These are great. I loved your D&D rules review, tracer. That almost made the movie worth seeing.
As for the accusation for the director being drugged during the making of the movie, well, it would explain a lot. Personally I think he was kicked in the head by some errant horse one too many times.
Um, sorry, I’m sleepy. Paul Verhoeven did Total Recall and Robocop. I don’t know if he and James Cameron ever did each other, but it’s none of my business if they did.
Either it was very cold in Fantasyland or he was addicted to raspberry kool-aid. Either way the movie was the suckiest suck that ever sucked a suck. A friend of mine forced me to see it opening night (at full price no less!) and I still contend she owes me. She says we’re even because I made her see Mulholland Drive, but I think she still owes me.
IIRC the empress, or queen, or whatever fulfilled her pledge to make everyone equal by standing on a podium and saying, “You’re equal.” What a great speech! It makes the Gettysburg Address look wordy by comparison.
Personally, I’m with Bubba Ray here. I would have been sorely dissappointed if the movie were not incredibly campy. I mean, have any of you naysayers ever actually played D&D? Did you hire a speechwriter for when your NPC monarch gave a stirring speach? If you did it the way my group did, then you just give some off-the-cuff thing like “Congratulations, you’re all equal now”, and told the players that it was, in fact, inspirational.
And I thought that the dragons were pretty good, in appearance at least.
Chronos you can’t possibly be talking about the same D&D movie that the rest of us saw. The dragons in the movie I saw sucked displacer beast nuts they were so poorly animated.
Well, for myself, the only saving grace was Zoe McLellan, who I thought was hot.
(And looks like she should be the younger sister of Kristin Davis of Sex and the City)
But, yes, the rest of the movie sucked… and not in a good way.
Army of Darkness was incredibly campy. It didn’t suck. That’s the difference.
If we had millions of dollars with which to write out a campaign, then yes, we would have hired a speechwriter to write flowing verse that was more eloquent than Martin Luther King, Jr.'s “I have a dream” speech.
Uhhhh… Well, in my games, we also rolled dice to determine the outcome of combat. This does not mean that in the movie, I would have found it acceptable if two people faced off, and then pulled out d20s and rolled them to see who hit who.
Profion seemed pretty much spot-on for the way the Bad Guys get played in games I’ve been in. I always figured the dungeons were littered with rubble and debris because of all the time they spent chewing up the scenery.
Profion was the saving grace of the film. Sure, we all knew Jeremy Irons could act. But not everybody can really overact. That’s a different talent altogether. Unfortunately, they didn’t really give him any lines worth busting a face vein over. But Irons is a consumate professional, so he nearly sacrificed a few anyway. What a guy. He’s definitely going into my D&D movie.
Imagine it:
As Ridley sees Snails die at the hands of Damodar, he cries “Nooooo!” and points his sword threateningly at Damodar. Damodar folds his arms and replies, “You have got to be kidding.”
Ridley swooshes his sword though the air as he charges Damodar and, when he’s less then three feet away, drops the sword and pulls out a cheap plastic d20. He rolls it on the ground in full view of Damodar. The die shows a 15. “Hah!” Ridley cheers triumphantly, “THAC0 17!”
Damodar, though, is unimpressed. “AC -1”, he calmly replies.
Ridley’s eyebrows go up in amazement. “Holy cats, I missed!”
With a sneer, Damodar pulls a pricey, marble-surfaced d20 out of his silk dice bag, and rolls it on the ground in full view of Ripley. The die shows a 12. With a grunt, Damodar intones, “THAC0 10.”
Ridley gupls uncomfortably. “AC 8.” He curses himself under his breath for not wearing his leather armor on this quest, which would have reduced his AC to 6 – not that it would have made a difference against that attack roll.
Damodar non-chalantly replies, “That’s a hit.”
Suddenly, an enrmous, bloody gash appears in Ridley’s side. He’s been hit.
But … then … why did the original ending (as appears in the “deleted scenes” section of the DVD) only show Ridley walking sullenly away from Snails’ grave marker, with no hint that anybody was going to cast raise dead on him?