2 (01:08:47):
Like?

Speaker 3 (01:08:47):
What are its powers and agenda currently?

Speaker 2 (01:08:50):
Yeah? What are the checks and balances? Right?

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Anyway? Profion urges the council to vote to remove the
scepter from the Empress's control and destroy the threat of
revolution forever. Is this supposed to be the scepter that
he was already trying to use in the scene before.

Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
I think I become increasingly confused about scepters in this movie.
It starts out so clear, like there's the scepter, it's
got a you know, a green gem on it, trying
to use it to control the dragons. But then there's
talk of her scepter. Later on, there's a skeleton with
a scepter. Are these a rod? Are they? Oh? That's
the rod, that's the row rod. Okay, but I found

(01:09:27):
myself confused at multiple times, like rod, scepter, multiple scepters,
multiple rods. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:09:34):
Only a fool would confuse a rod with a sceptor.

Speaker 2 (01:09:39):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:09:39):
And then also we get a scene where we meet
the Empress somewhere else in the castle. So thora Birch
is she's the Impress. She's she's kind of goth in
this scene, but in a later scene she's got some
are they cool?

Speaker 4 (01:09:53):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:09:53):
I guess cool cool weird costumes in this movie. And
this this scene she's kind of goth with like pins
stuck in her Later on she'll be in like bizarre
gold chain mail.

Speaker 2 (01:10:05):
She looks more comfortable here for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:10:07):
Yes, But this scene was actually shot in a very
beautiful location. Once again, I think this must be some
kind of cathedral or basilica somewhere. This doesn't look like
a movie set anyway. She's being advised by a kindly
older mage named Vilden, and he explains that the mages
are afraid of her because she believes in freedom and

(01:10:27):
equality for all the people, and so they're trying to
limit her power. And he's got a way for her
to outsmart the mage counsel and get the upper hand,
and that is to acquire the rod. You know the rod. Yes,
it's the mcguffin, the main mcguffin of the movie. She's
got to acquire the Rod of Savriel, which controls dragons,
but unlike her scepter, it controls red dragons. Here's what

(01:10:51):
I was talking about. And in the scene they don't
explain it. Is this something that the audience is supposed
to understand because it's just like, oh, red dragons. Oh wow. Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:11:02):
By the way, I want to add that it does
kind of feel like every NPC we encounter has a
name made up on the fly by the DM where
the game's like. And then the mage introduces his name
as Vilden. Wilden is his name, and let me write
that down, so remember.

Speaker 3 (01:11:19):
The exact same thought. The naming game is not strong
here Wilden yes, a Profion Yeah, anyway, Profion overhears this
conversation with the help of a little magical spy creature
is where is this supposed to be a mefit?

Speaker 2 (01:11:37):
You think, yes, I did not make this connection, but
my kid did. They were like, oh the method.

Speaker 3 (01:11:43):
I think that could be right. Yeah, okay. Anyway, so
he's got a little like spy, a little gray spy
demon that runs around peeping on things, and then he
and then he knows immediately. So Jeremy Irons is like,
I must have the Rod of zaff Reel. He says,
with one wave of it, he's going to be able
to hop all the Empress and bring down that useless
Council of idiots with her. So he sends Damodar to

(01:12:06):
the Magic School to steal the scroll that shows the
location of the Rod of Savriel from Vilden and then
kill Vilden too. So here's where our characters start kind
of colliding with each other. So Ridley and Snails they
sneak into the Magic School to steal things in the night.
Of course, they're using rope and grappling hooks. You know,
they're rogues, that's what you do. They make a lot

(01:12:28):
of jokes about how Snails, I think is afraid of heights,
which is not great for a rogue.

Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
But rogues can always go under or through, they don't
have to go over.

