#(considering this blog is mostly dragon age now..........................these two things are not unrelated)

[danielnelsen]

sorry to everyone when dnp start posting again, i might get very annoying about it

[mst3kproject]

1111: Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2

You know how Joel said the part of the movie that was ‘spilled’, the bit with David Carradine fighting the monster called the Protector, could have saved the whole film?  He lied. It’s just as dumb as the rest of the movie.  In fact, this whole film is so stupid and predictable that I’m going to have a very hard time filling two pages with my thoughts on it.  Apparently even Joel himself wished he’d found a different movie to use.

An age of darkness has fallen, and Caedmon of Nogg is the world’s last hope.  The ghost of his father, I think, or maybe Obi-Wan Kenobi, appears in a bucket of coffee and charges him with finding the Chosen One, whose pure heart will re-unite the Three Powers. The Chosen One is a skinny, hormone-suffused teenage boy named Tyor who works on a stick farm somewhere, and Caedmon trains him in wizardry while seeking out three powerful warriors: the Dark One of Eedok, Prince Ermine of Valdar, and Amathea of Fennir.  One by one, they defeat the evil wizards and gather the magical sword, chalice, and amulet that will bring peace to the world.

So, yeah, it’s less a ‘movie’ than it is a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, thrown together in five minutes after the original GM called from the side of the road with a flat tire.

It’s not at all apparent how this is a sequel to Wizards of the Lost Kingdom.  Not only are the storylines unconnected, the whole aesthetic is totally different. Where the first movie was all bright colours and friendly forest creatures, this one is brown and gray, starving peasants and grubby heroes.  It’s kind of the difference between Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Game of Thrones, although infinitely worse than either.  Still, if there’s any sort of connection to be found, I should be able to figure it out. After all, one of my running gags on this blog is The Movies Are All Coming Together, in which I find connections between unrelated films to assemble them into a single, great, incomprehensible movie.

For starters, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2 is definitely a sequel to The Undead.  After Pendragon skooered Lydia the Witch, her insanity curse on Smolken wore off and he remembered he was actually Caedmon the Wizard.  He was forced to run off to this distant land to escape all the medieval punk kids wanting him to autograph their copies of Digger Smolken’s Rottenest Hits.  As for how this relates to Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, though? I don’t think this is a sequel at all. It’s actually a prequel.  See if you can follow me here:

Remember, Tyor was not supposed to kill Zarz… by running him through at the end, he gave in to evil.  So after a few years of putting up with Caedmon’s incompetence as a pupil, he got sick of him, turned him into a sparkly crab hat, and embraced the dark side. Meanwhile, Amathea was getting tired of Ermine’s philandering, so she and Tyor teamed up to kill him and seize the throne.  The Dark One’s restaurant went under after he was caught selling chicken that turned back into stone when you bit into it.  He tried to get money to pay off his small business loans by ditching Stripper Wife and wooing a wealthy cyclops so he could take her dowry and run.  To avoid his jilted bride’s vengeful brother, he went on the run and returned to using his real name, Kor.  Presto, you’ve got Wizards of the Lost Kingdom!

I have to take a break now.  My brain hurts.

This movie wants so badly to be epic.  The narration sounds like Achronus from Cave Dwellers telling us another story about Ator: and so, Cademon of Nogg set out across the land of Syn in search of the boy Tyor.  And yet, every time something happens that should be epic, it’s just people standing around.  The finale is a showdown between callow young Tyor and the two dark wizards Zarz and Donar, and they all just kind of mill around and bicker.  The fight between the Dark One and the Protector is much closer to being a climactic battle than this is, but it’s just more obvious fake swordplay and disappointment, and David Carradine looks downright embarrassed about it. I’m not convinced that scene was actually intended for this movie, by the way.  David Carradine made another stupid fantasy movie called The Warrior and the Sorceress, which I have not seen, and it might be from that.

One thing I can say for Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2, though, is that the middle of the story has substantially more to do with the beginning and end than in its predecessor.  Caedmon is given his task, which is to find Tyor and then help him get the sword, amulet, and chalice so he can overthrow the evil wizards and unite the three kingdoms.  And the middle of the movie is spent doing exactly that.  This does divide the whole narrative into three separate plots that are only barely related to each other, and because of the limited running time all three of them feel truncated.  Tyor confronts Loki and turns him to stone and we’re like, that’s it?  He hears the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi and pulls a knife on Freyja, who agrees to take him to the sword and… that’s it?  It feels like the movie ought to be twice as long as it is, except that we really wouldn’t want that.

In particular, the audience has no idea what the sword, the amulet, and the chalice really do.  The fact that Tyor is able to overcome the amulet’s supposedly supreme power with some nonsense words really deflates the whole enterprise.  The sword is supposed to be magical but all it gets used for is stabbing people.  The chalice shows the truth except that Zarz can make it lie?  And at the end Obi-Wan takes all three away instead of letting Ermine and Amathea use them to rule the three kingdoms?  The three artefacts could not be more obviously plot contrivances, even if they were just boxes with the word macguffin written on them.

The Protector beast really ought to have been set up earlier, too, if it were going to deserve a setpiece fight.  As it is, MST3K excised it with no plot consequences.  Why didn’t we get to see Zarz feeding people to it?

Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2 is grittier and less silly than its predecessor, which does allow the actors to escape with some tatters of their dignity, but in a way this is itself a weakness.  The first movie kept me interested mostly by throwing random episodes of what the fuck at me.  This one plods through its plotline without any lion-centaur beasts or random tricksy mermaids, although the impossibly bad werewolf-versus-pigwoman fight did make me look twice.  At the same time, paradoxically enough, I think it’s fair to say that Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2 also takes itself less seriously.  The first movie did have a full-on wizards’ battle at the end, even if it sucked.  The second one here has a whole lot of talking and Tyor turning the crystal ball into a roast chicken, which apparently incapacitates Zarz in some way but I’m damned if I know how.  The roast chickens in the movie are clearly the ones you get out of the little warmer at the grocery store deli.

You know what?  This movie should have ended with Tyor turning Zarz into a chicken!  That would have allowed Tyor to win without killing anyone, and given a purpose to the weird ‘chicken’ motif that keeps happening.  Why was I able to come up with that, and the movie wasn’t?  The writers seem to think that chickens are somehow inherently funny, when really everybody knows that’s only true when they’re trying to cross the street.

These are not movies that really lend themselves to analysis but I guess there’s kind of a hint of theme, in that the Dark One would rather live quietly, running his pub with his wife, and only goes out to fight when he’s forced to do so?  Although I’m not sure how we’re meant to interpret that.  Is it about the benefits of a peaceful lifestyle (insofar as stabbing people when they don’t tip qualifies as ‘peaceful’)?  Or are we supposed to think the Dark One should have gotten off his ass and answered the call of duty before it came to that?  Maybe the chicken thing was meant to suggest that even a coward can save the world?  I don’t know. I just work here.

So that’s my marathon of lame-ass wizard movies that made it to MST3K.  Of the three, I think the first Wizards of the Lost Kingdom was easily my favourite.  It was light and silly and it made no sense, but it kept me giggling, sometimes just out of sheer surprise.  And I guess that means Quest of the Delta Knights would come in second, because Wizards of the Lost Kingdom 2 was definitely the worst.  The other two movies at least looked like people were having a good time making them, while this one feels like it was probably as much a chore to be in as it is to watch.  Even Sid Haig as Donar looks like he’d rather be anywhere else, and considering some of the crap Sid Haig seemed to have been enjoying himself in, that’s really saying something.

All the monster fights in the world couldn’t have saved this one.  What it really needed was the Dark One fighting a giant chicken.