Thanks for the memories!

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

You have to give credit to "Dragonslayer" for what it does right; the special effects are quite good, the principal characters are compelling and the story is never predictable. However, in its efforts to turn a medieval wizard & dragon story on its head the movies proves itself to be needlessly dark and depressing. The Kingdom of Urland lives in a constant state of terror because of a 400-year-old dragon named Vermithrax Pejorative and must sacrifice young virgins to it in order to save themselves from a fiery death. Not terribly happy with this deal, the King sends for the last sorcerer to come to the kingdom's aid. What he gets instead is the sorcerer's apprentice. The story follows Galen (Peter MacNicol) who has only limited magical skills, little confidence in himself and all-out hostility from King Even with the help of a young woman (Caitlin Clarke), there isn't much hope for the apprentice, particularly with magic clearly dying out in the world.I'm going to start with the positive aspects of the movie. We have not one, but two characters you can really get attached to and genuinely like. You admire Galen for stepping up to the plate and volunteering to confront the dragon, an opponent who is significantly more powerful than he is but must be stopped. This guy knows he's outmatched so he is forced to use his intelligence to confront the beast, sneaking about its lair, using a mix of conventional and magically-enhanced weapons, and sorcery to take on the dragon. Being young and inexperienced, things seldom go right but he never gives up. Another reason that you like him is because he has to face much more than just the dragon, he has many human opponents as well. The king and his guards, they're total jerks. There are some pretty dark revelations about them that makes you want our young hero to win even more.The other character I really like is the young woman who helps Galen. Her character is essential to the plot because she helps our hero at multiple instances and in fact gets the story moving from the get-go. You would expect her character to be a typical damsel in distress considering the wizard combating the dragon that wants virgins thing, but she's actually a tough character that holds her own and in some ways is much more confident and stronger than our actual hero.I also have to give credit for the film's special effects, particularly whenever you get to see full shots of the dragon Vermithrax. The creature is created with puppetry when it comes to the close-ups (to mixed results) and with stop-motion in the full-length shots. The way the creature is revealed is expertly done, with several shots at the beginning teasing you enough that you want to see more, without showing too much and giving away the best part of the movie (the monster itself) too early. When you do see the dragon, the stop-motion effects used to bring it to life are excellent, some of the best I've seen. It ranks as high as the works of masters Willis O' Brien and Ray Harryhausen. The film also has numerous complex ideas and themes throughout and like I said before, it subverts many stereotypes of the genre so you can't see where the movie is going at any point.That brings me to what works less well with the movie. It's simply so dark. There are so many deaths during the movie that it brings you down. It's not like the deaths I'm complaining about are heroic deaths either, they just feel kind of petty. Sympathetic characters are brutally murdered for no real reason. It's not even to make the villains seem really evil or to add a tragic back story kind of thing, they're just written in to be slaughtered. If the intention was to make the odds against our hero feel overwhelming there was no need to do so. Another major negative point towards the movie is a revelation about Galen's master at the very end. If it had been tweaked just a little bit, where it was discovered by our hero and then implemented by him, it could have been a really clever plot development. To me it felt like a needlessly cryptic revelation that was as bad as those rage-inducing scenes in romantic comedies where the plot could have been solved within 5 minutes if people would actually talk like human beings. It makes you think that a) that wizard was just too lazy to do the whole thing himself b) he really put all his eggs in one basket in hoping nothing would go wrong in this convoluted plan of his and c) that if anyone is to blame because of the fiasco in the kingdom, it's the wizard! The film then ends on a tone that sort of just tells you that your dreams of an awesome, uplifting world where magic, sorcery, beautiful princesses to be rescued and fantastical monsters to be slain by valiant heroes... those are stupid thing to believe in. Get back to reality, because the movie is over buddy!I'm torn with this picture because this is the second time I've seen it and I really didn't like it at first. I thought it was depressing but well made and the ending was bad. I still think that's the case, but there are also many good points and it does make it worth a watch. So here's what I recommend. Watch it once, and think what you want of it, but then watch it a second time, like several months later when you remember the tone of it, but not too many of the details. With lowered expectations and forward knowledge of what happens overall, you will be able to focus your attention on the positive aspects and actually enjoy the film. (On DVD, June 20, 2014)

This is one of the best sword and sorcery films out there. It is very good - especially the visual effects (amazing for the time era).The story is sorta reminiscent of "King Kong" or "Clash of the Titans" (among other films) in the way there is a beast of sorts after a helpless woman and a young dashing hero out to rescue her. Dragonslayer has a stereo-typical scenario but so wonderfully done.Dragonslayer is not a movie of epic portions but is a good movie to watch on a day when you have time to spare. If you are into movies about dragons, wizards and heroes then give Dragonslayer a try. It's one of the better quality movies of this type.9/10

Recently I rented this movie through Netflix because I had not seen it for many years and wanted to see if it lived up to my nostalgia. And I have to say that Dragonslayer (1981) is still a special movie to me.There is not much plot in the movie that is not described in the title. Peter MacNicol plays a sorcerer's apprentice who, when his master is killed before fulfilling a promise to slay a dragon, must attempt to slay the dragon himself.Because it was released at the start of a run of sword-and-sorcery movies produced in the 1980s, Dragonslayer is different from almost every other movie in the genre that followed it. In fact, it is almost unique in movie history.I actually believe that Dragonslayer has more in common with Jaws (1975) than it does with other 1980s fantasy-adventure movies.Director Matthew Robbins, no doubt influenced by Steven Spielberg's directorial techniques in Jaws, introduces the dragon slowly, in fleeting glimpses, before finally revealing it in its entirety after more than an hour of screen time.There is, for example, a great shot from behind a character's head as he slowly rises to his feet with the dragon in front of him, with the dragon's head only just visible around his own.The director also makes clever use of camera angles to suggest that people are constantly in fear of death from above, crouching and even crawling along the ground in apprehension of awakening a sleeping dragon.Like almost all the sword-and-sorcery movies of the 1980s, Dragonslayer is also a triumph of production design. Production Designer Elliot Scott creates a world in which a fire-breathing dragon does not seems out of place. The sorcerer's castle is appropriately dark and dreary, the people live in a village that appears to be little more than sticks and rocks put together, and the dragon's lair, full of fire and steam, is an unforgettable sight.The screenplay has perhaps just the right amount of plot in it, yet I cannot say that it impressed me as much as the direction and production design, because it seems more like a series of clever ideas than a coherent screenplay.I do not want to spoil the movie for those who have not seen it, but I thought it was a clever touch for the hero to use a shield made of the dragon's own scales for protection against its fiery breath. Also, when the hero ventures into the dragon's lair, the dragon is hiding in the last place that you would expect a fire-breathing dragon to hide.Like many other movies of the genre, Dragonslayer does suffer from a bit of an identity crisis. Is this a movie for adults or for children? Obviously few people over the age of twelve care about the slaying of a dragon, yet the unrelenting grim and serious tone of the work suggests an ambition to be more than just a "kids' movie." This tone is maintained so completely that the jokey, lighthearted ending seems out of place, compared to everything that has preceded it.The screenplay also suffers from some awkward moments of transition, as when the hero, after battling the dragon, appears outside the dragon's lair, with no explanation as to how he escaped or survived. The myth of Saint George and the Dragon, which provided most of the source material for the screenplay, suffers from the same abrupt transitions, if I remember correctly, yet the screenplay should have improved upon the flaws in the source material.I also cannot praise the movie as an actors' showcase, especially since Sir Ralph Richardson, obviously the best actor in the movie and giving one of his last performances, is on screen the least amount of time. The other performances are merely serviceable, nothing more.I would give this movie 7 out of 10, because if you are a fan of fantasy movies then the movie is definitely worth seeing at least once. If you are not a fan of fantasy movies, then you might give the movie only 5 out of 10, as its good points would not be as meaningful to you.I have to admit that I have no idea how people today, accustomed to Lord of the Rings and other lavishly produced computer-generated spectacles, would view this movie. I would like to think that the movie has held up better than many other movies that rely upon special effects, thanks to its production design, and Alex North's atmospheric musical score, yet maybe this is not enough for viewers today.Perhaps the greatest praise that I can give this movie is that, at least for me, it is memorable and unique.This movie should always have a place in movie history, if only for its special effects. It was released the same year (1981) as Ray Harryhausen's last special effects movie, the original Clash of the Titans, and introduced a new stop-motion technique, "go-motion," which would be the special effects-industry standard for the next twelve years, until Jurassic Park was released in 1993 and made all stop-motion effects seem obsolete.It would be easy to dismiss Dragonslayer as merely a footnote in the history of fantasy and special-effects movies, but I would prefer to think that, when viewed today, it still succeeds in transporting the audience to another time and place and makes them believe the impossible.

A strange fact that you see when looking at movies through the years is that movies featuring dragons for some reason never really perform all that well. Sure you have your semi hits like "Dragon Heart", but nothing that really sets the box office ablaze as it were. Take this one for instance, you can tell they put some good money into the film because at times the film looks terrific, however the movie did not really perform all that well at the box office. Granted it was rather dark at times and while there is a great fight between the hero and the dragon at a point in the film when he was trying to save that one girl who rigged the lottery so she would get chosen the ending fight was nonexistent. The story has a town and castle plagued by a dragon, people go to search for I think a wizard to help them get rid of said dragon. Well for some reason or other a man stabs said wizard and the wizard dies and they are now just left with the apprentice. The town holds a lottery and whose ever name is drawn is sacrificed to the dragon. Only females are drawn though. Like I said the dragon looks rather good and the one scene of the apprentice going to the lair is good too, but to often the movie bogs down and feels sluggish. Still, overall it was a somewhat good film that features a dragon so it was doomed to fail like so many other dragon movies.