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
I guess that's true. And then there's some gags here
with like big foam dragon teeth and magical boxes of
illusions and stuff. Meanwhile, in the room next door we
meet another character. This is Vilden's assistant, Marina, who is
a young mage in training. Yes, her name is Marina
like the place where boats go and Marina is. It's

(01:13:00):
very intelligent, but she is also snobby and condescending to
non mages. So Vilden and Marina are looking for the
scroll that says where the rod is, because you know,
you got to get the rod, and eventually they find it,
but they are interrupted when Marina catches Ridley and Snails
in the middle of like loading up their lutesacks. She

(01:13:20):
ties them up with a magical lasso, but then is
interrupted once again when Damodar shows up to kill Vildan
and take the scroll. So Damodar kills Vilden and Marina
escapes through a magical portal, the first of many, with
the scroll, inadvertently pulling Ridley and Snails along behind her
with the lasso. This portal takes them out into the

(01:13:41):
streets of the city below. And then while running through
the streets pursued by the bad guys, our three young
heroes bump into a dwarf warrior who I believe is
sleeping in a big compost heap.

Speaker 2 (01:13:53):
Yes, because according to this film, that's what dwarfs do.
They drink, they eat, they don't brush their teeth, and
they sleep on piles.

Speaker 3 (01:14:01):
Of garbage on compost. Yeah. So now our three heroes,
and then now also the dwarf fighter, who we will
come to learn is named Elwood. They all dive down
into a drain pipe in the sewer to escape as
Damodar closes in. So Elwood is just a member of
the party. Now, it's that fast. They just bump into
him in some garbage, and now he's part of the party.

Speaker 2 (01:14:23):
That was his call to adventure. It was just somebody
bumped into him. Now we're hanging out.

Speaker 3 (01:14:28):
And here's where we get one of Bruce Payne's most
unbelievable line deliveries. I wrote down exactly what it is.
He says, post brigades at every sewer entrance and exit.
I want them found now. But you will just not
believe how he says that.

Speaker 2 (01:14:43):
He says it like it's his only line in the film.

Speaker 3 (01:14:46):
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, later we learned that Marina has been
framed for the murder of her teacher, and the four
heroes decide that they've got to work together. Ooh, and
then here's where we get that great ludicrous scene where
Jeremy Irons punishes Bruce pain for letting them escape, so
he puts CGI snakes in Bruce Payne's ears. I don't know,

(01:15:10):
how would you describe the parasite implantation scene?

Speaker 2 (01:15:13):
Yeah, I don't know. Weird CGI creature. I'm not sure
how it gets in exactly, Like does he shove it
in his mouth?

Speaker 3 (01:15:21):
He's like zaps it into him somehow. But then we
see it like running around underneath his skin, and then
it comes up to his ears and his ears get
all swollen, and then the snakes pop out of his
ears and he looks unhappy.

Speaker 2 (01:15:35):
Yeah, as far as I know, this is not something.
It may be something in D and D. There are
a lot of creatures in D and D, and this
is not what I'm familiar with it in any case,
But I mean, the CGI is not the best, but
it's also not the worst, even by this movie's standards
it and pain does a good job selling like the
otherworldly pain of having this creature inside his head. And

(01:15:59):
I have to say you included a very nice screenshot
here where Jeremy Irons is looming behind him and you
have these like the osuary con structures like crowning his head,
like horns of like skeletal horns. It's it's really cool.

Speaker 3 (01:16:16):
Yeah. Oh yeah, another actually great interior location here, but yeah,
for a ridiculous scene.

Speaker 2 (01:16:23):
And it's like he's being punished with a fate worse
than death for like a minor screw. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:16:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:31):
Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:16:31):
We also learned here that the Impress's tracker, Norda, is
in pursuit of the scroll as well. So this is
how we're gonna work what seems like a ranger character.

Speaker 2 (01:16:39):
In Yeah, yeah, she's a ranger and he's like, just
follow her. This just got a lot easier. Also, that's
that's the why I put the snake in your head,
so we can follow the tracker.

Speaker 3 (01:16:49):
So now we go to a bar, which is basically
the most icly canteena scene. We just see a lot
of people, a lot of different kinds of creatures running
around drinking, you know, any antics. People just dancing, just
kind of dancing like they're at a club kind of.
It doesn't necessarily look like the medieval aesthetic of a
dance dance going on.

Speaker 2 (01:17:09):
It's a weird scene because some of the creatures just
look like dudes and face paint. Others look like like
serious attempts to create something like goblins or orcs. Yeah,
and others look like they jumped off the page of
the Garden of Earthly Delights, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:17:25):
Yes, yeah, yeah. This is also the scene where they're
trying to figure out how much chicken they can fit
in Ellwood's.

