fantasy

Die Nibelungen: Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924)

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On the trivia subpage for Die Nibelungen on TVTropes, which treats this film and its predecessor as a single work, there’s a notation that Kriemheld’s Revenge is generally considered the superior work. Since the expansion of Google into mostly pyramid schemes of search engine optimization, I’ve had a hard time verifying that against any academic texts, but the few blog posts I’ve found seem divided roughly down the middle. Most viewers are in agreement that one part is good and the other is great, with proponents of exalting Kriemhild over Siegfried mostly noting that the former ejects all of the more fantastical elements of the latter, instead going for more grounded spectacle in the form of massive battles. I found Kriemhild to be a bit of a letdown after all of the filmic magic of Siegfried; it’s still a lot of fun, but it didn’t live up to its first half. 

When Kriemheld’s Revenge opens, we find the grieving Kriemhild attempting to use Siegfried’s gold hoard to win over the commonfolk of Burgundy to rise up and avenge the death of her husband at the hands of the monster Hagen Tronje. Hagen, who is forever up to no good, discovers where the hoard is hidden and throws it into the river to cut off Kriemhild’s support (it was also Siegfried’s wedding gift to her, to further underline the betrayal of the act). Rudiger, a military commander and vassal of King Etzel (better known to us as Attila the Hun), comes to Burgundy to seek Kriemhild as a bride for the mighty warrior king. Although initially reluctant, she realizes that this may be her only chance to see Siegfried’s killer see justice, and she agrees on the condition that Rudiger swear an oath to help her kill Hagen. Before she leaves her homeland, she stops at the same spring where Hagen murdered her late husband, and digs up several handfuls of earth to take with her to her new home. 

Some time later, Kriemheld has solidified her alliance with Etzel by bearing him a son, and she requests that her husband invite her family to celebrate the Midsummer Solstice with them in the Hun kingdom. The Huns themselves have grown restless as they believe that Kriemhild has tamed their king; outside of his fortress, they speak traitorously among themselves, asking “What is in the mind of our King?” and replying “Lord Etzel sleeps; the white woman stole our lord! She uses her golden hair to bind him!” Kriemhild herself believes that she has this power over Etzel, as she comes to him to beg him to fulfill his oath, saying “He who murdered Siegfried is now in your hands.” Etzel, who knows that Kriemhild does not love him, tells her that he can’t, as he and his people hold the responsibility of hospitality sacred. Kriemhild then bribes the rebellious Huns instead, asking only for the head of Hagen Tronje but for her family to be spared. They kill most of the Burgundian envoy in the caves beneath the feasting hall, with only one knight escaping to tell the royal family, prompting Hagen to murder Etzel and Kriemhild’s baby on the spot. All out war then erupts, with the remainder of the film playing out as the Burgundians barricade themselves in the feast hall and attempt to fend off wave after wave of attacks. Kriemhild makes several overtures to her brothers, promising to spare them if they will simply deliver up Siegfried’s murderer, but they stubbornly refuse. By the end, the feast hall has been burned to the ground and Hagen meets his death, and the entire dynasty of Burgundy is dead, Kriemhild included. Her revenge has been wrought, and it cost her everything. 

Narratively, there’s not as much to discuss this time around. It’s essentially an extended version of the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones (a comparison a Redditor made eleven years ago, so I’m somewhat late to this party), with a forty-five minute battle sequence that is unfortunately somewhat repetitive. One of the things that I found my mind wandering to as the fight wore on (and on) was an exhibit of illustrated manuscripts that I saw at the Blanton Museum several years ago. At the time, I was struck by a tendency of medieval artists to depict all of history through a contemporary lens: every event, from the Bronze Age through the life of Christ, was depicted with then-modern fashion, weapons, and armor. Setting a Biblical story in modern times (or even modern raiment) is something that, in the present, would be considered virtually heretical to contemporary believers, so much so that I’m hard pressed to think of a TV or film production that tries it. There was the short lived NBC series Kings, which was a modern retelling of the life of King David, but when it comes to updating the gospel narrative, I can only think of Tyler Perry’s ill-fated TV movie spectacle Passion and the recent evangelical-owned Angel Studios’ Testament. To get back on topic, Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen is twice removed from the original story’s origin. As the presence of Atilla the Hun indicates, whatever real life events were narrativized and mythologized in Nibelungenlied had to have happened at the tail end of the Classical Era, in the 5th Century C.E. Nibelungenlied, or The Song of the Nibelungs, was, as best we can tell, first recorded in print in 1200, and as such has all the trappings of medievality, including the reimagining of 5th Century characters in the armor, ornamentation, and fashions of the beginning of the 13th Century, all captured on film in the 20th. It’s artifice upon artifice upon artifice, and it’s a fascinating thing to behold. I was still having more fun watching Siegfried talk to birds and turn invisible last time, but this one gives you time to meditate on what it means as an artifact, mythologized all the way down. 

In all of the intertitles, the first letter of the dialogue is ornamented, in the style of an illuminated manuscript, and the speaker is indicated by what appears in the illustrated first letter. In accordance with his legendary ability as a horseman (and many horse-related justifications for the etymology of his name), Etzel’s icon is that of a horse, and Kriemhild’s cowardly brother Gunther’s is a crown. Kriemhild’s lines are denoted by a unicorn. To a medieval audience, this would suggest nobility, suffering, and salvation, and it’s something that appears to be an intentional choice of Lang’s rather than something taken from a pre-existing text (although I am not an authoritative source on this). From what I’ve gathered in my reading, Nibelungenlied is a tragic story about how revenge only begets further violence, with long periods of scholarship centered around two women, Brunhild and Kriemhild, and how they brought down an entire dynasty through their wiles. I think that Lang’s use of the unicorn for Kriemhild is a sly acknowledgement that she’s soldiering on in sacrifice in order to see justice done, even if the ultimate end of her endeavor is the death of her entire family line. Earlier audiences would have seen Gunther’s forcible capture of and marriage to Brunhild as the natural thing for an ancient king to do, something that we in the present “can’t judge” via the same moral lens as we would the same thing happening today. 

