Released: September 2017
Director: Simon Wells
Not Rated
Run Time: 84 Minutes
Genre: Fantasy/Adventure
Cast:
Ross O’Hennessy: Richard
Ben Loyd-Holmes: George
Silvio Simac: Thomas
Zara Phythian: Dimia
Andrea Visiliou: Phrowenia
Over the past year, I’ve been seeing more indie films than I had in the past several years. I’ve come across some pretty good indie films, including Fist 2 Fist, Weapon Of Choice, Accident Man, and A Reckoning among others. As a result, I’ve developed a real soft spot for the indie film. There’s a certain charm to the low-budget film fair. While most people would scoff at the idea of an indie film because of the way it looks, I have a different perspective. There is something usually interesting and unique about the way an indie film is made. I mean, yeah, some of the visual effects might not necessarily be great, but as long as the rest of the film holds up, that’s something that can be forgiven. If I can tell that there is effort being made in a film, indie or otherwise, I tend to give it a chance. I might not completely like it, but I would definitely give it marks for trying. Sadly, even in the indie film scene, you’re going to have a lot of films that are genuinely awful. Movies like Dark Feed and a large chunk of Roger Corman’s movies would fall under the “generally awful” category. So….where does Knights of the Damned fall?
The film opens as a dragon lays siege to a kingdom in a faraway land. A small group of knights, led by George, are on a quest to rid the kingdom of this beast. Meanwhile, people are turning into these….zombies as a result of “dark magic.” You’re going to be hearing that a lot. Most encounters that these knights have are mostly blamed on some form of dark magic. The idea of a zombie/action/fantasy film like this isn’t necessarily a bad idea. However, the execution of the story here is unbelievably banal. The film’s plot gets unnecessarily complicated with dragons and zombies and a mustache-twirling evil prince scheming to rule the land. Honestly, the story might have been salvaged if it was in the hands of better film-makers. Ultimately, the story is nothing we haven’t seen before and done better.
The acting in the film is….okay. The guys that play the knights actually look like they belong in a film like this, and they tend to carry themselves pretty well. The female warriors that show up later also do…okay. A number of these folks including Silvio Simac and Zara Phythian have backgrounds in martial arts and are generally pretty physical. That helps them in the long run as they do most of their own fighting. Some of the other acting is flat-out awful. The guy who plays Prince Favian goes WAY too overboard with his performance to be taken seriously. In fact, it’s almost hilarious. I’m not necessarily blaming the actors for how their performances turned out. Not entirely. The fault lies with the writers and the director. The dialogue being spoken is some of the worst that I have ever heard. Honestly, I thought that Star Wars: Attack of the Clones had some seriously clunky and poorly delivered lines. Knights of the Damned seems to be trying to take that “honor” away from Clones….and succeeding. Now, is it really fair to compare a low-budget film with that of a 200 million dollar film? Probably not, but my point still stands.
While I understand that this is a low-budget film and the nature of that kind of film has restrictions on what they can do in terms of visuals, the visual effects and CGI in this movie are really, REALLY bad. The dragon looks worse than the CGI dragon in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. According to IMDB, the movie was made for approximately 6.3 million pounds which equates to about 9 million US dollars, give or take. A lot more effort could have been made to make the dragon look somewhat realistic. Instead, the beast looks like something out of an early PlayStation One video game, and that’s not a good thing. The make-up effects, on the other hand, are not that bad. It’s not Walking Dead-quality, but they are passable. The action is also somewhat…..okay. Unfortunately, it’s let-down by an over-use of slow-motion. While it isn’t as bad as it is in some other films, there really is no reason to be using that much slow-motion in action sequences. As I said in my review of Kickboxer: Retaliation, slow-motion is okay in certain situations, other-wise it’s used to hide bad choreography. The guys and gals that do most of the fighting handle themselves pretty well, although I would tip my hat to the ladies as they are given the better fight sequences. Some of the cinematography and camera-work is actually pretty decent, as there are some really beautiful shots of the surrounding landscapes.
The pacing of the film also drags it down. For a film that runs 84 minutes, it feels like two hours. As a film that is this short, there’s a lot of unnecessary exposition and it feels like it’s used to pad out the run time. Look, I’m not necessarily proud for coming down hard on a movie like this. Nobody intends to make a bad movie, it just sometimes turns out that way. For a movie like Knights of the Damned, it’s a concept that could have worked had it been in the hands of more experienced and competent writers and directors. I have nothing against these folks, personally, and as I said, I don’t like railing against movies like this, especially if they are of a low-budget indie nature. But I have to call it as I see it, and Knights of the Damned is not a good movie, not by any stretch of the imagination. The three male leads and the gals who play the female warriors do okay, but everyone else left a lot to be desired. I would personally keep an eye on folks like Silvio Simac, though. He was not bad here, and he’s definitely got the physicality and personality to do a decent action movie. At the end of the day though, I can’t recommend this movie. While it does have some good elements, the bad outweigh the good.
My Final Recommendation: Honestly? Skip it. 4/10