The Best Dungeons & Dragons Movie Is Still Bad - Bad D&D Movies Part Four | Cynical Reviews
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- Опубликовано: 25 ноя 2024
- It’s the best one, but that’s not saying much.
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In this fourth part of my series covering movies based on the Dungeons & Dragons IP, we take a look at 2012’s straight-to-DVD Dungeons & Dragons 3: The Book of Vile Darkness. It’s arguably the best of the D&D movies we’ve seen so far, but that’s a low bar to beat.
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Hey cynical I found these forgotten 80s movie called up the Academy directed by Robert Downey Sr. The reason why the movie was forgotten was it was terrible. I think this would be a good movie to review. It has an interesting history behind it
I dreamed of Tony the Tiger. With a spoon in his paw, he walked slowly but vigorously and without hesitation in my direction and I couldn't defend myself. Because I was too busy not to drown in the freezing cold milk ...
a great episode, by the way, both thumbs up!
9/10 on the pronunciation, just the "ch" at the end of Buch was wrong 👌🏻
We need to watch Dragonheart, and finally, we still watching Pet Sematary on Tubi TV for October, do you understand?
21:16 Good video essay, but again with the 'it's/its' thing in the subtitles? How hard is it to get this one tiny thing right? English isn't even my native language; that's why I apply the subs in the first place. Still, I've never ever made that mistake - let alone repeatedly. Seriously: if you want to be snarky and critical about things, first make sure you've got your own shit in order. But again: good review - keep it up. I guess it's just a pet peeve I cant get over.
I read it as bad DAD movies and expected a review of movies about horrible parenting...
Not a bad idea for a video...
@@CynicalReviews Please do a series, there are so many to choose!
Free video idea.
@@CynicalReviews home alone. Any of them.
Fuck salt bae
This movie is like some poor soul playing D&D for the first time who rolls up a lawful good fighter or paladin...and the other players are just total murderhobos.
Yeah, and the DM is a huge asshole too. "Yeah, sure you can roll up a lawful good paladin, but Pelor isn't going to give you any of your class abilities for story reasons"
I had a friend who was suppose to be a paladin instead he took it upon himself to murder everyone we met who was unarmed. I was playing as a mage who I guess was somewhat good. I didn't go running down stairs in a town swinging my sword at least. This was my first experience of playing D&D.
the DM is 1000% Otaku and another player ends up being the BBG....explaining all those obvious folded notes.....
I just got over my nightmares, now i got ptsd all over again, thanks 😂
So my average tables
Fun fact: The german title literally translates to “The book of dark shadows”, which is every bit as redundant as it sounds.
Dark Shadows was a pretty good soap opera though.
Book of Shadows was confusing, and barely connected to Blair Witch 1.
@@OtakuUnitedStudio I was gonna say it sounds like a "Dark Shadows" companion guide, or something.
I'd rather the Germans be redundant than, well you know....it's a change for the better.
Yep can confirm. It sounds super exiting tho!
The ending makes perfect sense... The Slaymate was supposed to be the main encounter before the BBEG, but since Murderhobos gotta Murder, the party had to fight and kill an entire village. Because of this the session was running long, the DM was out of snacks, and everyone just wanted to go home.
"Uh... Pelor uses his power through the amulet to smite all your foes... You're free from your shackles. Same time next week?"
I'm guessing the party is the evil guys and the lawful good guy is the DMPC
@@override367 I think it was an evil one-shot, but one guy didn't get the memo and the DM thought it would be funny to let it happen.
.... I have had only a few good 'evil' party plays where we are literally talking the LESSER of evils. The selfish, the mercenary, the assassin, etc. etc. They literally do it cuz no one better is out there and they wanna happily do the job for a healthy reward.
Grayson‘s father must have been like 12 when Grayson was born, judging by their age difference.
Gross but NOT impossible 😑
This movie seems to be set at a roughly medieval time period (As most dnd adventures) So that is not improbable.
Or he could just have some elf (or one of the other dozens upon dozens of long lived races and outsiders) Gene's in em ?
Well not impossible
You can stretch it to 18 or so, and now it's completely mundane
"Pays with a pouch of money he looted from his dead comrades" might be the most D&D thing in the entire franchise.
It's like calling Double Down the best Neil Breen film. It probably is, but by god does it mean nothing.
