(Review originally written at 26 November 2007)
This movie is perhaps even more campy than "Conan the Barbarian" but it's also a lot worse.
For an adventure movie it's way too boring. The action and sword-fights look pretty lame and poorly edited. On top of that, there are simply too few action moments within the movie.
You can never get yourself to care for any of the characters. Characters just come and go in this movie. Way too many. There is no consistency in the story. Every character is in it for like 5 minutes and than disappears out of the story again and the next character get introduced. This is a sort of approach that is common for adventure movies but in this case they simple just overdid it.
The story is very simple. The way the story progresses is just incredible bad and disjointed. It doesn't care that it just doesn't make much sense. The story heavily relies on its adventurous/traveling elements but those moments are done so incredibly bad in the movie, that the entire movie becomes a bad one, that at times is a real drag and annoying one to watch. The movie tries to conceal how bad it is by putting in humor, to make this seem like a comedy but it doesn't fool me, or prevents me from seeing how incredibly bad this movie is made and constructed.
Amazing that so many well known, respected actors agreed to make an appearance in this movie. I'll admit, the only reason that I ever wanted to see this movie was because it featured Peter Cushing in one of his last film roles. Besides Peter Cushing, the movie also features Sean Connery with glitters, Trevor Howard, Ronald Lacey and John Rhys-Davies. Hope they still enjoyed themselves. I surely didn't enjoyed them!
The movie is good looking in a campy sort of way, with simple looking sets and costumes. The atmosphere is made even more campy by the horrible '80's synthesizer music. My head nearly exploded! Also Miles O'Keeffe performance make this a campy one. Apparently his voice got even dubbed by Peter Firth. Perhaps to conceal his bad delivery of lines? O'Keeffe is best know for playing Tarzan in the huge flop "Tarzan, the Ape Man", with Bo Derek.
A really bad movie in its sort and simply not worth watching.
3/10
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