I wanted to watch something mindless, and had only seconds to decide, and ended up watching Pacific Rim – Uprising, even though I haven’t seen all of the original Pacific Rim, a movie I found so unbelievably silly that I couldn’t sit still for it. This was worse. Rotten Tomatoes seemed to agree, giving it a low rating. But Pepper Mill watched it with me.
I grew up watching Godzilla movies. But, my Og, that was dumb!
Great special effects, though.
Also, because I recently read part of the Kievan Rus myths, I obtained a copy of the original Russian Ilya Mourometz. It was restored by MosFilm in 2001, and the DVD has English subtitles. This is basically the same film that was recut and overdubbed around 1960 and released in the US as The Sword and the Dragon. I actually paid money to see this in the theater when it was first released in the US, so I got the advantage of seeing it in widescreen (it was the first Russian film made in CinemaScope). Every other time I saw it was on TV in pan-and-scan, so my latest watching of the film was the first time I’d seen it in full widescreen since the first time I saw it. The film became a staple on New York’s WWOR (channel 9). I remember recommending it to a friend, who later called me to ask what the heck this was.
It’s a traditional Russian bogatyr epic about mythical characters, which puts this on a par with those Hercules films of the same period, or the Harryhausen films (but with far inferior special effects). The titular Mourometz starts out virtually paralyzed. He is given a miraculous by three travelling bards and the sword of the older hero Svygator. He gains enormous strength and stomps off to fight the invading Tugars (actually the Mongols). The film is filled with pretty impressive sets, over-the-top characterizations (the Tugar ambassador to Kiev makes the ambassadors to Sparta in 300 look downright polite), and equally over-the-top feats and images (Ilya hurls boulders; The robber “Nightingale” blows down trees; The Tugar chief amasses a treasure heap of outrageous size, and later commans his men to throw themselves together to form a hill he can ride to the top of to see into the distance; the Tugars have a three-headed fire-breathing dragon at their beck and call) The quality of the Rioger Corman-edited US version was pretty poor, the dubbing was awful, and certain elements of the plot didn’t make much sense. In particular, Paul Frees’ dubbing of the Tugar chief made him sound like Boris Badenoff (who Frees also voiced), so I kept expecting him to send the dragon after Moose and Squirrel, or something. The film generated a Dell comics adaptation ( The Sword and the Dragon: The Dell Comic Book – Midnight Only ) . Eventually the film showed up on mystery Science Theater 3000, which mistakenly thought it was co-produced with Finland, and so made a lot of Finnish jokes. The other comments were pretty much spot-on, but making fun of the lack of logic in a myth is pretty easy to do.
The original version is of much better quality and color, the extra width helps. There are a lot of wide-screen shots that were obviously put in simply because tyhey looked neat. A lot of the motivations became more clear, and it’s overall easier to take (although my patience was definitely tried when Ilya’s lady love makes hi a magic tablecloth with the help of pre-audio-animatronic cute animals, singing all the while in Russian like the Russian counterpart to Disney’s Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. The animals look so incredibly fake.)