Was neil Breen just an actor or was he a regular tommy wiseau
@@aidanaidan8662 Neil Breen is an architect that decided to do films and I don't regret his decision because his movies are what I most love about bad movies
fatal findings is the best imho
@@aidanaidan8662 Basically the same. Just one day decided to make movies & star in them. They are pure gold for cringe just like the room.
Excuse me but no, the best is clearly among his latter 3.
"Das Buch der dunklen Schatten" sounds really stupid in german. Like something a forth grader would call the evil book in their roleplaying game.
It sounds like a translation from another language. Just that little bit off. I found it quite nice for a title that shows no one should take it all too serious. Kind of a "Let's just have fun and not think too hard" vibe. :)
I agree. Especially the "dunkle Schatten" bit. "Dark Shadows" as opposed to "Bright Shadows" I guess?
@@josy6177 there is a movie with Jonny Depp called just "Dark Shadows", so yay?
Well... the Book of Vile Darkness IS a real book, you can buy it in stores. It gives options to play evil characters, some of which are actually in the movie, like the verminlord. In-universe it is also an existing book, and a powerful artifact that corrupts people.
@@SwiftNimblefoot his point was that the german version translates to "The book of dark shadows" not "vile shadows".
The assassin looks like Jeff Bezos with Elon Musks face deep faked on and it drives me crazy.
Impossible. He's too ethical to be either of them.
The main character looks like a methhead Matt Damon and it's really throwing me off.
@@PrototypeSpaceMonkey holy shit you hucking wrecked them
probably the nicest thing you could say about this movie
Tommy Wiseau should made an D&D movie.
I would *pay* to have that made.
I would so watch that.
Yes yes pls yes
That would be shite
@@than0514 i think that is the point they are making.
"most DMs rightly banned from their table"
Oh you sweet summer child.
He should stay away from Unknown Armies, one of the iconic magick schools literally runs on that stuff.
You've got to love that game.
I'll give Courtney Soloman this, he's committed to making a good D&D movie and is slowly improving.
By 2030 he'll propably have done a DnD masterpiece.
@@hebanker3372 Man is probably scribbling scripts away during this quarantine. Like a lich in a half-empty library.
At this rate, he'll make an actually passable movie by the time he's 80.
I still don't know how he got the first one, let alone any others after what he did with/to it.
The reason why the witch sleeps with the main protagonist sounds literally like a porn plot lmao
The whole movie looks like porn so I guess it fits
@@louschwick7301 Dicks and dragons, the movie!
@@godomoths2582 isn't that just Game of Thrones
@@cheesebatto i dunno. I have never seen GoT
@@godomoths2582 me neither, it was a joke bc i know there's at least one character that fucks dragons
This movie looks like one of those bargain bin movies my parents bought in mass while I was growing up. They would usually end up watching it once, think it was "meh" then never touch it again.
When my parents watched one of these movies, they would say it was “cute.” Which I guess actually means it was meh or dull, considering they would always use this regardless of whether it was actually a cute but mediocre movie or a dull slasher movie full of nightmare fuel.
“Whatever was in that ale must’ve been good enough to yeet that head wound into the shadow realm.” I died.
Yep. I had to have my son explain what "yeet" Meant. God I I'm old...
I watched this movie with a friend of mine, and while it's by no means a good movie, we had a ton of fun. It was really quite entertaining! Not as cheesy as the first movie, but it actually had some soul, which i feel made up for it. I also feel like Akordia's group really had that feeling of actual players rolling an evil party, it felt like someone in the production had at least played D&D before, moreso with how all of them had prestige classes, which was certainly a big thing in 3rd edition. The ending really is the most disappointing part of the movie, i felt like i would've been able to call it decent if it hadn't been for that.. such a shame.
Also CJ, you made a mistake which i did as well, until my friend pointed it out. At 18:38 when Grayson blasts Akordia out of the room he isn't using a spell, he is using the Ring of Force he bought at the magic store at the beginning of the movie. As for why he hasn't decided to use it at any other point in the movie.. you guess is a good as mine, but there it is.
"Some stuff that most DMs ban from their tables."
Oh dear, Cynical Reviewer, should I tell you the storylines of my campaigns?
I'm sure I don't want to know...
I want to know, please tell me.😃
Please tell us
D&D never went too much that way but Vampire! Oh boy. The DM and half the party were staring in shock.
@@CynicalReviews Hey man, at least they didn't say it was FATAL instead.
This seems like the most generic fantasy movie one could dream of.
In one of my first campaigns, we started in a tavern. Yknow, the most generic opening of generic DnD openings.