Speaker 2 (01:17:31):
Beard, yes, and Dancer is a.

Speaker 3 (01:17:33):
Lot yeah, so he's trying to tell stories while he's
eating like a chicken hole. You know, that's a joke,
like you just take the whole chicken and shove it
in your face. But they seem so our heroes seem
to have arrived at a consensus that they can find
the Rod of Savril themselves and that they need to
do this. And this appeals to Marina because she's going

(01:17:55):
to be able to clear her name, And then the
others are tempted by the idea of a fine antial
reward from the Empress when they deliver it to her,
and there's a lot more banter and open mouth chewing
related comedy. I was trying to think. Major takeaways from
the scene are, like, there's class antagonism. Marina insults Ridley

(01:18:16):
and Snails for being criminals, and they try to explain
to her the concept of honor among thieves. That's where
this comes in. She's like, well, commoners really are common
it seems, and Elwood wants gold and chicken, and so
it becomes clear that Ridley has a crush on Marina.

(01:18:37):
Uh oh, So they kind of even though they argue,
they don't part ways, they're kind of drawn together and
they figure out how to do some kind of magic
teleportation into inside the scroll. I don't remember exactly what's
going on there. But also in the scene, Snails meets Norda,
the Empress's ranger. You know, she's very very kind of stoic,

(01:19:00):
keeps the cards close to the chest, but he goes
up and tries to buy her some wine and like
whispers to the bartender, like make it your cheapest wine.
But then this scene is ended when Damadar and his
soldiers show up, and this is going to be a
pattern throughout the film where there's just like a scene
that ends because Damodar arrives. That just happens over and

(01:19:21):
over and over.

Speaker 2 (01:19:22):
Yes, I mean it's not the worst structure to have,
I guess in a story, but but yeah, it is
definitely the pattern.

Speaker 3 (01:19:29):
Elwood cleverly covers their escape by flipping over a table
and shouting bar fight yeah, which and everyone obeys.

Speaker 2 (01:19:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:19:40):
Anyway, later, Ridley and Marina they teleport like back out
of the scroll, and now they know what the next
leg of the quest is. Somehow they know that they've
got to get into the Temple of Dragons so they
can get the rod. And to get into the Temple
of Dragons, they've got to have a magic artifact called
the Eye of the Dragon, which is held by Zilas,

(01:20:00):
the boss of the Thieves Guild in a different city
called Antius. You catch all that, you're getting all these details.

Speaker 2 (01:20:06):
You supposed to write this on the back of your
character sheet and then you can refer back to it
and then check them off as you get them. It's like, okay,
first we got to get the one and we need
to get.

Speaker 3 (01:20:15):
Yeah, so that's where they're going next. And then they
show like a couple of the nicest looking things in
the movie are just random, like zoomed out location shots.
So there's one going into going into Antius that doesn't
look too bad. It's like, it's kind of interesting. It's
like showing these big kind of castle fortified castles up
on these spires of rock rising above a valley with

(01:20:38):
bridges spanning out to them.

Speaker 2 (01:20:40):
Yeah, it looks really cool. I don't really get the
sense that the place we then go to is in
fact this location. No, it doesn't look like it, but
would have been neat to go there.

Speaker 3 (01:20:49):
There's a lot of goofing around when our heroes arrive.
They go to the marketplace and they just see weird
people and creatures and it's like, oh, I'm you know,
I'm getting distracted from our mission by various things.

Speaker 2 (01:21:00):
Yeah, our mage momentarily looks at some jewelry that's being
sold by a vendor, and the Dwarf says, if I
don't get to drink, you don't get to shop. And
I'm like, oh my god.

Speaker 3 (01:21:09):
Oh boy. And eventually they talk their way into a
meeting with Zilas at the Thieves Guild played by Richard
O'Brien and Marina when they go in, Marina says to
Justin Whalan, She's like, so, this is it, right, everything
a thief strives for? And Ridley says, yeah, so what
a thief strives for is to live in like a
baroque salon with purple walls, gold furniture, rugs and pillows everywhere,

(01:21:36):
and lots of weird people lounging about in various states
of dress, and also somebody to feed you grapes.