Perhaps Lang had already seen the writing on the wall with regards to the path that Germany was headed down, because if we view this narrative through that aforementioned modern lens, it’s clear that the real villains here are King Gunther and his evil buddy Hagen. Gunther, a legendary Germanic figure, is a sniveling, craven man, unfit to lead his nation and who commits the real “original sin” of this story that sets all the tragedy in motion: invading a sovereign nation with no justification other than his desire to expand and control, and—let’s not mince words here—raping the Icelandic queen Brunhild. He and his brothers’ commitment to protecting his inner circle is the embodiment of cronyism, as they take “bros before hoes” to an extreme end, refusing to allow Hagen Tronje to meet his just reward even at the cost of their family honor and, eventually, their lives. Gunther is a shortsighted despot who lacks the will to take accountability for his poor decision making, and in so doing, brings a nation to ruin. Does that remind you of anything? The fact that this film predates WWII by over a decade is merely testament to the fact that history is alive and forever repeating itself, and that artists can always see the pendulum swing back into darkness that lies just over the horizon. As established last time, that didn’t protect Die Nibelungen from being used by the Nazi propaganda machine (and it’s worth noting that the racist presentation of the Huns here shows them as being so alien and ugly that it can’t be justified), but I do think that Lang was trying to send a message to his adopted home before it was too late. Or perhaps, sometimes, a unicorn is only a unicorn. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Masters of the Universe (2026)

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The objectively, morally correct thing to do is to reject all generative AI slop in artistic spaces, which of course means rejecting all movies wholly or partially generated by AI prompts. Generative AI may be attractive for movie studios looking to avoid employing human artists by plagiarizing their pre-existing work, but what the audience gets on the other end is a clinical amalgamation of things we’ve already seen, a systematically averaged-out, artless mediocrity. Of course we should resist that. I would argue, then, that our resistance to AI slop should extend to rejecting corporate studio schlock that just happens to look & feel like generative AI, even if it was technically made by human hands. The new Masters of the Universe adaptation, for example, is spiritually AI: a soulless averaging out of recent decades’ IP action blockbusters into a meaningless mush indistinguishable from what an AI prompt to generate “a live action He-Man movie” would produce. There is no discernible artistic impulse behind its creation beyond using vintage 80s pop culture nostalgia as a vehicle to deliver product placements for companies like Coca-Cola and Amazon. As a result, the only useful service something like Masters of the Universe can provide is to offer a summation of everything that’s currently wrong with big-budget corporate filmmaking in one convenient, insultingly middling package. It’s just as dispiriting as it sounds.

The #1 issue with modern blockbuster filmmaking, as exemplified by Masters of the Universe, is bloat. This is a movie adaptation of a cartoon that was designed to sell toys to children in the 1980s. There is no possible justification for its production costing over $200 million, for its runtime stretching beyond 140 minutes, or for its screenplay saving its source material’s most exciting ideas for a promised sequel (which, thanks to the disastrous first-weekend box office results, is never coming). A lot of that bloat is a result of Masters of the Universe suffering a lethal case of the Surf Draculas, indulging in a full hour of narrative place-setting before He-Man fully becomes He-Man, needlessly having him tread water on Earth as a displaced Prince Adam for the entire first act. If this movie is Mattel’s attempt to create a Barbie for Boys opportunity with one of its other signature toy brands, the company could’ve learned a lot by paying its four(!) credited screenwriters to study Gerwig & Baumbach’s Barbie screenplay, which has the good sense to start with a fully formed Barbie living her daily life in Barbieland. Instead, we meet Prince Adam as a young whiny child, then watch him travel via magical portal to Oklahoma City and waste fifteen years’ worth of the audience’s time growing into an even whinier adult (Nicholas Galitzine), who has to work a desk job and sit in on conflict-resolution meetings while biding his time until he can find his back to the faraway planet of Eternia. No one on Earth nor Eternia could possibly give a shit. The idiotic beauty of the original Masters of the Universe series is that it’s all surface and no backstory, so simple that even a toddler could instantly understand its appeal. It’s a cartoon universe populated by literal action figures come to life, so why delay the joy of seeing those absurd characters in action?

A major issue with the film’s bloated, years-long production is that its multiple screenplay drafts have left it thematically & politically incoherent, dangerously so. While wasting his youth at an Earthbound desk job, Adam’s potential as the muscled-up master of the universe is held at bay by wimpy HR types and visibly queer-nonbinary coworkers. His cubicle’s nameplate includes “he/him” pronouns, which is intended to read as a joke about his destined transformation into the redundantly named He-Man, but also opens the movie up to political interpretation as a right-wing screed about how masculinity is in crisis because of the pervasive wokeness of modern office culture. Adam’s muscles are just aching to burst out of his baby pink button down, but the fascist feminazis who employ him are weighing him down too much to flex. Was there an early draft of Masters of the Universe that borrowed Barbie‘s fish-out-of-water gender commentary by contrasting the fully roided-out He-Man of the cartoons against the post-“toxic masculinity” culture of the modern era? It certainly feels like some scraps from that draft have been scattered throughout this final product’s opening act, which the rest of the movie leaves thematically & politically unresolved. So, it just takes as a given that the audience finds the sinisterly feminizing forces of modern life to be a grave social ill, encouraging us to cheer on He-Man’s journey back home to the Manosphere of the 1980s as a small victory for macho men everywhere.

While the final screenplay seemingly lacked attention to revision in theme & intent, it clearly was submitted for several drafts of Joss Whedon-style joke punchups meant to lighten the mood. Masters of the Universe is so jokey, in fact, that it’s outright apologetic about its own existence — fully crossing over from self-deprecation to self-hatred. The basic concept of He-Man as a sword-wielding space prince who fights against the tyranny of skull-faced Bad Guy with an army of action figure cartoon mutants is already ridiculous enough at face value. There’s no need to constantly nudge the audience in the ribs with “What the???” and “That just happened!” jokes pointing out the absurdity of the scenario. Say what you will about the live-action Golan Globus adaptation of Masters of the Universe from the 1980s (another notorious box office flop), but at least that version was sincere in its over-the-top goofballery. This modern reboot shamefully shields itself from any potential accusations of sincerity, pointing out how stupid and dated every character design is while actively hiding their most absurd details from public view. He-Man’s trademark Prince Valiant haircut has been reworked into a feathered blow-out; the Sorceress’s trademark eagle headdress is simplified to a vaguely birdlike cowl. The cowardly green tiger Cringer’s transformation into the courageous, armored Battlecat is largely kept offscreen and treated as a throwaway punchline. The floating smartass wizard Orko is saved for an end credits gag, in hopes that most of the audience would’ve already made a hasty exit without ever seeing him. He-Man’s brothers in arms against Skeletor are also deployed mostly for sex jokes about fisting (Fisto), giving head (Ram Man), and penis size (Power Sword) which, along with the constant violent murders of the back half, undercuts the movie’s potential marketability to the only audience who could possibly find any of this remotely entertaining: 10-year-old boys. In short, everything’s a joke, and nothing’s funny.