My friend suggested that we raze the town and murder the citizens. Long story short, that caused a cataclysmic event that led to the sole survivor of the massacre ascending to godhood, someone being crushed by a giant space whale, and my half-giant using “Lay on Hands” to “heal” everyone who had the misfortune to meet him.
Now that’s a DnD movie I would pay to see.
That's a DND movie I'd pay to see!
Hello fellow CK2 player. Excited for CK3?
That sounds wonderfully entertaining.
Why is it so hard to make a movie about DnD
So many people are passionate about it, it has a lot of lore and monsters you could use in the story, and you can make as many creative decisions as you want because all campaigns are different
I think it all comes down to the writing, the format, and the lack of budget and focus.
One of the reasons Castlevania on Netflix worked so well is because the writer, Warren Ellis, has never played any of the Castlevania games. Because of this, he could write the story based on impartial research, leaving the fan service to the directors and visual designers, who are fans of the games. Also, it was an episodic series, so it had more time and space to build the world and flesh out the characters rather than trying to cram everything into a 90-minute feature film.
I’m inclined to believe that whoever wrote the D&D movies are big fans of the game, and that’s a problem. There are so many recognisable facets to D&D that a fan of the series would try and cram in as many references as possible until the story loses all semblance of focus, and ends up coming across as a clumsy attempt at making a homebrew campaign. If you ask me, a studio ought to just adapt one of the published modules into an episodic series (Tomb of Annihilation would be fantastic) with a half-decent writer working from an impartial perspective, and either give it the budget to justify the production or give it to a good animation team.
@@OrangeyChocolate
I really do not believe that this is the case here, based on what Cynical Reviews said, because I’ve never watched any of these films, the problem with the first films was lack of budget and "seriousness", like, it seems it was a movie only made because of an "obligation" and nobody cared much about the final result. In the case of these more recent films it seems to me that the film suffers from the same problems as other B films that always appear here and there, low budget, crude effects, cliche history, etc. I don't really think that the writer being a fan of DND is a problem, and I definitely don't agree with what you said that the writer shouldn't be a fan of what he's writing, yes it worked for the Castlevania series but it has dozens of other films and series that called writers who didn't know anything about what they were writing and the quality of the film ended up getting worse because of that, if anything, Castlevania is the exception, not the rule.
I'd say that DnD has a lot of great elements to pull from to make a story, but exploiting any of those elements to their fullest extent would require focus and excluding other things from the story. but doing so is a creative risk, so instead of focusing on specific and original ideas that you come across by digging deep into the books, these film tend to mostly focus on the surface level generic fantasy elements.
Because DnD is silly
@@timokohler6631 D&D is whatever you make it. It's a toolbox. that can be used to create many great and touching stories. but so far, only in TTRP and CRPG form.
"Mazes and Monsters is a far out game- Swords, poison, spells, battles, maiming, killing..."
"Hey, it's all imagination!"
*"Is it?"*
(Looking forward to this.)
"You're alive! Whoever restored you back to life must be a great holy man."
"Shall ye enter ?"
2:31 "Big tracts of land."
Thank you, Monty Python.
it's 2:24
Ten seconds in and I can feel my cancer rapidly metastasizing
There a cream for that, or something?
the best bad D&D movie is that Tom Hanks TV movie from the early 80s where he plays a uni student who becomes addicted to D&D and has a psychotic break
Mazes and Monsters
The kissing booth 2 is coming out tomorrow, you BETTER do a review on it once you watch it!!!!!!!!!
Omg I can't wait, lol.
Ooh
I can't believe they made a sequel to that garbage.
Wobbles and Bean Yeah I just finished watching it and it was....not good. And the worst part is, it finished on a cliffhanger so there’s most likely going to be a pt.3 coming😭 Can’t wait to see if this guy does a review on it, it’s gonna be gold
I'm watching it right now. Lol. He needs one review ittt
I guess you can say the people who made these movies "Schatten" the bed
sorry
You are forgiven.
Wow I'm German that kinda hurt
🤣
@@CynicalReviews Are there Girls There?..... if there's girls there I DO Them!!!
Nobody followed the OG comment with badumtss? Weird.
Ba-dum-tss.
You think Tom Hanks ever feels weird about mazes and monsters in this age of dungeons and dragons?
JJ, what am I doing here...
You still must review the best D&D movies of all (a low bar, but still); The Gamers, and The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising.