Speaker 2 (01:21:42):
Yeah, and he really Richard O'Brien's character comes off more
as like King of the Circus as opposed to like
Prince of Thiefs.

Speaker 3 (01:21:49):
Yeah, yeah, I agree, there is a showbiz element to
him that doesn't quite feel like the thieves Guild.

Speaker 2 (01:21:58):
Yeah. Yeah, everything feels a little off with this character
and this presentation and this whole scene. Again, none of
this is like Richard O'Brien's fault. It's just I don't know,
things didn't come together right. And then we also have
that weird purple headed guy, yeah, and with the third eye,
with the third eye, and also just like some very

(01:22:18):
like strong overacting undertaeth, all that makeup that was just
distracting every time he was on the screen, I was
just trying to figure out what choices led us to this.

Speaker 3 (01:22:28):
So thoughts on Richard O'Brien's performance. He's not hamming it
up with quite the rocket fuel intensity of Jeremy Irons,
but I think he is having fun with this goofy role.
He's sort of a pale, greasy human eel version of
Job of the Hut. But he's got, you know this
like wide ingratiating smile. He does some casual sexual harassment

(01:22:50):
of Marina. He's a little off and he makes some
vaguely threatening comments at them, but then eventually a deal emerges.
He's like, Okay, there's a thing called the Antius Guild Maze.
It's sort of a deadly obstacle course full of traps,
and if Ridley can make it through, he's going to
get the Dragon's Eye. And okay, they make a deal.

(01:23:12):
So I'm not going to narrate solving the maze, but anyway,
Justin Whalen has to solve and avoid some Indiana Jones
traps to get the prize at the end of the course.

Speaker 2 (01:23:20):
And I wonder if this maybe British listeners can chime
in on this I wonder if this whole thing is
a reference to the Crystal Mays game show that I know.
Richard O'Brien was one of the hosts of.

Speaker 3 (01:23:32):
Oh I know nothing of that.

Speaker 2 (01:23:34):
I mean, it's certainly nothing I've ever seen, but I'm
just familiar with it from being familiar with Richard O'Brien's
work over the years.

Speaker 3 (01:23:41):
Now, at the end of this whole sequence, Zilas tries
to betray them. So it seems the prize that Justin
Whalen retrieved from the end of the maze was the
artifact that he wanted, and Xilas has never been able
to get this out of the maze before, so he
tries to steal it from Ridley, but they are interrupted
by the arrival of Damadar once again, once again, and

(01:24:02):
yet again. A big fight breaks out and our heroes
except for Marina, are able to escape because of the fight,
and Marina gets captured. Later, our heroes regroup in the
woods and they are caught by Norda, the ranger, the

(01:24:24):
tracker who works for the Impress. Here's where you get
a good look at her armor and it's funny, it's
like very reflective. I don't know it's like glinting even
in the dark of the forest.

Speaker 2 (01:24:36):
Yeah, very form fitting plate armor. And if you've ever
seen any fantasy illustration of a female woman in armor,
you know exactly what they're going for here.

Speaker 3 (01:24:46):
So she's trying to arrest them and take them back,
take them and the scroll back to the Empress. But
in this encounter instead she learns of the treachery of Profion,
and then she reports back to thora Birch via a
magical zoom call, and the Empress commands Noorda to instead
work together with these people and seek out Damodar and

(01:25:07):
acquire the rod. You must get the rod. Everybody wants
the rod. So Noorda is now on the same team
as our heroes. Now Marina, of course, has been captured,
and there's like an interrogation scene where Bruce Payne comes
in with his blue lips and he's like, you know, ooh,
I don't necessarily want to overthrow the Empress, but I
have no choice. I've got ear snakes. And she's like,

(01:25:31):
He's like, can you help me, and she says, no,
I don't know how to help you. And then he
gets real mad and he says he's like, well, I
can suck the information I need out of your brain
with my ear snakes, and then he does it. He
gets the info he needs, which I think was basically
like where are you going? And then we're back with
our heroes in Noorda where they're continuing their journey. We

(01:25:53):
eventually find out they're going to come rescue Marina, and
this is where you get that exchange between Norda and
Snails where it's like, how old are you? I'm two
hundred and thirty four?