I won’t even get into the ugly intangibility of the film’s green-screen CGI effects, which places actors you know & love (most embarrassingly, Idris Elba & Alison Brie) in a soundstage otherwold where they look entirely disconnected from their environment and from each other. You’ve seen a Marvel movie before; you get the picture. Crucially, that general cultural familiarity with the past couple decades of corporate superhero filmmaking means that you can close your eyes and picture Masters of the Universe without ever watching a frame of it. It’s exactly what a computer would regurgitate onscreen if you prompted it to “imagine” He-Man in the MCU. The only glimmer of hope that this project might have produced something more substantial than that was the hiring of Laika figurehead Travis Knight to direct, as he had previously done the impossible by delivering a watchable, likeable Transformers movie a decade into that toy-marketing movie franchise (2018’s Bumblebee). There is no personal, authorial stamp to be found on this material, though. It is the exact amalgamated median of modern blockbuster aesthetics, with He-Man plugged into its predetermined proper-noun slots like a Mad Libs template. By the time it attempts to borrow some Guardians of the Galaxy charm in its mid-battle Queen needledrops and Brian May guitar work (hoping that the audience might misremember the 80s Masters of the Universe movie as having the Flash Gordon soundtrack), you might as well take a nap in the theater and watch the rest of the movie play out in your dream. You know exactly where it’s going because you’ve already seen everywhere movies of this type have been. It may not technically qualify as generative AI slop, but that’s a distinction without a difference. The only positive thing to come of it that some below-the-line workers got a paycheck instead of being plagiarized by a computer program.

-Brandon Ledet

Die Nibelungen: Siegfried’s Death (1924)

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I really had no idea what to expect when I put a hold on a library DVD copy of Die Nibelungun. I just wanted to watch some more Fritz Lang. When I opened the case, I found two discs inside and, upon examination, discovered that they were two halves of a single story (or a film and its immediate sequel; I’m sure there is a distinction, but it makes little difference). I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, well, they must be short.” Dear reader, they are not. I haven’t watched the second half yet, but the runtime of Siegfried’s Death alone is 150 minutes, although some portion of that is introductory information about the Kino Lorber restoration and its sources. Sorry about that spoiler title, by the way, but it’s in the text (or this version of it, anyway); but also, this story is so old that it’s referenced tangentially in Beowulf, so don’t blame me. Putting this disc in, hitting play, and seeing that runtime, I admit that I felt a little daunted. And then, two and a half hours later, I was still utterly entranced when it came to an end. 

Even if you think you haven’t heard this story before, you have, if not in the form of all the pieces it shares with more familiar epics that preceded, then in the stories which took inspiration from it, probably most notably The Lord of the Rings. Siegfried (Paul Richter), son of Westphalian King Sigmund (or Sigmonde, if you prefer the spelling from Beowulf), surpasses the forging skills of his teacher, a craven man named Mime. When Sigfried learns of the beauty of Princess Kriemhild of Burgund (Margarete Schön), he decides to seek her hand, and Mime, in a fit of pique, directs him to Burgund through a wood that contains monsters. Siegfried happens upon a dragon, which he slays; a taste of the dragon’s blood gives him the power to understand birdsong, and a nearby bird tells him to bathe in the dragon’s blood to become invincible. Sigmund does so, but a falling leaf lands on his back above his shoulderblades, leaving him with one vulnerable spot. 

Siegfried finds himself in a land of dwarves, and manages to defeat their king, Alberich, despite the latter being invisible. In exchange for his life, he offers Siegfried the sword Balmung, the magical net he has which allows him to be invisible or appear in another form, and a horde of gold. When Alberich tries to kill Siegfried atop the treasure heap, Siegfried easily bests him, and with his dying breath, Alberich curses the treasure and all who might use it. With his newfound wealth, Siegfried is able to present himself at the court of Burgund as a king with several vassals. There, he meets King Gunther (Theodor Loos), Kriemhild’s brother, and his obviously evil vizier, Hagen of Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow). Hagen tells Gunther not to allow Siegfried to woo Kriemhild unless Siegfried agrees to help Gunther win the hand of Icelandic queen Brunhild (Hanna Ralph), a maiden warrior whose suitors must best her in a triple sport competition. Siegfried goes to Brunhild’s castle under the guise of one of Gunther’s bannermen and, using the helm he won from Alberich, becomes invisible and helps Gunther cheat. 

Brunhild returns to Burgund with Gunther, whom she reluctantly marries in a double ceremony with Kriemhild and Siegfried, and Siegfreid and Gunther become blood brothers. Brunhild initially refuses to consummate the marriage, until Gunther convinces Siegfried to “tame” her, disguised as Gunther, which he does by wrestling her. Brunhild, still bristling, antagonizes Kriemhild by insisting that as the queen of Burgund, she should be able to walk into church before Kriemhild, as the wife of a vassal, and the argument leads to Kriemhild revealing Siegfried’s role in Brunhild’s hostile wife-takeover. Brunhild, furious, demands that Gunther kill Siegfried, and lies that Siegfried deflowered her. Gunther is torn by his blood oath, but Hagen convinces him to allow him to do the deed, and likewise tricks Kriemhild into revealing Siegfried’s vulnerable spot, which he uses to kill him during a hunt. Brunhild mocks Gunther for allowing the lie of a woman to trick him into taking his best friend’s life, then takes her own. When Siegfried’s body is returned, Kriemhild demands justice against Hagen, but her family protects him because of their complicity. 

Kriemhild swears vengeance: “Whether you hide behind my family, or upon the altar of God, or beyond the edge of the world, you will not escape my vengeance, Hagen Tronje!”

This movie is so fucking cool. There are images in here that are so potent and so powerful that I’m surprised this film doesn’t have the same broad awareness that Metropolis does. It’s clearly been incredibly influential. There are shots in Die Nibelungen that are recreated almost identically in Dune, Lord of the Rings, and even Star Wars. There are images here that are incredibly powerful: Brunhild brooding, perfectly centered in the frame; Siegfried, holding aloft the sword that he has just forged; Alberich and his cohort turning to stone upon defeat. Kriemhild’s dreams are manifested in beautiful, if crude, animation, and there’s a sequence at the end where Kriemhild looks at the place where Siegfried said his last goodbye to her and the image slowly crossfades into an image of a skull. Siegfried’s fight against the landwyrm in the forest still looks sick as hell, and the framing of Brunhild’s stronghold, bracketed above with the aurora borealis and below with a field of unquenchable flame is an image that I’ll never forget. 

So one must wonder, why exactly has this film been largely forgotten while Metropolis, M, and others endure? Well … this is an adaptation of Germany’s national epic, which I mean in the literary tradition of great poetic works which define, delineate the founding of, and reinforce national identities. The more well known adaptation of this text is Richard Wagner’s operatic The Ring Cycle, which has been accused of carrying over the composer’s own antisemitic views (although his friendship with the racial science codifying historical monster Arthur de Gobineau did not begin until at least half a decade after The Ring Cycle was completed). Die Nibelungen, having Fritz Lang as its director, excludes Wagner’s more regressive choices (notably, Alberich and Mime are largely considered to be anti-Jewish stereotypes in The Ring Cycle, which they are not here, at least as far as I can tell). Still, that doesn’t mean that a film adaptation of Germany’s national epic poem, which was all about the proud traditions of Germanic ancestry and nation building, wasn’t considered fair game by the Nazi propaganda machine. The opening of the film sees Lang dedicating the movie to the “proud German people,” whom he himself would flee less than a decade later after an ominous meeting with Joseph Goebbels, which made it easy for Die Nibelungen to be trotted out at party meetings. 