True both good, but this is bad D&D movie so they don't qualify.
I wanted to ask the same question. PS: Maybe also add JourneyQuest?
@@Fiddling_while_Rome_burns since both have basically no budget to speak of, I would say it qualifies them absolutely. Besides wouldn't it be fun to see that talent and good ideas > budget?
Onward (2020)
At this point they might as well revel in the campiness.
They should make a dnd comedy film that portrays how the majority of dnd campaigns go: a bunch murder hobos who make terrible decisions (that somehow work in their favour due to RNGesus) and loot everything nailed and not nailed down.
For extra insanity, it has to include a “chaotic neutral” kleptomaniac rogue who’s actions always screws the party over in some way, and a bard that makes it their mission in life to seduce everything (humanoid or not).
So basically... a Volothamp Geddarm movie? I'd watch that.
"Dungeons and Dragons: The Codex of Tired Cliches"
That's basically the first movie.
I have to argue that this sounds EXACTLY like a tabletop D&D game, to the point where I have to believe it's self-aware.
Grayson is played by the new guy to the group. Nobody told him it was an evil group, so he brings his bright-eyed lawful good human fighter guy with max charisma.
Akordia's player has a big crush on The New Guy, and keeps trying to impress him with how badass her character is and contriving ways for them to bang. Grayson's player is deeply uncomfortable.
Seith is a guy who plays rogue because he's still a 13 year old at heart and thinks ninjas are cool; tching-ching, YOU'RE DEAD! I loot the bodies!
Barbarian likes rolling dice, getting big numbers, and translating those big numbers into making big damage and playing with big tits. He's The Stereotype of all Stereotypes.
Vermin Lord has been with the DM for years, whether the DM likes it or not. He's the best role-player of the bunch, but unfortunately also doesn't give a fuck anymore and has played this campaign like five times.
The DM has run all five of those times, and is basically on autopilot. he doesn't feel comtempt, but he also does not feel joy. He'sa TSA emplpyee, just moving things along except for randomly selected times to make a roll.
I've always looked forward to your dungeons and dragons videos. They are quite entertaining
The problem with D&D movies is that D&D isn't a story, it's a set of rules and game mechanics to allow for a group of people to make their own characters and have them do things in a world of the GM's creation. D&D doesn't really have any inbuilt setting or story. Sure, there are official settings for which additional material is printed, but there's no actual core setting like say Vampire the Masquerade which is 80s/90s real world but with secret vampires, with a metaplot that can be translated to a film. So most of what D&D is is generic fantasy, that's what most people's games are and the fun comes from the fact that it's *you* controlling your character with your friends, you're the ones interacting with this Lord of the Rings ripoff world.
But at its core D&D is mechanics, and you can't make a movie about mechanics, so what you're left with is shallow generic fantasy, and there's better generic fantasy films out there. About the only way I can see to make a good D&D movie would be to make a movie that's based in one of the actual settings, with the characters and events prominent to that setting, while cutting out the player characters element entirely.
There’s plenty of actual stories that exist within d&d though. Drizzt novels are all in the forgotten realms, as well as many comics. There’s even a few based around events of campaign modules, made with specific characters and everything. They could base a movie off of something like that, though I would agree that making a movie would be exceptionally difficult regardless. A show would be a much better fit, but still difficult.
@@Aplesedjr Yes but none of those are in the actual core rulebooks themselves. That's what I meant about a good film needing to not be about D&D but rather the stories/settings that have been played with D&D in the past. But again at that point, how is it a D&D film and not just a fantasy film? There's dark elfs in plenty of fantasy, it's not a D&D exclusive.
That's exactly what I'm thinking. Add to the fact that it would also have the common pitfall of most videogame movies: You're degrading the levels of experience. The whole point is that *you* get to be the main character and do stuff and make decisions. If you wanna watch someone play D&D, there's plenty of livestreams out there that would probably be better than these movies because they're not constrained by visual budgets.
Didn't they technically try that with "Dragons of Autumn Twilight"?
@@Shenaldrac I mean, they tried with you're suggesting with the dragon Lance movie.
Eeeyyy CJ cant wait to watch this when i get home, till then have this comment and like for the algorythm. Hope youre doing well broseph
Much appreciated!
@@CynicalReviews always brother i look forward to your vids every time
@@CynicalReviews Hey, I think your computer or RUclips did something weird with your editing once it was uploaded. Your image flickers on screen for just a half second several times during the review at moments I have a feeling you didn't mean for it to, lol!