Speaker 2 (01:26:02):
Yeah, yeah, reasonably good joke there.

Speaker 3 (01:26:04):
So it's time for rescue. They get to the fortress
where Marina is being held and Snails and Ridley sneak
in with the grappling hooks. This is the part where
they say Ridley, look beholders, and then there's just like
a long shot with like there are some vaguely purple
looking things in the distance, like what those the purple
blobs way far away?

Speaker 2 (01:26:25):
Yeah, I mean it almost feels like like the digital
team was like, you know, we can throw some beholders
into one of these scenes and you can do some
added voiceover about it, and they're like, yeah, let's do it,
but it's beholders. If you're not familiar with them listeners.
These are hideous, floating head like beings with numerous eyes

(01:26:46):
on stalks and one central eye. They're incredibly dangerous creatures
to run into in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. They're
they're very evil. They're like super paranoid. They don't do
grunt work guarding castles. There are some other like beholder
related creatures, like spectators that I guess you could maybe

(01:27:06):
have in that role, but Beholders are not doing that work.
Beholders are not going to just be casually encountered. And
more to the point, they're like there's like central Dungeons
and Dragons, ip, like, these are things that that that
they're almost instantly recognizable as Dungeons and Dragons creations. So
kind of I mean, it's kind of neat that they're

(01:27:27):
included as a as an Easter egg here, I guess,
But also just they totally don't make the most out
of a Beholder appearance.

Speaker 3 (01:27:36):
Yeah, nobody fights one. They like throw a bone essentially
to make one run off after it, and they and
then they sneak in. Then the then our two rogues
split up. Snails goes into Damodar's room and he gets
he falls into like a pit of quicksand disguised as
a rug. Is this something from D and D.

Speaker 2 (01:27:58):
It may very well be. I did like the effect here,
because oh yeah, this is a practical effect. They did
some sort of like a painting on top of a
like a movie quicksand situation, and he sinks into it.

Speaker 3 (01:28:09):
So I did like this, Yeah, I thought it looked good.
He sinks into a bunch of oatmeal and his gross
looking and then of course Damadar comes in and attacks Snails.
He says something like he's like just like all thieves,
always taking things that don't belong to you, Like that's
a really good dig against a thief.

Speaker 2 (01:28:30):
It's true. It's true though they're always doing it.

Speaker 3 (01:28:34):
And they fight, and you know, Snails before he's always
being cowardly. He actually gets some good slashes in on
Damadar and then he runs away, and then we see
Damadar like pursuing him at a steady march like Jason Vorhees. Meanwhile,
Ridley rescues Marina from a dungeon. They fight their way out.
We get one of those scenes where so many movies

(01:28:56):
in the nineties like this, a scene where the girl
hits cigar with a stick and the boy says nice,
you know, and then you gotta have that. And then
Demodar corners Snails at a dead end on the castle
grounds and they fight and it is brutal. Demadar beats
him up and like breaks his bones. We hear bones

(01:29:17):
cracking and crunching, and then Ridley and Marina show up
to the rescue and I was like, okay, okay, Snail's
gonna be okay, They're gonna help him, and then nope,
he just gets murdered. Damadar kills him. Like this is
off tone something I don't know. It didn't feel like
that was supposed to happen.

Speaker 2 (01:29:36):
Yeah, yeah, the tone on this choice is a little off,
but yeah, kills him dead and you know, ending possibilities
aside like he's super dead, he mostly stays dead.

Speaker 3 (01:29:48):
Also. Then then Bruce Payne stabs Ridley with the sword,
and just when he's about to finish him off, Marina
saves the day by zapping Damodar with pink magic and
then teleporting them away to somewhere else once again. Yes,
so that encounters over rip Snails. There's a brief interlude
where we get to see the Empress giving a very
wooden speech at the Mage's Council about the people and

(01:30:11):
about Profion's treachery, and she says, she says Profion is
trying to take all the power for himself. Profion accuses
her of the same. They go back and forth, and
it's weird energy because it's like Jeremy Iron's frothing at
the mouth versus an introverted teenager.