This becomes the default means for examining any piece of German interbellum art, and it’s valid, but I’m not a sufficiently qualified historian to get into that extensively, and there’s already probably a decent amount of scholarship about that which you can find online (for now, anyway). What I do find interesting, if not surprising, is that the primary conflict of this text is so blatantly patriarchal. Brunhild is treated as a kind of villain here, but to a modern reader/viewer, she’s completely justified. Her unwilling marriage to Gunther makes her, for all practical purposes, a sex slave in a gilded castle, and Siegfried’s use of glamour and magic to deceive her into believing that Gunther has passed the challenges she created to maintain her dominion and anonymity means that, yes, Siegfried is an accessory to her rape. She has every right to demand his death, and Gunther’s, for that matter. Instead, within the narrative itself, she’s a vindictive woman whose manipulations cause her husband’s downfall. 

I’m going to go ahead and disregard authorial intent, which would have us agree that her line about “a kingdom brought down by a woman’s lie” is clearly meant to be taken at face value. I also have a feeling that Kriemhild’s revelation to Hagen about Siegfried’s weakness is also supposed to be more “a woman can bring a nation to ruin” reinforcement of sexist presuppositions. To some, Kriemhild is the Madonna whose naivete creates the possibility for Siegfried to be killed, and Brunhild the Whore whose lies lead to his death. I’m going to reject that paradigm and say that, as a text, Die Nibelungen makes it explicit that Gunther is the root cause of every conflict here, either because of his belief that he deserves Brunhild or because of his craven weakness as a monarch so easily misled by Hagen, who is the other villain of the piece. Helen didn’t start the Trojan War; Paris did. 

A five hour epic in two parts is a hard sell. In ten years, I have convinced fewer than a dozen people to check out Baahubali, and I only have to overcome people’s resistance to subtitles for that; for Die Nibelungen, I’m also fighting their resistance to silent film. And, it’s also entirely possible that the back of this filmic diptych will be awful and I’m setting them (and myself) up for disappointment. I’ll let you know once I’ve engaged with Kriemhild’s Revenge.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

OBEX (2026)

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In Albert Birney’s debut feature The Beast Pageant, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines in his job & home is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to go on a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural upstate New York (where Birney was living at the time). In Birney’s breakout collaboration with Kentucker Audley, Strawberry Mansion, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines on his jobsite visits to strangers’ homes is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to dream of a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural Maryland (where Birney has been living since). In his most recent directorial outing, OBEX, Albert Birney himself appears onscreen as a lonely man who . . . you get the picture. Birney has six feature films to his name, and the three I’ve happened to have seen all follow the same basic narrative structure, the same way that all Neil Gaiman stories I’ve read happen to rely on the same Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole plot device. The only thing that’s changed between these career checkpoints, really, is the nature of the sad-sack protagonist’s job, the types of machines that distract him from his mind-numbing daily labor, and the type of fantasy adventure that breaks him out of the routine. If you’ve already seen The Beast Pageant or Strawberry Mansion, you’re already familiar with the general vibe & shape of OBEX but, thankfully, Birney still finds plenty room for variation & novelty when coloring within those rigid lines.

In this iteration, Birney plays a 1980s computer whiz & agoraphobe who never steps outside his modest Baltimore apartment. His only true friend is a geriatric lapdog named Sandy that randomly wandered into his yard and has been spoiled like a baby ever since. Birney’s sad-sack loner makes a living by “drawing” computerized portraits of strangers on commission, recreating family photos with carefully arranged keystrokes on commercial-grade printer paper. When it’s time to relax, he entertains himself with the other screens arranged throughout his house, most notably a tower of cathode-ray TVs stacked in his living room as a kind of unintentional video art instillation. He often runs three different programs out-of-sync on this TV tower like a televised-media DJ, cuddling up with Sandy on the couch and cranking up the volume to drown out the roar of cicadas outside of the house. Things go awry when he purchases a PC computer game through mail catalog that promises to bring great adventure into his life — a promise made literal when the game invites a demon named Ixaroth to invade his home through the screen, directly importing Sandy into the game. To rescue Sandy, he must then go on a harrowing adventure outside of his apartment by willingly entering the game himself, represented as a live-action roleplay version of 8-bit era Zelda puzzle games. The story is not unfamiliar (especially not if you’ve seen Riddle of Fire in addition to Birney’s prior work), but its familiarity is ultimately, warmly sweet.

The most notable shift in craft here is Birney’s newfound interest in horror genre tropes, which is usually where most low-budget directors start. Some of his best couch time with Sandy in the first act is spent recording the entirety of A Nightmare on Elm Street Film from TV broadcast to VHS tape, so they can rewatch it together later, anytime they want. This allusion opens the film up to a wide range of surrealistic horror touches, including dozens of rubber-masked cicada mutants straight out of 1950s creature features, a couple Harryhausen-style skeleton soldiers and, most improbably, some spooky late-night drives inspired by Lynch’s Lost Highway. The treacherous demon Ixaroth obviously adds to the film’s horror bona-fides as well, represented onscreen as a beast made entirely out of TV static, with a tangible taxidermy skull. It’s an image that pairs well with Birney’s return to the Game Boy Camera-style black & white cinematography of The Beast Pageant, but more importantly it’s one that signals the themes he’s getting at with this latest stylistic experiment. The evil entity is composed of the glowing-screen filler that keeps his protagonist from venturing outside his apartment, making the film out to be a dire warning about the price of staring at screens all day instead of living a real life. Sure, you get some mind-melting psychedelic video art out of it, but at what cost? In comparison, I’m not sure that The Beast Pageant had a similar underlying message other than that having a job sucks. Maybe OBEX is Birney admitting that making & looking at niche art all day sucks too, especially if that’s the only thing you do.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Beast Pageant (2010)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the industrial fantasy adventure The Beast Pageant (2010).

00:00 Welcome
02:30 Murder! (1930)
09:00 Tromeo & Juliet (1996)
13:00 Eden Lake (2008)
21:00 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
31:00 Dooba Dooba (2026)
37:07 The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)
45:13 The Plague (2025)
52:46 All You Need is Kill (2026)
57:30 Tangerine (2015)
1:01:22 Tale of Tales (2016)
1:06:00 Mandibles (2021)
1:10:15 The Beach Bum (2019)
1:16:16 The Lure (2017)
1:18:50 Mississippi Masala (1991)
1:22:37 Two Sleepy People (2026)

1:26:00 The Beast Pageant (2010)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

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Once upon a dream, Disney was in the business of producing world-class visual art. Now they’re just in the business of business — corporate acquisitions and such. The dream is over. So it goes.