@@Richard_Nickerson I wasn't, I don't like to troll people. But if nobody else had that same issue, maybe it was something with my own playback.
@@Richard_Nickerson Yeah, I knew he had a running gag with that, but these clips looked less smooth, more like a weird error, but hey, maybe I was looking at it wrong :)
Your pronuciaton of „Das Buch der dunklen Schatten“ was pretty decent. You just missed the ugly „ch“ sound at the end of „Buch“. It should sound like you‘re trying to clear your throat.
You can tell by my ridiculously German name that I‘m an authority on the subject.
... deswegen hast du auch die Beschreibung des "ch"-Lautes komplett verkackt xD
Aber mir ist auch kein gutes englisches Äquivalent eingefallen. Ich glaube, die haben den Laut gar nicht.
I second this notion, but I'd describe the german "ch" maybe more like a cat hissing at you? (It's REALLY hard to come up with something fitting... especially late at night and rather drunk....)
@@der_benson4478 but that's just one of the two possible versions of the sound, they vary relates to the other sounds around it. Sounds complicated but really just boils down to "human tongues are lazy and use the sound that is closest to the one before it so they don't have to move so much". This version of the sound is more throaty. Have a nice time being drunk :)
deviltrigger
Es war ein Witz. Keine Ahnung wie man Phonetik anständig beschreibt und hab‘s auch nicht ernsthaft versucht.
Auch wenn‘s ein Klischee ist, Deutsch ist akustisch gesehen keine super schöne Sprache.
@@fritzvoncranach6268 jo, kein Ding. War auch nicht so ernst gemeint. Ab und zu kommt bisschen Schleim mit, haste eigentlich Recht. Anscheinend klingen wir ja schon recht aggressiv :^))
Okay, was that one woman going for the world record of "most piercings in their face"? That really made me cringe.
She wouldn't even be close. The World Record Holder is basically all piercing.
That stupid drawn on face tattoo is worse. It looks like someone colored on her face while she was passed out lol
Well the race she's supposed to be are basically sado-masochistic shadow-elves who worship the goddess of death and wear armor with the spikes on the inside, so she's not nearly as hot topicy as she could be
For what it's worth 8 months after this episode aired, but: credit where it's due, Shadar-Kai actually have a lot of piercings, so they did a believable job in this field. However, their skin is usually quite pale/bluish and the tattoos she sports give a whole new definition to fake.
The kissing booth 2 is coming so pls remind us of how bad the series is
Sadly it seems to do very well on netflix
Ye 😑
@@felixm6325 well succes and quality are not always connected.
I admit I’m a little curious as to why on Earth the kissing booth (the thing not the book) was used again in the school year
Cynical reviews: These were all the movies with DnD licence however... there were other movies that focused on DnD, but in a different way.
Me: (thinking) Yeah, like Mazes and Monsters...
(picture of young Tom Hanks appears on the computer screen)
Cynical reviews: Next time, we're gonna take a look at... (holds up a copy of Mazes and Monsters) the moral panic movies.
Me: (fist pump) YEAH
Yep. I did a happy dance when I saw that. For those of you who haven't seen it, buckle up. You will need a reverse gravity spell to suspend your disbelief.
You could run a game where one character is good mixed in with a band of established evil characters, like you said it could be fine for a solo video game or movie, butt you never want to single out a player as the protagonist separate from the group or it could make the others feel like set dressing. If you plan it out right and talk it out with the evil guys then I imagine it could work, but it might be more trouble than it's worth and the session is already getting pretty grim dark. If you really want to try it I guess make it 2 good characters (for this example lets just call them Frodo and sam ) in a group of 3-4 evil, more attention to go around and maybe give the evil characters more breathing room to accomplish their own goals with the good guys alive, even better just have an even split and each side reluctantly has to work with members from another group, not too far off from a paladin and rogue needing to workout their differences.
I feel like it could make for an entertaining game if the sole good guy is meant to be the only sane man in a group of murderhobos and it was played up for laughs, but that would require that no one is really taking the game seriously.
You should consider covering the Dragonheart movies at some point. They're basically more DnD movies in all but name.
Also the first one has Dennis Quaid as bootleg Geralt.
Yes please. I love Dragon Heart.
@@jblask2 R.I.P Sean Connery
This series reminds me of my first campaign.
My first ever character was a goliath barbarian who was the biggest (literal and metaphorical) sweetheart. He was engaged to a merfolk woman, but was thrown into the campaign when the ring he was to propose with was stolen from him.
Within the first 15 minutes of the campaign, he swore to return a displacer beast cub to it's mother and earned some sick butterfly wings.
I absolutely loved playing as him since every other character in the campaign was completely chaotic so he was like the babysitter of them, only stepping in on combat when they would absolutely need him (he was stupid powerful so it wouldn't be very fun if he got involved all the time).
My favorite part was when the merchant started reciting magic item descriptions straight from the 4E Player's Handbook.
I got 'you have beautiful eyes' vibes from Over The Garden Wall when you did the jaws bit.
So that's my takeaway.
You know.. it really shouldn't be hard to write a Dungeons & Dragons movie. It really shouldn't. I think the huge problem with these movies is ALWAYS budget. No money to pay writers. Impossible deadlines. "Get this done fast and cheap." attitudes so "No time for more takes, or for sprucing up that CGI.". No money to bring in actual, talented actors, and the ones who are brought in have to work with a script that was thrown together in a week, with probably only one draft of it, written by people who have never actually played D&D. As a matter of fact, most of the people working on the movie probably have no D&D experience. Most of them might have just... heard of that game that nerds play. It's just.. people who have no interest making these films, being forced to write fast, doing everything as cheap as possible, who don't know, or understand the source material, making these movies. I don't feel ANY investment or interest in D&D for ANY of these movies. They have no heart.
Then you must have missed the Last movie ,as well as cynical review on it, sin ce both make it clear that someone on the writting team clearly had a passion for the game. The real issue is that you either have people don't care about the property and end up hampering their own story by using it, or they care to much and think accuracy equals quality.
THAT ARMORS... THEY RE... YUST SO *BAD*
For f’s sake, nerds, wyverns are a form of dragon
I enjoy D&D, but you don’t get to “Well, actually...” folks’ culture and mythology
Wait. *pauses video and reads back cover, (I'm German)*
"The epic saga goes into the next round: Once again, good goes into battle against evil in the third film adaptation of the legendary game DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. Fans of lavish fantasy will be whisked away to an effect-louded world full of mysterious beings and creatures."
yeah, somebody wrote this who had no idea what the movie or the original game was about. also: nobody says "aufwändiger Fantasy" (lavish/extensive/elaborate Fantasy) as a genre.
Mazes and Monsters is next? A movie with a message? hell yes. A movie that's message is fear mongering? Hell Yes. A movie that's an "adaption" of a game? HELL YES.
The guy in the wig who dies immediately was a contest winner for a quick cameo in the movie.
Back when I just got into bad movies a friend and I binged the 3 DnD movies in a single sitting
After the first 2 set my expectations so low I described 3 as a decent generic dark fantasy
Some of these look like they took sets from Horrible Histories.....
say what you will about the sets, but horrible histories is amazing
@@omnical6135 The best way to learn history.
Hm... Okay, so... Actually it's not a Wyvern, it's more of a Drake. Wyverns don't have a breath weapon, drakes do, and both are unintelligent dragon-like creatures with 2 wings and 2 legs.
Me: "Wants to write the Campaign down to write a book someday."
Party: "Im gonna cast Detect Magic as a ritual!"
"We are in the middle of a negotiation with an Orc Warlord!"
"So?"
*jumps on table and starts chanting while the guards carry him outside*
Me: "Yeah..."
The only things I remember about this movie was indeed the main character always looking close to tears, the obligatory sex scene, and the fact that the mindflayer was a human and not an actual illithid. Talk about disappointing.
If I was to make a dnd movie, there would be something really crazy weird. Like accidentally creating a black hole, yes that is something that happened in a campaign I was in.
I hope you'll do the D&D cartoon from the 80's.
When someone asks me if there are any DnD movies I tell them only about this one and warn them it is bad. Still I don't even acknowledge the existence of the other movies so definitely this one's the best :D
It's worth mentioning, that all of the class names like Vermin Lord and all Magic Items keep their English names in the German version, making the shop scene even weirder for the German audience.
The movie of vile darkness.
It's not evil or anything, just boring.
DnD is one of those properties that by itself can't make a good movie. It can make an amusing movie and it can make a cheesy nerd movie, and boy howdy can it make a bad movie, but to make a good movie you need more than the tappings of the game, you need a plot. This is why The Gamers and JourneyQuest and the other fan-made properties do a better job. Maybe if they'd make one based on some of the associated novels or a classic adventure like Ravenloft, but it'd need a budget that no studio seems willing to take the chance on. Oh well.
They don't have to express the "D&Dness" in a film. Sure they could use something classically Dungeons and Dragons like Mindflayers or Beholders as the antagonist, but it should be like any other fantasy film.
Your german in the beginning was actually pretty good. Well done. 👍
5:03 An editing mistake while trolling the movie's effects. Hilarious...
03:58
These quick flashes look intentional, not an editing mistake and inserted when he says the word "but".
It happens at least three times.It's definitely intentional.
Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley knew that all D&D movies are bad be like: Fine, we'll do it myself.
Now we got Honor Among Thieves and it's a freaking bless to the source material.
On one hand, this movie sucks. On the other, we get a Bag of Holding AND some Goliath and Shadar Kai rep. And a slay mate? That’s pretty cool.
"By Shaddar Kai law, my body is yours." "Fuck yes! I've been waiting for someone to play Mario Kart with!"
The notification was 2 hours later godammit
Wot?
Rohan Garg no it isn’t. the people on patreon get videos early.
There was an animated chose your own adventure type movie as well called Scourge of Worlds. It was notable that it used the archetype characters for the various classes from 3/ 3.5 as the main cast of characters.
I am also just a good slap away from crying.
You actually pronounced the title impressively good for a non-german speaker, respect!
I don't even think if Kubrick was directing a DnD movie it could've been good.
The issue is DnD as a system "borrowed" (to put it mildly) a LOT and all you get is more or less folklore and mythological creatures that you dont need to license DnD to use on your high fantasy movie, its not as if they arent aware of that considering how many new creatures they made (like Beholders) but do you really need to put DnD on the movie title to use then? assuming you want to pay Hasbro for using then.
And that is the problem, the real "meat" for a storytelling prespective of DnD is the settings but those are ... well DragonLance is complicated license-wise, Greyhawk suffered from neglect from being Gary Gygax work and from how he left TSR leaving Forgotten Realms that its not *that* relevant in culture and even if you could do some novel adaptation into screen they would likely not fare well. Sure there are other settings but TSR was crapping out settings and none are that well developed or well know, I dont think anyone would want to watch a Spelljammer movie simply because they dont even know what it is.
In the end, you could make a good DnD movie or at least a decent one but you could also make a generic high fantasy movie without paying Hasbro any money.
It's the same people making these movies so the difficulty of making a DnD movie is hard to judge. The game has campaigns that could be given a damn good treatment IF the people in charge give a shit, Because so far they have not
Imagine for a second: "The Myriad Adventures of Volothamp Geddarm"... it would be like a Discworld/Hitchiker's Guide sort of story about Volo encountering strange and wonderous places, people and creatures... and running away from them. Directed by Taika Waititi.
Good D&D movies aren't called D&D movies, because they'd just be good fantasy movies at that point and you can probably pull more viewers in by avoiding calling it a D&D movie.
The Mythica movies are pretty tight.
I remember Mazes and Monsters. Back when i worked for blockbuster a regular customer asked me to watch it to know if it was something he'd want to watch, and i did. It was the first time i ever saw fear mongering made manifest into film. And it was so stupid.
no one:
Tom Hanks: "I HAVE SPELLS"
Technically, it's a drake, as wyverns don't have breath weapons.
The cringy/funny dialog in this movie is like the shite I used to write in uni and I AM LIVING FOR IT.
Wish that someone made decent budget version of Gamers these days to show both the franchise AND the actual hobby. Fantasy movies are awesome but the essence of D&D is what happens at the table and not the minds eye.
I recommend "Gamers" which has at least two sequels...of which my favorite is the second.
"You've saved my life, by Shadar-Kai law you are entitled to my body."
Me, having played a shadar-kai: I don't remember reading that. Whoopsie better go thank my kobold cleric
This poor poor fog machine really got abused during the filming
I used Tab for a Cause until just recently. It worked fine at first, but after a few months I started getting a lot of scammy new tabs, fake virus alerts, and messages pretending to be legit Internet providers telling me I won something, with a phone number to call, that sort of obvious scam thing. I did not understand how I could be getting those, since I use all sorts ad blockers and script blockers (not on youtube, of course). I decided to start disabling plugins and turns out, yeah, Tab for a Cause was giving me those.
not all dragon's are wyverns and but all wyverns are dragons!!!