Speaker 2 (01:30:27):
Yeah, this scene just I mean, Jeremy Irons is super
amusing as always, but yeah, I just felt bad for
thora Birch because like this, it just feels like like
two completely different planets of acting going on here, and
she does don't look.

Speaker 3 (01:30:43):
Comfortable elsewhere our heroes reach their destination. This is the
part where I'm saying it's one of the best looking
things in the movie. Kind of I'm not sure exactly
what this is, but it looks to me like a
hand painted background. It's basically, you know, it's like a big,
drooping kind of giant tree with a bunch of glowing
lights in it. It's a little bit Thomas Kinkaidloathlauri and

(01:31:05):
a little bit Ewok village on indoor, but with some
dark magic, and it may be very pretty, but we
are not ready to yub nub yet because the quest
is not complete. Now. When they arrive, there's an elf
played by Tom Baker with short blonde hair, who heals
Ridley by zapan him, and then Tom Baker says a
bunch of things. He says, he's just kind of talking

(01:31:27):
out of nowhere. I don't think this is prompted by anything.
He's like, the Elvin peoples do not require spells to
work with magic. You use magic. We are part of it,
as are all living creatures, including dragons. Sadly, humans see
only their destructive powers. And then Ridley wakes up. He
explains he had a bad dream where he saw a

(01:31:49):
dragon being born, and then Tom Baker explains that magic
is the life force of nature. He keeps everything around
us alive. So if the dragons were to be it
would that would destroy the fabric of magic and with it,
all life. And at this point I was like, wait,
who is this guy? Do they even say who he is?

Speaker 2 (01:32:13):
I was just so pleased that Tom Baker had finally
shown up and there was some captivating acting happening on
the screen. I was like, yeah, I trust you completely.

Speaker 3 (01:32:24):
Whoever you are after this, So of course Ridley is healed.
And then there's that dark Knight of the Soul scene
I mentioned earlier, where like Ridley and Marina are. They're
arguing about whether the Impress's plan to help the common
people is worth putting faith in, and at one point
Marina says that Ridley is what Snails died for. But

(01:32:46):
also Marina says that she now understands why the common people,
why non mages are worth fighting for, and then justin
Whalen's like, you know, for a mage, you're pretty smart,
and then big old kiss. But of course there's a
little naked cgi demon looking on the methods there again.
So we're gearing up for the final showdown. Our heroes

(01:33:06):
are given some magical weapons. Ridley gets a silver sword
and Elf says it will protect him. I do kind
of like these costumes we see. I don't know who
these elves are. I guess they're like wood elves of
some sort, but they look like Texas chainsaw elves. They've
got ed gain masks on.

Speaker 2 (01:33:22):
Yeah, they look a little disturbing, don't they.

Speaker 3 (01:33:25):
This is it's weird that a lot of the best
looking visual stuff and I'm not saying it's that great,
but the best stuff is like hidden away in the
final third of the movie, but we get a scene
where Ridley has to go into a dungeon alone to
retrieve the rod before Belloc, I mean before Damadhar gets it.
And he's tempted by many treasures in the treasure room,
but then he thinks better of it before removing anything.

(01:33:47):
So he's like gonna steal some gold, but then he's like, no,
I shouldn't do this. He puts it back down and
he says, sorry, snails, like snails would have wanted me
to steal this. But he talks to a skeleton covereding
cobwebs who identifies himself as sav Reel, the creator of
the Rod. Oh yeah, now he says, be warned, anyone

(01:34:09):
who wields the power of the Rod must suffer a
horrible fate. And I think he says that the rod
must be destroyed or it's wielder will be destroyed. And
then like absolutely out of nowhere, we just like cut
to Jeremy Irons back in the city, back in some
doll and he's screeching. The Impress has called out to

(01:34:29):
dragons upon us. We see the dragons flying through the
sky and attacking the tower. He's like, destroy them. So
here we kind of go into action movie mode. A
lot of the rest of the movie is just people
fighting cgi dragons, people shooting giant ballistas at them, zapping
them with magic, buildings exploding with dragonfire, and dragons versus dragons.