That corporate culture shift didn’t happen overnight. At minimum, it happened over a decade. The 1950s saw Disney’s earliest, mightiest strides to diversify its portfolio, expanding into television and amusement parks after spending its first couple decades focused on its core mission: overworking & union-busting animators. Still alive, engaged, and at the helm, Walt Disney himself was conscious of the ways his company’s corporate expansion could dilute the quality of its feature films, so he made a point to reaffirm dominance in the field through technically accomplished pictures like Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. Fittingly, the studio closed out the decade with the most back-to-basics title of the batch, 1959’s fairy tale romance Sleeping Beauty.

This feature-length adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s thinly plotted ballet is, above all else, a formal flex. Narratively speaking, Sleeping Beauty doesn’t accomplish anything that wasn’t already covered by Snow White or Cinderella. It’s yet another princess-in-distress fairy tale of a fair maiden being rescued from a jealous hag’s curse by a macho hero’s kiss. Only, it’s stripped of any defining characteristics that would make its doomed lovers lastingly memorable. Nothing about Princess Aurora is especially iconic, to the point where she’s more often referred to nowadays by the film’s title than by her proper name. All memorable character quirks are instead reserved for the women in charge of her fate: the three goofball fairies who protect her from Evil (Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather) and the villainous Mistress of All Evil (Maleficent, the only character here deemed worthy of her own spinoff franchise).

Without any of the usual pesky plotting or character concerns getting in their way, Disney’s team of technicians could focus entirely on the animation’s visual majesty. Afforded an extreme “Technirama” aspect ratio to paint his elaborate backdrops within, artist Eymind Earle crafts an extravagantly detailed tableau in every frame. Walt Disney tasked his crew with evoking Medieval tapestries in the film’s design, and Earle goes so overboard in his traditionalist craftsmanship that he upstages the characters that populate his backdrops.  In turn, his collaborators create an incredible depth of field through cell animation techniques, especially in early sequences where the wicked witch Maleficent and her fairy foes bless & curse the newborn baby Aurora through a series of magic spells. Roses, specters, lightning, and other abstract premonitions swirl in psychedelic montage as Aurora’s fate is decided at the foot of her royal crib. It’s a divine intersection of the fairy tale traditionalism of Snow White and the pure orchestral illustration of Fantasia — two mighty Disney triumphs from decades past, the best animation money can buy.

I have no interest in recounting Aurora’s troubled path to womanhood here. She’s cursed to die on her 16th birthday but is saved by a good nap and a classic case of puppy love. The rest is all arranged royal marriages, goofy sidekick antics, and sitcom-level mistaken identity hijinks. Even the mighty Maleficent is more memorable for her visual design than for her words or actions. We love the drag queen pageantry of her devil-horned headpiece. We love the green-on-black color scheme of her magic spells. We love her climactic transformation into a purple, fire-breathing dragon — another grand achievement in classic, hand-drawn animation. When the evil witch is defeated and Aurora is saved by the kiss of her sweetheart prince, the picture ends with the young couple dancing in the clouds. That’s also where the audience’s heads are supposed to be, not sweating the details of the storytelling on the ground.

When was the last time Disney was more focused on the visual majesty of it’s animation than on the marketability of its characters? Every in-house Disney production is now shrewdly designed to stock some toy shelf, amusement park attraction, or T-shirt screen press with fresh, sellable IP. It’s difficult to imagine an instance where they’d set aside character quirks & catchphrases to wow an audience with a return to classic, elegant animation. At this point, the company’s animation wing is a product delivery mechanism, like an assembly line conveyor belt. It used to be their entire raison d’être.

-Brandon Ledet

Angel’s Egg (1985)

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Angel’s Egg, a 1985 film from director Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, is currently screening in limited runs with a 4K remaster, and I was lucky enough to catch it at my local arthouse. It’s stunning. A beautifully rendered monochrome world with only two living beings within it, the film is one that resists most attempts to interpret its metaphors, with Oshii himself admitting that there are parts of it that he does not understand. As such, it feels like a long, strange dream, full of images that feel pregnant with symbolism but too ephemeral to achieve any truly coherent exegesis. 

In a waterlogged and abandoned city, an unnamed girl protects a large egg, while she forages for canned food and collects jugs of water. A giant machine rolls through the town, and an unnamed man bearing a cross-shaped weapon clambers down from it. They resemble one another, both being porcelain pale with platinum hair, but the girl flees from the man initially, and when he asks her for her name, it’s unclear if she fears him, can’t remember her name, or if she perhaps never even had one in the first place. The man briefly steals the egg and then returns it to her, retelling the story of Noah’s Ark but changing the ending so that the dove never returned, and that everyone on the ark simply forgot about their pasts. This leads the girl to take the man to a sort of sanctuary where she has been bringing her collected jugs of water, numbering in the thousands, and placed them all around the fossilized skeleton of an angel. The man, who has said that the only way to know what is inside of an egg is to break it, does so one night while the girl sleeps, and her screams the following morning when she discovers the bits of shell are heartbreaking. She runs and falls into the churning sea, where she drowns. 

That’s a very rough sketch of what barely constitutes the “plot” of the film. This isn’t a story so much as it is a series of surreal images strung together as flimsily as the sluggish narrative of a dream in which you’re exploring a seemingly endless, empty city beneath a gray sky. (These are positive qualities that the film possesses despite “flimsy” and “sluggish” having derogatory connotations.) None of it really seems to mean much of anything. My favorite images from the film are completely tertiary to the above synopsis. The city seems to be filled with statues of fishermen, which the girl is startled by and avoids the presence of. Later, the city suddenly becomes filled with shadows of giant fish, silhouettes cast upon the streets and the sides of buildings, and the fishermen spring into action in an attempt to catch them, firing harpoons into the road and through streetlamps and into windows and empty houses. When I was still trying to understand the film and not simply experience it, I thought of them as automatons from the derelict city’s ancient past, left running in order to catch fish which had been hunted to death. That didn’t at all explain where the shadows came from, and now I see the sequence as two different kinds of ghosts, memories of two extinct parties that are both now long gone, physical husks that hunt long-dead prey, and the shadows of the flesh long since transcended. Is that accurate? Does any of it mean anything? I’m not sure, but it definitely doesn’t really matter. 