Not in the D&D universe. in D&D Wyverns are beasts/Animal
I still stand by that the Jeremy Irons D&D movie was the best. I've played D&D for 27 years, and was one of the 3 DMs in our extended D&D group. We've had a wide varieties of players, join our main crew in adventures of varying degrees of depth. One thing we consistently did no matter the group or game, we had fun. Our games were very detailed and atmospheric, but everything was littered with anachronistic humour and situations to make the whole process of playing "Arguing and Math" [That was our core group's name for tabletop RPGs] incredibly fun. Essentially *that* was what a movie version of our games would probably end up being like.
Knights of Badassdom is another *AWESOME* '"D&D culture" inspired movie to check out. played fully for laughs.
4:53 what's the phantom of the opera doing here?
My favorite part is where the Vermin Lord paraphrases Benjamin Franklin. Maybe in the next D&D movie a half-elf Necromancer will quote Thomas Jefferson.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
You all heard the man: there is a lot of butts in this video!
The Witch smacks the main character in the face with Mage Hand. Thats actually pretty acurite to most DnD campaigns.
1. Pretty damn good German pronunciation! Why did you have to order the Blueray from Germany btw?
2. Moral Panic movies \o/ Looking forward to that one!
I'll have the phrase " You may ravish however you see fit" forever stuck in my mind from now on.
It’s a Black, Blue Kratos.
This movie needed more betrayals. Pelor betrays all the knights, goliath betrays whiny knight, shadar-kai betrays her superiors to fall in love with whiny knight, edgelord betrays whiny knight, whiny knight momentarily betrays shadar-kai..... I, I dunno. It just seems like maybe if they threw more betrayals in there, the story would have been somehow better. Right?
Those tattoos are so painful to look at. On a "got something on your cheek there mate" level bad.
Honestly for me the one time I watched this movie I was impressed with it, in a low expectations way. But the mage in the evil party being a shadar-kai took me completely by surprise, and not in a good sense. She mentioned it right before bedding the paladin and I had to pause the film and look at my girlfriend at the time with some confusion. They picked an obviously evil creature sure, and in 5e later on these creatures became a player race, but when this movie was made a shadar-kai was a type of fey. They simply picked an evil beautiful creature . . . with white hair and white-grey skin, to be played by an actress in sharpie makeup. Not only that, but a creature of a proud and noble race was submitting to this guy for the mere token effort of saving her life, a thing which as a shadar-kai she should care nothing about (as she'll just reform on the Plane of Shadows)
The lore at the time for shadar-kai stressed their senses being dull to the point of non-existence, besides functionality (so sight and hearing were fine but they didn't GET anything out of it, enjoyment-wise) so I started the movie up again thinking "hey maybe this'll be funny". The idea of a standard human paladin virgin-boy trying to satisfy a shadar-kai in bed, a creature who barely felt things like pain . . . I imagined a cut to paladin lying there broken and bloodied on a broken bed with torn sheets and a pissed off mage . . . instead nothing, normal post-coital stuff. A chance to have a little levity or show a funny side of this guys complete ignorance of the creatures he's thrown in with, wasted.
But I'm probably a bit too wrapped up in the lore
At the end, I thought you were talking about "pound-hub" movies. But you were right, that moralistic movie is still in the list. Good job as always man :D
HELL YES BOOK OF VILE DARKNESS GETTING THE REPRESENTATION IT DESERVES. I adore it it's so silly. I wish there was an English release so I could own the DVD.
So are you also mad about Community's "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" episode getting taken down from streaming services because of a joke that is taken out of context?
My son and I are sooooo stoked for the next "d&d" movie review! We are huge fans of M&M for all the wrong reasons! Thank you Amazon Prime!
Okay. I take it back. This movie plot sounds more like D&D-themed porn fanfiction from not very experienced writer.
The witch was hot.
Honestly I hope that the new D&D movie is halfway decent. It took a long time for a good D&D video game to come out, but Dark Alliance is still a gem.
15:33 "Sindel WINS"!!!!
"FATALITY"!
12:18 as the proud owner of the 4'th edition Book of Vile Darkness, i must say:
Uhm ackhually, its a dragonspawn.
I really don't see Nickolas Hoult in that actor but that's okay, they're both mad hot. ❤️
Why can't D&D get a proper film with a Lord of the Rings level budget, good actors, and someone who actually gives a shit about the license enough to either write an original story or adapt a D&D module into a film?! Seriously, with those 3 elements in place the film could actually be good.