(01:34:54):
There's like one part where a dragon gets zapped and
it falls out of the sky and it gets impaled
on a spire on top of a tower. The camera
really lingers on this and it looks bad. And then
of course a bunch of people are fighting for control
of the rod. So like Ridley brings it out of
the dungeon, then Damodar steals it from Ridley and company.
Then Ridley escapes and his friends they portal back to

(01:35:17):
where Damodar is and then they steal the rod back
from Profion.

Speaker 2 (01:35:22):
Now, is it just one point each time you acquire
the rod or how does the scoring work? Here?

Speaker 3 (01:35:28):
Very good question, Yeah, how does the experience? They're really
racking up a lot of XP at the very end here.
And so there's a final fight that's like Ridley versus Profion,
And there is a line where Jeremy Irons says, not
so talented. Hey, mister Ridley, I think the movie The
Talented Mister Ripley had just come out like the year before.

Speaker 2 (01:35:50):
Yes, yes, nineteen ninety nine. Yeah, solid movie. Always always
a gamble to reference a better movie in your movie.

Speaker 3 (01:35:58):
Yeah, so Ridley is. Ridley gets hold of the rod
at one point and he's like, Okay, now I'm going
to use the rod. That's been the whole point of
the story. We got to get the rod so we
can use it against Profion. But then he has a
tempted by the ring moment. He like holds it up
and you can see him grinning with all the power
he has. Now it's like flowing into him and he

(01:36:19):
looks at the dragons and you see him realizing what's happening,
that he's being tempted, and he turns away from the
power of the ring, or from the power of the rod,
and he refuses it. He says, I won't become you,
referring to Profion, and then he smashes the rod with
his sword.

Speaker 2 (01:36:36):
Foolishly, I thought he was going to give in for
a second there, and I was like this, then, there's
more to this kid than I thought. Maybe he's got
it in him. No, he doesn't have it in him.

Speaker 3 (01:36:47):
So anyway, he smashes it and then they're still fighting Profyon.
At one point, Profion summons a I think like a
ghost bone dragon to attack the Empress.

Speaker 2 (01:36:57):
It just kind of like climbs on her back and
makes a squat down.

Speaker 3 (01:37:01):
Yeah, but the Empress uses her gold scepter against Profion,
and that like makes all the gold dragons that are
flying around to come and eat Profeon, like one eats him,
like the t rex eats the guy off the toilet.

Speaker 2 (01:37:15):
And going back to our earlier discussion, yes, it does
make sense that she would command gold dragons instead of
red dragons, because gold dragons are good, red dragons are bad.
But also, I mean dragons and dungeons. Dragons are not
just you know, you know, beasts, they're highly intelligent. So
there's a whole discussion we could have here.

Speaker 3 (01:37:36):
Yeah, they're treated more like beasts here, like you just
kind of bossom around and they do what you say,
and then the dragons fly away in the end, and
now it seems like, yeah, everything's good, you know, every
all the problems are fixed. We get we're like cutting
away and then we see we don't even see off screen.
We hear the Empress in voiceover saying, this is a

(01:37:57):
direct quote people of ismir, I do declare that you
are now all equal. Let the celebration begin.

Speaker 2 (01:38:07):
That was always easy. Yeah, and then they were good.

Speaker 3 (01:38:11):
Why didn't you say that from the beginning?

Speaker 2 (01:38:13):
Yeah, So here's a question. How many levels do you
think these characters accrued during the during the run of
the film here, because they feel like they start off
at like level two and maybe cap it around level three.
I don't feel like there's a tremendous amount of growth.

Speaker 3 (01:38:35):
That's funny. I was gonna say. I was going to
say they spend most of the movie at level two
and then in the last ten minutes they go from
level two to level nine.

Speaker 2 (01:38:44):
Oh yeah, well, I mean they get some high power
magical weapons, that's for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:38:49):
Do we ever see our magic users learning additional spells?
I don't think so.

Speaker 2 (01:38:54):
Do we see them throw dust around? Yeah? They play.
I mean at least there's some spell components in the mix,
but that's about all we see. I don't think we
think we see any magical books. Really, do we see
anybody reading from a tome of magic or a scroll.

Speaker 3 (01:39:10):
Not that I recall, and certainly not to learn a spell.
I mean there is a library full of scrolls at
the beginning.

Speaker 2 (01:39:16):
But yeah, I mean it can be disappointing if the
prop department can't really meet your needs on that. I
mentioned the color of Magic earlier in the picture, which
has a great cast, and of course I love the
work of Terry Pratchett. But as memory serves, there's a
magical book that shows up in that picture that they
just didn't make it look believable enough for me to

(01:39:39):
be like a tome of ancient magic. Like it looks
like they were really rushed creating it. So it's kind
of a gamble there. You got. The props department has
to be able to meet you on any of these requests.
For sure.

Speaker 3 (01:39:50):
It's just a paperback of how to win friends and
influence people.

Speaker 2 (01:39:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:39:54):
Oh, but we also alluded to this. There's some kind
of code. There's some kind of happy coda where they
go to snails as grave and then they like put
the ruby on it and it lights up and then
it's like, oh, snails is still alive if we go
somewhere else, and then they turn into they turn into
magic and fly away.

Speaker 2 (01:40:11):
Yeah, I mean it is true. In Dungeons and Dragons,
there's always a way to bring a character back. You know,
it's a multiverse. There are all sorts of resurrection spells.
There's no reason that a fun character needs to stay
dead forever. So Snails will return, but actually he won't.
But Snails could return. You could all go home and

(01:40:33):
roll up a Snails and tell your dungeon master, Hey,
I'm changing characters. Snails from two thousands Dungeons and Dragons
is now Injuring our campaign.

Speaker 3 (01:40:44):
Our party is Snails Profion. And I was gonna say
l would, but like, what's the funny twist on it?
Like what if Elwood became a vegetarian and he was
always just getting say ten in his beard?

Speaker 2 (01:40:59):
Yeah, yeah, say tan and beats. Yeah. These are good
choices to have. You know, you need choices like this
for your character. It gives you some stick to fall
back on during all the small moments of a campaign.

Speaker 3 (01:41:14):
All right, Is that all we've got on Dungeons and
Dragons two thousand for now?

Speaker 2 (01:41:18):
I mean there's so much more we could say. Every
scene with Jeremy Irons is like a masterclass in overacting
and hamming it up. There are so many weird choices,
digital effects that don't really come together, and yet at
the same time some admirable practical effects, some admirable sets,

(01:41:39):
and certainly some really cool interior locations. I would says
this is not a movie for everyone. I'm not encouraging
everyone to go out and watch this movie in its entirety,
but everyone must see the first fifteen minutes. The Emperor
has decreed, all right. So that is two thousands Dungeons

(01:41:59):
and Dragon. I hope you enjoyed it. I think it
was a solid choice for our two hundred film selection
here on Weird House Cinema. So now we just have
to chug on and eventually start thinking about the three
hundredth film.

Speaker 3 (01:42:13):
We will not do the movie three hundreds.

Speaker 2 (01:42:15):
We will not do three hundred. It's true, all right.
So we're going to go and close this episode out,
but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. We
know that there are multiple listeners who are Dungeons and
Dragons enthusiasts, and you may have additional insight on what's
happening and what's not happening in this film. Likewise, if
you have thoughts on anything we've referenced in passing different

(01:42:36):
Dungeons and Dragons locations, Dungeons and Dragons novels. What are
your favorites? Because I really haven't geez, I don't know
that I've ever read one myself. I'm familiar with them,
but I never picked one up. So if I were
to pick one up, which one would it be? These
questions and more write in with your answers. Just a

(01:42:57):
reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a
sign and culture podcast, with core episodes in the Stuff
to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Thursdays and Tuesdays,
and then on Wednesdays we do a short form episode,
but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film here on weird House Cinema.
If you want to see a list of all the
films we've covered over the years, go to letterboxed dot com.

(01:43:18):
You'll find us there. Our username is weird house and
we have a nice list of everything. We've covered all
two hundred film selections, and we're going to start looking
ahead at the future. Sometimes you can peek ahead and
see what's coming up the following week.

Speaker 3 (01:43:30):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:43:50):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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