Angel’s Egg is filled with Biblical imagery, with occasional glimpses of what appears to be the (or an) actual ark, sitting on a cliff as rain falls. Noah’s Ark is thematically central, and the film’s final image implies that all of what we have seen transpire occurred on the upturned hull of a giant ark-style vessel. The man’s use of a weapon in the shape of a cross is likewise open to many interpretations, but I remain convinced that attempting to puzzle all of that out is utterly the wrong way to engage with the film. There’s a giant mechanical sun that’s also an eyeball, and it’s covered in statues. What does it mean? Who cares? Enjoy the ride.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Demon Pond (1979)

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A late-70s Japanese folk horror about a demonic dragon that lurks underwater, threatening to drown a nearby village that won’t do its bidding, sounds like film bro catnip — the kind of zany, go-for-broke genre freak-out that the smelliest twentysomething in your life makes their entire personality for a couple years before moving on (see: 1977’s House). In practice, 1979’s Demon Pond is much more delicate than that. Its titular demon is a whispered-about, metaphorical presence that never graces the screen. Its vintage Moog score lilts and swells instead of hammering the audience with analog synth coolness. Its heroic fights against the otherworldly spirits that haunt the human world are staged as the ceremonial ringing of a bell. It yearns more than it burns, getting more wrapped up in doomed romance than doomed society. If you want the zany, go-for-broke genre freakout version of Demon Pond, check out something like Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare. Here, the yokai are quiet observers of human longing & misery, their supernatural antics held at bay by calm waters & a ringing bell. The film gingerly holds the audience in its palm like a flower petal, until it crushes us in the vengeful fist of its climax.

Although adapted from a traditionalist kabuki stage play, Demon Pond structurally mimics the basic story template of folk horror cinema like The Wicker Man, The Wailing, and The Last Wave. These are stories in which a Big City outsider stumbles into a rural town with its own mysterious, supernatural traditions that ultimately leads to his demise (and often to the wide-scale destruction of everyone around him). In this case, a schoolteacher on vacation pretends to be studying the small village he’s visiting as a casual tourist, when he’s in fact searching for a dear friend who disappeared from his life three years prior. He finds that friend married to an alarmingly delicate, ethereal woman who’s so childlike in her innocence that she seems alien to the human world. Indeed, her earthly presence is reflected in a magic-realm doppelganger that only the audience can see: a spiritual priestess who lords over the local yokai, bound to an ancient agreement that they will not flood the nearby village as long as the humans on-site ring the temple’s ceremonial bell three times a day. An academic collector of local folk tales, the teacher’s lost friend has taken up the lifelong duty of ringing said bell to save the thousands of villagers who would drown if the area floods. Meanwhile, the villagers have long dismissed the bell business as ancient superstition, but they’re starting to suspect that the strangers at the edge of town are the reason they’re suffering the unreasonably long drought that’s threatening their livelihoods. The race to see which superstition will win out (i.e., whether continuing to ring the bell or slaughtering the outsiders will fix the village’s water woes) is a one-track race to doom, inevitably leading to the village being sunk to the bottom of the titular pond.

Part of Demond Pond‘s delicate nature is due to its queer angle on gender & romance, resulting from the casting of stage actor Bandō Tamasaburō in the dual role of Yuri/Yuki, bell-tender/princess. Tamasaburō was specifically trained in the kabuki art of onnagata: male actors who play overly dramatic female roles. He performs the fragile softness of Yuri and the all-powerful romantic fury of Yuki with a heightened, drag-like attention to gender cues that adds to the stagecraft artifice of the film’s fantasy realm. It also adds a subversive texture to the central romance between the ringers of the temple bell, something the movie leans into heaviest when it draws out the couple’s intimate mouth-to-mouth kiss into elaborate choreography & blocking worthy of an early-MTV music video. Meanwhile the aquatic-yokai princess Yuki is most pained by her bell-bound agreement to not flood the village because it keeps her apart from a neighboring prince she yearns to marry. She eventually comes to welcome the flood, as it would free her to love as she pleases, making poetic proclamations like, “How blissful to dissolve in the stream of affection. Let my body be crushed to pieces. Still my spirit will yearn for him.” That’s some high-quality yearning right there, especially since its cinematic adoption of kabuki theatricality drags it into the realm of tragic queer love.

For most of its runtime, Demon Pond floats somewhere between the isolationist folk-tradition dread of The Wicker Man and the garish high-artifice spectacle of The Wizard of Oz. Then, it’ll swerve into a special effects showcase sequence here or there unlike anything you’ve seen anywhere else. When the yokai “creatures of mud” (humanoid catfish, crabs, frogs, etc.) emerge from the pond grounds to summon the fabled flood, they’re represented in costuming befitting of community theatre or a well-attended Halloween soiree. When their bell-bound princess emerges, however, her otherworldly magic is represented in purely cinematic double-exposure techniques truly befitting of an underwater spirit. When the village inevitably fails to ring her bell and floods in the consequences of its own inaction, director Masahiro Shinoda (and special effects wizard Nobuo Yajima) go full tokusatsu spectacle, crushing the village under a heavy flow of water with the same might & scale of a Godzilla rampage. Whereas most later Godzilla pictures would indulge in kid-friendly pro wrestling drama, however, Demon Pond‘s spectacle is instead a tragic expression of nuanced, adult conflicts. Its superstitious villagers are paradoxically desperate for water but afraid of a pond. Its doomed-lover outsiders are paradoxically resentful of those villagers but feel responsible for keeping them alive, undrowned. The entire local structure at the edge of the Demon Pond hangs on a precarious balance, one so delicate it can be thrown off by a single bell tone. When it all comes crashing down, you feel the weight of that tragedy pressing directly on your heart. It hurts.

-Brandon Ledet

Return to Oz (1985)

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My first obsession as a child was with Oz. The MGM musical has been a part of my life for so long that I can’t recall the first time I saw it, as its entrance into my life predates my earliest still-retained memories. I can recall the first time I saw any other Oz-related media, however, as I can still remember—even if distantly and vaguely—a Christmas that we spent at my grandparents’ cold New Jersey apartment when I was four years old. They had HBO, and in the early hours of the morning, with the scent of Community Coffee (which we always brought to my grandparents when travelling, as well as several containers of Tony Chachere’s, both of these being luxuries they couldn’t obtain in the north) and my grandmother’s Marlboro Reds in the air, I watched an episode of an animated series featuring Dorothy and company. This was a revelation to me, that there was more Oz to know, and I immediately started to devour as much of it as was available. I was reading by age five and although the early 20th century diction of the Oz books was somewhat difficult to parse, most of the versions available at my library were illustrated, and this was enough for the early years. But what affected me even more than the Judy Garland film was its long distant Fairuza Balk-starring sequel, Return to Oz, which was exactly the kind of proto-horror that my young brain was attuned to. 

Return to Oz opens in Kansas, where the reality of post-tornado living is dreary and dire (and, given the age that I was when I first saw it, likely felt familiar to me in the wake of Hurricane Andrew). It’s nearly winter and the new house isn’t complete, and while Dorothy excuses Uncle Henry’s tendency to stare into space with his feet up, Aunt Em knows that it’s PTSD, even if the terminology doesn’t exist yet. Still, she’s more concerned with young Dorothy’s mental state, given that the little girl no longer sleeps through the night (when she sleeps at all) and is insistent that her imaginary journey to fairyland and the friends she made there are real. Em’s desperation to do the right thing for her niece leads her to leave the girl in the care of a doctor named Worley (Nicol Williamson) and his severe-faced nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh) overnight, where they promise that the newly discovered “science” of electroshock therapy will cure all of Dorothy’s ills. A storm comes in the night that allows Dorothy an opportunity to escape, which she does, although she ends up falling into a river; climbing aboard some floating debris, she falls asleep, only to discover that she has awakened near Oz, and is in the company of Billina, one of her chickens, who has not laid an egg since the tornado. 

Dorothy quickly discovers an Oz in ruins. Although she finds the old house she first arrived to Oz in, there’s no Munchkin village nearby; the yellow brick road she travelled for much of the first film is in a state of advanced disrepair; the Emerald City’s brilliant gemstones have vanished as the city’s architecture lies in ruins. Worse, the city itself is ruled by the Wheelers, a pack of feral Klaus Kinski-looking men who travel on all fours on legs that end in squealing wheels. Hiding from them, she finds “the royal army of Oz,” which consists of a single individual, a mechanical man named Tik-Tok who is awakened via a series of wind-up keys. The inhabitants of the city have all been turned to stone by magic, with only Tik-Tok having survived this transformation unharmed by virtue of not quite truly being alive. He’s only the first of Oz’s inhabitants to join Dorothy’s new adventuring party, however, as she also soon collects Jack Pumpkinhead—a Jack o’ Lantern/scarecrow hybrid brought to life in order to scare the witch Mombi (Marsh again)—who governs the empty Emerald City as regent for the Nome King (Williamson again). The final member of the group is the “Gump,” a loathsome creature that Dorothy and company build out of old furniture and assorted attic garbage and bring to life via the same magic powder as Jack was in order to escape Mombi. Adventure awaits! 

Although it may not be the most valuable element of media made for children, I do think one of the things that makes a piece of kid-oriented art have some sense of staying power is the extent to which it encourages imaginary play. A kid who loves The Land Before Time will get just as much pleasure out of going to the playground and pretending to be Littlefoot with their friends as they would out of rewatching the movie. I vividly remember running around in my front yard with my mom as a kid, sometimes on all fours, shouting “To the meadow! To the meadow!” in recreation of a scene from Bambi; the Little Golden Book Scuffy the Tugboat encouraged me to get outside in the rain and play with my own toy boat, and my mother still uses “There’s enough to float Scuffy” as a descriptor of how much rainfall she gets when I call her. Even more so than The Wizard of Oz, The Return to Oz capitalizes on this inherent hunger that children have to create the magical out of the mundane, and it does so using the same extratextual decision that Wizard did—that Oz contains “echoes” of the real world—in a more deliberate way. In the earlier film, this was much more explicitly a way of telling the audience that Dorothy’s adventures were just a dream all along, that her companions were the farmhands and the witch was Mrs. Gulch, translated into her fantastical dreams. As an official sequel, Return follows that same narrative choice, but more subtly and arguably more fantastically. Besides the obvious correlation between Worley/the Nome King and Wilson/Mombi, we also see Dorothy’s “inspiration” for Tik-Tok in the form of the shock therapy device, and she’s given a tiny jack o’ lantern by another patient (who is the spitting image of the missing Ozma, princess of Oz, who also happened to be Jack Pumpkinhead’s “mother”). 

This is something that all children do, applying personality to toys and items and giving them voices and roles in their imaginary play. Even if kids don’t pick up on that being what’s happening in the film, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t unconsciously get absorbed and make their internal worlds just that much more magical. That’s not even counting the number of kids who realized that they could imagine returning to a fantasy land in disarray as a new adventure to play out, following the yellow brick road once more, but one that’s twisted and broken. What if I pretended I was in NeverNeverLand, but without Peter? What if Fantasia needed another Bastian to give the Empress a new name? What if Narnia fell? (Admittedly, Prince Caspian opens in the ruins of the Pevensie’s castle Cair Paravel and The Last Battle features the actual end of Narnia, but you get what I’m saying.) 

I’ve spent enough time praising the film for its potential to inspire imagination, which, while valid, isn’t praise for the film as a text unto itself. Every time I watch Return, I discover (or rediscover) something new to love about it. For one thing, this is a film that I never really thought of as being funny when I was a kid, but there are one-liners and jokes aplenty that will no doubt appeal to any adults in the audience (one of my favorite smirkers is Dorothy’s reply to Jack’s confusion that Tik-Tok might still be able to talk after his “thinking” spring had run out, which is to say that “It happens to people all the time”). My favorite thing about the film is the presence of the copper kettle-like Tik-Tok, who was always my favorite character in the books as well, with the eighth book in the series, Tik-Tok of Oz (specifically the one with this less-than-honest cover) being read no less than fifty times in my childhood. He’s just adorable. I love him. Billina is perhaps the second best non-human actor in the film, a Henson Company creation that’s such a perfect recreation of a Buff Cochin Bantam hen that there are moments where I know she’s a puppet and others where I know she’s a real chicken, but there are many more where I could not tell you if she’s “real” or not to save my life. 

If the general public remembers this one at all, it’s usually negatively in comparison to their memory of the MGM picture, or they remember this one specifically for being on the scary side. While Wizard’s Wicked Witch of the West scared generations of children, this film had multiple frights that play out over the course of the film. The escape from the sanatorium is notably frightening, as the nurse screams into the pouring thunderstorm for Dorothy and her benefactor to return before they fall into a river and nearly drown. The Wheelers are scary, with their squealing wheels (inspired by the squeaking gurneys in the Kansas portion, naturally), and several of them are turned to sand and desiccate before blowing away when they fall into the Deadly Desert while pursuing Dorothy and friends. The Nome King’s death as he becomes more rocklike before crumbling and melting away in a hellish fire, his stone skeleton frozen into a screaming death face before it eventually crumbles, is also noteworthy, as is much to do with the Nomes and their kingdom in the first place (their faces moving about in stop motion on various rock faces remains impressive to this day). But the most memorable scene is one that I would argue remains one of the most chilling in all of cinema, including horror made for adults. At one point in the film, Dorothy must sneak into the chambers of Princess Mombi, which she has already seen contains dozens of glass-fronted cabinets containing the detached (but still living) heads of various Ozian women, which she changes to suit her mood as easily as changing hats. She awakens Mombi’s original head, which then begins chanting her name in a guttural, almost unearthly voice, as all the heads around her scream and Mombi’s headless body rises from her bed to attack. It’s fantastic!

It’s only a matter of time before this film gets lumped in with its intro-to-horror brethren as fodder for slop content along the lines of “CaN yOu BeLiEvE they showed THIS MOVIe to KiDs!!?!” that I’ve started to see pop up online. (Newsflash: if you’re under a certain age, you may not realize this, but art used to be created for multiple groups to enjoy and get something different out of because we didn’t all have individual devices programmed to shovel unchallenging, hyper attuned, algorithmically-driven, intellectually incurious fodder into our brains every waking hour). Enjoy it now before the internet tries to ruin it for you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)

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Let me tell you a story. A human boy comes into possession of a bladeless sword hilt that only he can control and which only has a blade at his command. He teams up with a rogue pilot whose rough exterior belies a heart of gold and, alongside a sassy computer intelligence, they meet a space princess. They visit exotic locales like the desert, a swamp, and a hive of wretched scum and villainy. Before the end, the boy learns that he is part of a long line of people who wield a mystical power and who can appear after death as spectral guides in this metaphysical art, and he defeats an ancient evil in a dark cloak. Sounds like Star Wars, right?

I really didn’t know that much about Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. I’m not even really sure exactly when I managed to acquire a digital copy, or when I transferred that file to my phone for a potential future viewing (I’m not an Apple user so I’ve had the same phone for 4 years without a forced upgrade occurring as a result of planned obsolescence). I’m traveling at present and I did foresee that while journeying I might grow weary of the beautiful but nonetheless antiquated and challenging prose of Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s 1922 novel The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension, and had planned ahead by downloading a couple of episodes of Peacemaker while I was on Wi-Fi. I did not foresee that the HBO app would simply not load at all once I was in airplane mode, and thus after failing to simply sleep on the flight, looked at what I had in my videos folder, and there Starchaser was, waiting for me to finally give it my attention. Many worse things have happened on airplanes recently than watching Starchaser, but I still nonetheless failed to be engrossed. 

The eponymous Orin is an enslaved human miner living beneath the surface of the planet Trinia, where he and other humans toil with laser diggers for volatile crystals, which are then “fed” to a giant dragon-like face when the slaves are visited by their god, Zygon. One day, Orin finds a sword buried in the rock, and when he frees it, the grandfather of his girlfriend Elan tells him that it may be part of an ancient legend about a liberator, before the sword projects an image of an old man who speaks a muddled prophecy, then the blade disappears. Elan’s grandfather is killed, prompting Orin and Elan to take actions which eventually result in them climbing into a crystal shipment and travelling through the dragon’s mouth, where the scales fall from their eyes about the nature of their enslavement, and Elan is killed by Zygon. Orin manages to dig his way up to the surface, where he meets a smug smuggler named Dagg Dibrimi and his smart-mouthed ship’s AI Arthur, although Dagg doesn’t believe Orin’s claims that there are slaves beneath Trinia’s surface. Dagg completes a hijacking of some of the crystals from one of Zygon’s freighters, and in the ensuing firefight, ends up in possession of an administrative fembot named Silica, whom he reprograms (through a not-very-funny scene in which we learn that the relevant circuits are in her posterior, and it’s very uncomfortable to watch), causing her to immediately become devoted to him. 

Along the way, the travelers are occasionally annoyed by a sprite-like “starfly,” which eventually directs Orin to discover a bomb hidden within the payment that Dagg receives for his services, eliciting Dagg’s loyalty, and the two of them eventually meet Aviana, the daughter of the local interplanetary governor. She recognizes the hilt from her historical studies and accesses a library file that reveals that the hilt belonged to the “Kha-Khan,” a group of legendary heroes from eons past who vanquish threats to humankind, although the last of the Kha-Khan disappeared from history after defeating a robot intelligence known as Nexus who sought to enslave humanity, at which point the hilt disappeared. And wouldn’t you just know it, it turns out that Nexus wasn’t really defeated; he simply rebranded as Zygon and got a new job as the overseer of the robotic underground miners of Triana, although he quickly replaced his initial automaton workers with human slaves so he could then reprogram the mechanical miners into warriors, and uh-oh, here comes the invasion fleet! They’re defeated by the ragtag group, of course, and the starfly reveals itself to be the Force, um, I mean the spirit of the Kha-Khans past, who appear to Orin and the others as Force ghosts, I mean, uh, regular ghosts, I guess. 

Director Steven Hahn worked mostly as a production manager on animated TV shows, with eighties juggernaut DIC as well as other studios, after getting his start with Ralph Bakshi working on his seminal work Wizards. During the off season for the various TV series that he was working on (like the Mister T animated series, Care Bears, the anglicization of French series Clémentine, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Star Wars: Droids), Hahn wanted to keep his Vietnamese animators busy. If you just read the Wikipedia page for this film, you might think, “Oh, how thoughtful,” but the quotation that he provided to the now-defunct sci-fi blog Topless Robot reveals that he, like George Lucas, was a man with dollar signs in his eyes more than anything: “I’d been working in television animation and owned a rather huge facility in Korea. I’ll tell you why I came to direct and produce this film. It’s not something you might expect. During the off-season, I had nothing else to do! When you own and run a big studio, it’s difficult to sit around and pay everyone a salary when there’s no work. So, I had to do something, and I thought, why not make an animated film?” There’s nothing artful in that, so it’s not really all that surprising that there’s nothing artful in the final product, either. 

I’m being a little harsh. There’s not nothing worthwhile here. Although all of the character designs for the men are ugly as sin and Princess Aviana looks like she was traced from a He-Man episode, the ship designs are relatively cool, and the robots that we see are inoffensive even if they’re not particularly imaginative. The film also manages to have a couple of cool sequences when it manages to break free from its lockstep dedication to slightly misremembering Star Wars, with the most striking images from the whole film coming close to the beginning and the end. For the former, it’s the appearance of the decomposing “mandroids” living in the Trinian swamps, cyborg ghouls that are creepy and off-putting, and it’s unfortunate that they warrant mention only in the scene in which they appear. For the latter, there’s a moment during the climactic space battle in which Orin accidentally opens a bay door, unwittingly ejecting all of the robotic troops within the hangar into open space, which was a fun visual. The space battles are the most interesting things that we get to witness, and it’s worth noting that this is probably because the film was created to cash in on 3D movies, so it’s clear that all the budget that didn’t go into making Orin and Dagg not hideous to look at went into making Dagg’s ship look cool. Money not exactly well spent, but I suppose it was put where it needed to be the most. It certainly didn’t go into score composition, as there are moments where Luke Skywalker’s theme and the Imperial March are imitated so clearly that it’s shocking that Hahn didn’t get into legal trouble. Not for the faint of heart or short of attention span, this is to be viewed solely if your only alternative is unconsciousness and you can’t seem to sleep.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond