Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And this is Joe McCormick. And today on Weird House Cinema, we are going to be talking about the nineteen eighty one fantasy adventure Dragon Slayer. This was a first for me. I'd heard about this movie for years. In fact, a good friend of mine has long been recommending it. Was the first time I ever got to see it, and I was mighty impressed. What an event this was.
Oh absolutely, This is one too that I've heard about for ages, especially in reference to the titular dragon. So I knew it was going to have great dragon effects. And so It's been on the to watch list for a very long time, probably since I was a kid, and I would see promos for it on cable for cable viewings of it that I never never got around to watching it, and ultimately I think I'm glad that
I waited. Now. The reason that we ended up selecting Dragon Slayer is because, as many of you might have noticed, on Monday, there a lot of people got to witness a total solar eclipse, and that got us thinking, well, we should watch an eclipse movie, And when you start looking around for films that feature a total solar eclipse in a meaningful way, there's really not a lot to choose from, And for my money, it basically comes down
to two choices. You can do nineteen eighty one's Dragon Slayer or you can do nineteen eighty five's Lady Hawk.
Now, Rob, as much as I can see why you would be drawn to Dragon Slayer, I am quite perplexed that you picked the non rutger Hower option of the two.
Well, yeah, I think Lady Hawk is a fine film too, And they're actually actually very interesting films to compare in a couple of different ways, because, on one hand, both films cast organized religion in a suspicious or antagonistic light. Both films immersis in a setting that is supposed to feel realistically medieval or dark ages to some extent with it, but with at least some magic. In other words, we're
not dealing with a high fantasy, non Earth world. We're not dealing with worlds where magic can just do anything. And both films center around a fresh faced protagonist, and of course, both films prominently feature a total solar eclipse.
Hmmm, that's interesting. Now it's been a while since I saw a Lady Hawk. I don't even recall what role the eclipse plays in the plot, but I do like that you bring up the kind of interesting fact that they're fantasy movies that seem to be set roughly within real history, like I believe we're supposed to interpret the or Land, the setting of Dragon Slayer as somewhere within post Roman Britain, like say Britain in the six hundred's AD or something.
Yeah. Yeah, that's very much the sense that I got from it. It is a world in which magic and sort of traditional pagan if you will, beliefs are seeping away from the world, just as this new religion of Christianity is seeping in. And there's this idea that magic can still be potent, but it is uncertain, like magic
is leaving the world. And this again, this is not an everything as possible world of high fantasy magic and so legitimate magic in Dragon Slayer shares an uneasy space right alongside trickery, right alongside superstition and the teachings of this new alien religion that's being brought in by.
Outsiders and in the end getting all the credit for what our good, virtuous pagan magicians do.
That's right. So anyway, Yeah, no shade on Lady Hawk. Lady Hawk is a lot of fun. That one is a fun adventure film with a compelling romantic curse at the center. But Dragon Slayer is its own spectacle. I mean this is it's certainly a creature lover's favorite, dazzling cinematography and effects, but also I feel like there is a lot more to Dragon Slayer than just the creature.
I think I maybe just had the wrong opinion of it for all these years, where I thought that maybe it was kind of a creature only flick, like, all right, you're gonna be bored the rest of the time. But the monsters impressive, and there are plenty of movies like that, and we've probably watched films like that for Weird House before.
Yeah, as far as the human drama goes in Dragon Slayer, I would say I have some mixed thoughts, but they're mostly positive. On the downside, I will admit that most of the characterizations in this movie are not very deep, Like,
you know, you're not getting deeply drawn characters. The characters are closer to archetypes, but in the immediate scenes they're in, I would say often the characters behave in rather interesting and unexpected and nuanced ways, Like the villains aren't as villainous as you might expect, and you can kind of see things from their point of view, and the heroes sometimes do things that you wouldn't quite expect from a story like this.
Yeah, when the characters feel not so deep, it is often in a way where you're like, I would like to know more about this character. I feel like there's more depth here that the movie. You know, it's just it's just not a film that's going to explore those additional depths. But there's like this feeling that those depths are present in this character, Like the characters feel real and nuanced enough that it may be there, which is
not the case with other films that we've talked about. Yes, I do want to mention just a few reviews of note, because this film does has long had its supporters and its fans. I looked in Weldon's Psychotronic Encyclopedia film and this particular write up is by Bob Martin and not Welden, but he urges readers and I think this is written around the time of its release, not to dismiss it as kid stuff just because it's a Disney co production. And as quote, it's got true medieval grit.
I mean, this is a rather dark and grimy film.
Yeah, yeah, And you know that maybe doesn't sound as impressive now because we had you know, however, many seasons of Game of Thrones. Everybody's seen a lot of gritty medieval fantasy at this point, but at the time it was certainly like a breath of fresh gritty air.
I suppose I would say it's not as dark as Game of Thrones, like there is not the violence in it is not as cold as that. But it's a good bit darker than your standard fantasy fair certainly in nineteen eighty one.
Yeah, it's still PG I have to stress now. Roger Ebert gave it three stars and raved over the Dragon over and also over the Old Wizard and its overall dark, grimy tone and look, and he said, here is a movie with the courage to be grungy.
Now, I wonder if this is at all a reaction to or maybe not a reaction to, because I think it was the same year the movie Excalibur from nineteen eighty one, which this has come up on the show before. I've still never seen it, but my impression of it is that it is just an almost offensively gleaming film. Everything is just very polished and shiny and high you know,
high fantasy veneer. Whereas, yeah, this movie is gross and slimy, and a lot of the locations are cramped, dark, dank caves and rooms with like weird liquids bubbling in them, and it's just like it's just a movie where everybody looks like they smell bad.
Yeah. Ebert specifically mentioned ex Caliber in that review, because yeah, ex Caliber is shiny, super gleaming, blinding armor. But also we have to keep in mind that ex Caliber, which which I have a lot of fond memories off is all is not quite set in the real world. It's set in kind of It's set in a mythic world. Is a mythic world about Theorian legend, you know, So it's it's a maybe just a step or two room moved from any kind of realistic, real world, you know,
magical setting. Now. I mentioned Game of Thrones earlier. George R. R. Martin ranked it number five on his top ten fantasy movies of all time, just below Lady Hawk, The Wizard of Oz, The Princess Bride, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Okay, you mean he Raked Dragon Slayer or not excal Dragon Slayer.
I don't think ex Caliber made this particular list. I mean not that. I mean I could also see him being of an ex Caliber fan, because I do remember in the books a lot of descriptions of very brightly colored armor. It seemed to be very important to him to make sure that armor wasn't boring looking. And it's not boring looking at Excalibur.
Uh, that's interesting. So he placed it behind Lady Hawk. But you know, I can see these other entries. Yeah, the Wizard of Oz, Yeah, the Lord of the Rings, that makes sense.
Yeah, Princess Bride. Everybody loves the Princess Bride. Oh yeah, un understandable. You can find that and just do a search for George R. Martin top ten fantasy films and you'll easily find the list we're referring to. And then finally, I'll say, you'd be hard pressed to find a bigger fan of this film than director Giermal del Toro. I'll be mentioning several things that he had to say about this film and his connections to it as we proceed.
Yeah, well, certainly I can imagine that del Toro is here for the dragon. He's like, when do we get to the dragon? And this movie really does have an amazing dragon, especially for the time it was created. But this is an awesome looking dragon, but not just looking.
I want to stress that what's so great about the dragon in this movie is that even before you see it, its presence is signaled through you know, different kinds of like point of view shots and sound effects and the suggestion of it looming out of view in certain scenes in a really powerful, ominous way. That is just one of the great monster presences in any movie I've ever seen.
And I really like that the dragon in this movie is a monster, is not just a I don't want to say just a lot of the dragons were used to lately see more of the elegant, intelligent, fantasy dragon variety, you know, like almost kind of a higher being. This dragon, it might be cunning, but it is. It's not like a talking dragon. It's not a nice dragon. It's not a noble dragon. This is a nasty, disgusting monster that wants human blood.
That's right. Yeah, Yeah, the dragon is amazing. The presentation of the dragon is amazing, and I mean not just the full blown effects, but like the fine art of presenting a monster in a film, of teasing it out of you know, early on in the film we don't even see it yet. We see instead like carved representations of the dragon in these dank, you know, desolate settings that set the tone and prepare the imagination for the monstrosity to come. All right, In terms of elevator pitches
for this one, mine is pretty simple. It's look, no one likes having to make a yearly blood sacrifice to a dragon.
However, however, what if we did it twice a year.
Yeah. Like I said, if you come into this just for the dragon, you won't be disappointed. But there's a lot of other stuff I think to keep your mind busy, and we'll get into that as we proceed. Well, let's go ahead and listen to some trailer audio here to give you a sonic taste of Dragon Slayer.
That would be witnessed to something someday of consequills to you. To me, there's a great task needing to be done. Now, don't you've heard about trouble at home?
A dragon, fire and stench.
It is evil, pure and simple. Want me to do battle with that?
And behold, for I'm chosen. I shall die a prey bailer. Twice a year, the King selects a new victim, chosen by lot girls virgins.
Your kittens made a package with a monster.
What your children will dying? Only a few because that's sound cruel.
Dragon Slayer coming from Paramount Pictures.
All right, now, if you want to go out and watch Dragonslayer yourself or rewatch it, however you approach it before getting into the rest of this episode, well, let me tell you this one is widely available. You can easily rent or buy it digitally, but I would say pay attention to what version you're watching. Get this in
the highest visual quality possible. We watched it on the excellent twenty twenty three Paramount Blu ray, which provides us with a four K remastered version with Dolby Atmos sound mix, original screen tests if you're into that, A six part documentary that is quite good. I watched a couple of installments of this, dealing with the dragon effects and another aspect of the production, and then also a commentary track by director Matthew Robbins and Dragonslayer Megafan Ghiramel del Tour.
I want to hear more about this commentary track because I've heard good things about other Del Toro commentary tracks. A friend of mine has brought up before that his Blade two commentary is is a pretty great listen.
Oh yeah, I definitely did the Blade two commentary track back in the day. I think I also did his hell Boy commentary track. And I don't do a lot of commentary tracks these days. It's just a lot harder to find time for them sometimes. I also think it's maybe not as constructive for the weird house cinema treatment to get like really into the weeds on the director's commentary. And not all commentaries from directors or stars and other
people involved in the production are necessarily that great. But del Toro is always worth listening to. But because I mean, he has just such you know, expertise, He has such love for cinema and especially horror cinema and monster cinema, and this one is this is really special because I have to stress, this is a film that del Toro had nothing to do with Del Toro was a boy when this came out, he was a fan, and he ends up having you know, meaningful connections to director Matthew
Robbins later on. But yeah, he's he's on this commentary track with the director, you know, out of love for the film, out of you know, and I'm also friendship with the director, and you know, he's he's asking a lot of really insightful questions about the production and also commenting on the things that he really loves in it and pointing out some nuances that either might be lost on a first time viewer or a casual viewer, but also maybe or more apparent to a filmmaker as opposed
to to you know, someone who's just a pure viewer of cinema. Let's go ahead and start talking about the connections here. So yeah, I just mentioned him. Matthew Robbins was the director and one of the writers on this born nineteen forty five American writer and director, who at this point was coming off of a nineteen seventy eight comedy titled Corvette Summer starring Mark Hamill and Annie Potts.
He was part of the so called American New Way film movement alongside the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and worked early on, often in uncredited capacities, with both directors contributing writing and or ideas for such projects as nineteen sixty seven's Electronic Labyrinth THCHX eleven thirty eight four eb that's the short film that would become the THCHX
eleven thirty eight. He had something to do uncredited with seventy five Jaws, seventy seven's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and then additionally as a credited screenwriter, he'd written on scripts for Spielberg's nineteen seventy four film The Sugarland Express and the baseball movie The Bingo Long Traveling All Stars and Motor Kinks.
That's not exactly the background you would expect coming into dragons Layer.
That's right, But you know, dragons play based all to dragons. Dragonslayer is another one of these films though, that comes in the aftermath of Star Wars, right, so you know, the studios are all hungry for the next Star Wars and a lot of you know, directors and writers come along and they're like, well, you know, you're looking for the next Star Wars, and it just so happens. I have the script ready to go.
Big epic adventure with a young hero who yearns, yearns for greatness. Here we go.
Yeah. Unfortunately, Dragonslayer was not a commercial success, and afterwards Robin's directive Let's see nineteen eighty five's the Legend of Billy Jean eighty seven's Batteries Not Included, which he also wrote, I have seen that one when I was a kid. That's like little flying robots in it. He also did a rad dog movie called Bingo in nineteen ninety one. He did not write that, he just directed It.
Is a rat dog movie, like like Beethoven.
Yeah, the dog. I think the dog is wearing sunglasses on the cover. Like you just look at the poster, the box out for this movie. It's like, that's a rat dog movie. That dog's rat.
He's gonna wear sunglasses in the movie. Might do some dancing to some rock music, maybe, Robert Palmers on.
I'd say thirty five percent chance this dog rides a skateboard. That kind of movie, yeah, uh okay. And on the screenwriting front, he co wrote nineteen eighty five's Warning Sign, but then in nineteen ninety seven, he worked on a script for Del Toro's first and nearly his last American picture. According to del Toro, it's the film mimic on this film, and the filmmaking experience was somewhat compromised by studio interference. It led to a very long and ongoing collaborative relationship
between Del Toro and Robbins. To date, they've pinned four produced scripts together, so Mimic twenty tens Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, twenty fifteen's Crimson Peak, and twenty twenty two's Pinocchio. He's also worked on screenplays for a couple of Bollywood films, I believe, and he's still very much an active screenwriter to this day.
But he had a co writer on Dragonslayer.
Right, That's right, That's how Barwood born nineteen forty screenwriter and director who came up alongside Robins, co wrote a number of scripts with him, including The Sugarland Express, Corvette Summer, and Warning Signs. Barwood also directed Warning Signs. That was his only feature length film, but he went on to direct and design several video game projects for Lucas Arts and also wrote for them. All Right, now getting into
the cast here. This is a dragon movie, but this is also a wizard movie, and we have a pretty great wizard in this the Wizard Oldric and a great wizard requires a great actor, and boy, they landed one for this film with Sir Ralph Richardson.
He really does well because he can capture the kind of humble, befuddled, quaint version of the wizard as just an unassuming old man, but he can also come to seem quite powerful when the need arises.
Yeah, and I love how he's able to capture what I think of as the weirdness of wizards, you know, like I feel like there should be something about a wizard that is, you know, just just utterly mysterious and dangerous, like this is an individual with with knowledge beyond the common man, and therefore, you know, who knows what's going on in that mind of his.
Part of any great wizard is that it's not just that they're powerful, but that you are not permitted to know how powerful they are.
Right right, So Richardson does a great job with that. He's also to convey able to convey this kind of melancholy almost sadness of like this aging master, you know who still has his powers that is disposable, but he's very much in decline, just as magic is leaving the world. Like this is a very old man who is not long for this world either.
I mean quite explicitly portrayed as someone who, you know, if he'd stuck around a few more years, might have been burned at the stake by the newly converted Christians in the village right now.
I should point out that on the commentary track, Robinson del Toro point out, you know, they certainly talk about his craft and how good he isn't like utilizing props such as the knife. We'll talk about the knife in a bit. They talk about it how utterly piercing his eyes are in many of these scenes. He's quite a screen presence. But they say, like a lot of that weird energy has is also legitimate, Like he's like a
delightfully weird person. He apparently kept a pet rat in his pocket the whole time on set, a pet rat named Ratty, and he would take him out between takes solid wizard move.
How did he not talk the rat into getting screen time.
He's a consummate professional. Yeah, the consummate professional knows that the rat is here for emotional support and friendship. But you're not gonna like shoehorn him into the scene.
The rat provides rat magic, whether you see it or not.
Right right, So yes, sir, Sir. Ralph Richardson You know. Nineteen oh two through nineteen eighty three legendary English actor of Stage and screen, two time Oscar nominee. His dramatic credits include such films as nineteen forty nine The Heiress, nineteen fifty five's Richard the Third, sixty five's Doctor Chivago,
in nineteen seventy seven's Jesus of Nazareth. But he's equally celebrated for his late career fantasy and sci fi work, appearing in nineteen seventy three's Frankenstein The True Story, seventy five's Rollerball, nineteen eighty one's Time Bandits, and nineteen eighty four's I Always Forget that this film's title is so long, but Grace Stoke the legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.
Wait, is that the Christoph Lambert Tarzan?
It is? Yeah?
And in Time band It's this Ralph Richardson play God.
I believe he does. Yeah. My memory of Time Bandits is a little fraid I really need to revisit it.
I believe it's David Warner as the Devil and Ralph Richardson as God. Let's look it up. Well, his character is called Supreme Be but yes, I think he's supposed to be God. He arrives at the end of the movie after Evil has been defeated, and he's just sort of this tidy business like a British man with a dry sense of humor.
All right, So that's our wizard, and more on the Wizards as we proceed here. But we also have an apprentice. The Sorcerer's apprentice in this film is the character Galen, played by Peter McNichol born nineteen fifty four.
You know, I think before this I mainly knew him as Janosh from Ghostbusters Too.
Yeah. I think if you know him from nothing else, it is from Ghostbusters Too, where he's the guy constantly singing the praises of Vigo the Karpathian.
Yeah he is Vego, Yeah.
Which is you know, a wonderful, you know, comedic performance in that. And I think he's had a number of really sort of out there comedic performances throughout his career. He's had a very rich career on stage, screen and TV. This was his first film role, coming off of theater work, but he debuted on Broadway the same year in Crimes
of the Heart. He followed up Dragon Slayer with a role in nineteen eighty two Sophie's Choice, and subsequent films include nineteen ninety three's Adams Family Values and nineteen ninety five's Dracula Dead and Loving It. That Is, of Course Is That? Of Course is a comedy starring what Leslie Nielsen is Dracula and McNichol plays the Wrenfield character in that.
Oh, It's got a w Renfield in it. I don't think I've ever seen that one? But why do I? Why do I think of it as a comedy adaptation of Dracula that hughes way closer to the original story than it needs to.
That may be great. I believe I saw this when I was younger, but I just vaguely remember a few gags from it. A lot of people will also recognize McNichol from TV. He was a cast member on Ali McBeal, and his other TV credits include Tales from the Crypt. He was in one of Russell McKay's episodes. He was on twenty four, he was on Veep, and he's also done a fair amount of voice acting, including voic seeing the Mad Hatter in the Arkham Asylum Games.
Now, I think McNichol does quite well with the young hero role in this movie. But when I mentioned earlier that a lot of the major characters don't seem especially deep, he's I sort of had the main character here in mind, like he we don't ever really know why he wants anything that he wants. And I'm not complaining too much because I still love dragons Layer, you know, It's not
something that prevented me from enjoying the film. But he's to be generous, as you said earlier, maybe a character who generates more questions than he answers.
Yeah. Absolutely, there are times where I find myself wondering, well, why is he making this choice? Why does he want this thing that he seems to want? And Yeah, and it seems to be a common analysis of the film based on some of the reviews I was looking at. But like you, I do like mcnickel in the role. He has this kind of weird cherubic quality. He feels more like a nerd hero as opposed to like a sort of you know, sex appeal teen heart throb kind
of a character. Though I do love the idea of eighties teens with like heart dotted Peter McNichol posters on their walls.
I feel like he's decently handsome in this film.
Oh man, Yeah, I mean it's it's a major motion picture. He's he's plenty handsome.
But but yes, i'd see what you're saying. I mean, he's not like a like a muscle bound go get her hero. He's, you know, he's a little bit apprehensive, though he's also brave, but he's Yeah, he's closer to nerd than Jock, definitely.
Yeah, And I think that that does make him more endearing. Like, I don't think this character would have worked as well, especially given maybe some of the limitations we were talking about, if some of one of the other sort of flavors of the day or hot up and coming talents had played him, Like, for instance, I read that Eric Roberts
was considered for the part. Oh and I think Eric Roberts is quite excellent in some of the millions of films that he's done, But that would have been an entirely different Dragons player, even like nineteen eighty nineteen eighty one Eric Roberts, it would have been a different flavor.
Sorry, I got sidetracked just because I started thinking about actors that have been in too many movies, and I was like, what if it had been Udo Kierre or John Carodine.
Yeah, yeah, I was thinking. I was thinking that Eric Roberts is kind of the John Karrodine of our time.
All Right, so we're here, We're still on Team Wizard here, and the Old Wizard has a retainer by the name of Hodge, and he's a familiar face because he is played by Sidney Bromley, who lived nineteen oh nine through nineteen eighty seven, a British character actor who we've talked about on the show before because he was in nineteen eighty four is the never Ending Story in which he played the Nome scientist in gy Wok.
In that does he basically use the same voice in both movies?
Yeah, yeah, I think so, that's what I say. Voice, same beard, same kind of like general. Well, I mean he's ratcheting up that demeanor and never ending story because he's playing this kind of outrageous Gnome character. But still, I mean he's he's very much a character actor. I get the impression, like you hire Sidney Bromley, like you want certain things.
Yes, but in both cases he's very much like yo, she surely.
Enough, exactly. Yeah. His other credits include sixty two's Night Creatures, sixty seven is The Fearless Vampire Killers, the excellent nineteen seventy one adaptation of Macbeth, nineteen eighty one's An American Werewolf in London, and nineteen eighty six as Pirates.
Oh what is he in? Werewolf in London? Is just one of the guys in the pub.
I think he's one of the pub guys. Yeah, I don't specifically remember him, but I mean that's that's where he has to be. That that makes the most sense. Or he's like a street person that the werewolf kills in London, like that would be the two main candidates here, but I don't remember.
But Hodge is a lovable old grump like he spends most of his screen time complaining, but he's it's quite sad when he is killed.
Right, all right. We also have a heroin in this picture, and that is the character of Valerian, played by Caitlin Clark, not to be confused with a basketball star of the same name whose name is all over the news right now for basketball reasons. But this is the actor Kaitlin Clark, who lived nineteen fifty two through two thousand and four.
Right, So she plays the character who kind of sets the whole plot in motion right by by seeking out the advice and counsel of a wizard in defeating the dragon.
That's right. Yeah, she's the one who arrives on the scene and is like, Hey, we need help with our dragon. And it's a really interesting character because and this is I think a prime example of a character that I ultimately wanted to know more about. Like I feel like there's ultimately unexplored depth here that, you know, depth that we just got to get a hint of in many scenes, but you want to know more about.
Yeah, I think when I said that the characters could have been deeper, I mainly had these two main roles
in mind, Peter mcnichol's character in Kaitlyn Clark's character. But yeah, she's interesting because she when we first meet her in the movie, her character is disguised as a boy and we learn that she has had to spend her whole life whenever she was in public so far disguised as a boy in order to avoid being drafted into the potential lottery to become dragon food, which all the girls of her village.
Were yeah, yeah, And then ultimately we see her, you know, it seems like she has the opportunity to live openly again as herself, but then plans change and so yeah, it just left me wanting more exploration of this character. But anyway, Clark came out of the theater scene and this was her first feature film as well, followed by sporadic TV work occasional small roles in such films as nineteen eighty six As Crocodile Dundee nineteen ninety four is
Blown Away. She remained more active in theater and later as a theater instructor. Now her father in this who's just credited as the character's name, is just Valarian's father, and he was played by Imres James, who lived nineteen twenty eight through nineteen eighty nine, a Welsh Shakespearean actor, probably best known for this film. His credits include a lot of Shakespearean theater and British television, including Sherlock Holmes,
Doctor Who, and Hammer House of Horror. In fact, we have discussed the episode of Hammer House of Horror that he acted in in Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode Halloween episode Anthology of Horror that we did. That's the nineteen eighty episode The Mark of Satan.
Oh, yeah, that was a creepy one where we talked about like the evil mind control virus theme of that episode. I was looking at the screenshot you showed me of him in that episode and I think he might have been playing like the coroner or something. But in Dragon
Slayer he plays Yeah, Valerian's father, who you know. He's a very like, strong, kind, sturdy, friendly presence, and he takes it quite well that his daughter seems to have fallen in love with one of the last pagan wizards in the country.
Yeah, he's very supportive and very protective. So yeah, fine, fine character, so old performance. Oh but now let's get to the royal family of the area, starting with the king. The King Casadorus Rex played by Peter Air born nineteen forty two. He is a practical ruler for dark times.
Yeah. I think practical is a good word for him because and this will come up even more so with I think the next character we're going to talk about, But he is While you would say that he sort of fills the role of a villain in the plot, he's not really all that villainous. He does some kind of bad or sneaky things, but he ultimately is shown to be quite quite practical and quite you know, sympathetic in many ways.
Yeah, I think he's a pretty nuanced character, and then the performance is quite nice instead, So we don't get like a cartoon tyrant. We don't get a comical coward here, but rather a rational ruler who has made some morally questionable and at times hypocritical choices in order to maintain the status quo, in order to I think it very much in his mind as he discusses to keep the peace and to keep everything, to maintain stability. And if that means yeah, feeding a woman to a dragon every year,
well that's just what you have to do. It's what we've done. It seems to be working. Let's not shake the boat, right. Peter Air probably best known for this film, but his extensive credits include nineteen nineties, Mountains of the Moon ninety twos, Orlando ninety threes The Remains of the Day in two thousand and ones from Hell, alongside such TV shows as The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles in Rome.
He's got some interesting facial hair choices.
Oh yeah, yeah, they dress them up nicely for this. Now, his daughter in this picture is Princess Alsbeth, played by Chloe Salomon. So this is the king's noble and idealistic daughter. More on her in a bit. But the actor here a British actor with extensive TV and stage roles, though this was her biggest film, and interestingly enough, this is Alec Guinness's niece.
Oh, I had no idea.
So in many ways she's the heart and moral compass of the film. But that doesn't necessarily bode well for her.
Yeah, I would say her character's fate was one of the biggest surprises of the movie. Got incredibly grim there for a.
Bit, all right. Now back to the sort of the villain realm are sort of villains and shades of gray. Here we have the character Tyrian, and this is the King's main enforcer, a cold man but also a practical man of the sword.
Yeah. So the same thing I said about the King I think applies to his character, but even more so he's he is I would say, the human villain of the movie. But I kept waiting for him to do something more overtly villainous, more absolutely selfish, but he really doesn't. Unless there's something I'm forgiving, I don't think he ever
really does something overtly all that selfish. Instead, it seems like he has a view about what would be the best way to protect the people of the kingdom, and he is following through on that view.
Yeah, I mean there is one murder. Oh well, there's more than one murder, but there's there's one that's particularly cold blood. Well, we can get into that. And when we get into that.
It is cold blooded, but it is part of his strategy for protecting his people.
That's right.
I'm not saying murders, okay, I'm just saying, like, you never end up seeing him doing something where he's just like, oh, trying to grab all the gold and take it away for himself or something.
Right. He makes some good points, as we'll get into. But this character is played by John Hallam who lived nineteen forty one through two thousand and six. We've actually talked to him on the show before because He played Luro, the second in command Hawkman, in nineteen eighty one's Flash Gordon, which means he was very hard to focus on since he was almost always in a scene with Brian Blessed.
Yeah, how could you even see him?
Yeah? Like, basically he's the other Hawkman that's not Brian Blessed, and that is somewhat less loud. His other credits include nineteen seventy one's The Last Valley with Michael Caine, Nicholas and Alexandria from the same year, nineteen seventy three is the Wickerman, eighty five's Life Force, Oh eighty five, Santa Claus the Movie, and nineteen ninety one's Robin Hood Prince of Thieves.
It's a lot of movies I've seen and I don't remember what he was in any of them.
Let's see and one more cast member I want to mention here, and that is this, I guess you would. He's kind of a like a missionary, a Christian, an outsider that has brought Christianity to the local realm. Here. Brother jacopis here and he is played by Ian McDermot born nineteen forty five. So yes, the man who would become Emperor Palpatine seen here in a small but solid part.
Right, So he is the person who shows up at the village to tell them the good news of Jesus Christ and to inform them that the dragon is not a dragon but is Lucifer incarnate. And then he just gets like blasted with fire.
Yeah, so instead of like twinkling depths of decrepit evil, we get reckless religious fanaticism. And in the process, I think we do get some hints of the tools, the acting tools he'd employ in his performances of Palpatine over the decades to come. But yeah, great tremendous actor in Star Wars and out of Star Wars. Outside of the Star Wars franchise, his credits include nineteen eighties The Awakening, eighty three's Gorky Park, eighty eight Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, nineteen
ninety five's Restoration in nineteen ninety nine Sleepy Hollow. All right, now, going behind the scenes here, we don't always call out the cinemaographer on a picture, but we absolutely have to hear because the cinematography in this film is amazing and it is by a legend in the business. Derek Van Lint who lived nineteen thirty two through twenty ten.
I agree, this is a fantastic looking movie, and in all of its different ways. I liked that there's a lot of visual contrast in the sets and the settings, Like you're constantly going back and forth between environments that are cramped and claustrophobic and slimy and ugly and suggest hell to and then going from there to beautiful open vistas and mountain landscapes and valleys and running water and all that. There is a there's a pleasing sort of rhythm of images, and I like that.
Yeah, come as no surprise, I think to a lot of people that his other main cinematography credit in feature film is for nineteen seventy nine's Alien, and I think you'd definitely see that in comparing like the caves environments and even the other interior environments that we explore in this film, comparing those to the you know, like the alien planet in Aliens, or just the depths of the Nostromo.
But the curious thing is that outside of mostly dragons Layer and Alien, he worked mostly on commercials for Canadian TV. He was a Canadian. You know, there's and I couldn't find a complete list of everything he worked on, but he did like an Atari twenty six hundred commercial for Activision's Pitfall two and yeah, so not a lot of credits. But even then, from what I've read, he was highly influential within the business and actually turned down work on
subsequent big film projects with Ridley Scott and others. He directed a single feature link film himself the year two thousands, The Spreading Ground starring Dennis Hopper, which was also co written by Mark Berman.
Oh, I haven't seen.
That so anyway, He's one of the many reasons you should definitely see this film in the best quality possible in a nice dark room, good TV.
It looks fantastic.
Now. The composer on this film is another legend in the business, and that's Alex North, who lived nineteen ten through nineteen ninety one American composer and fifteen time Academy Award nominee. His most famous scores include those for nineteen fifty two as a Streetcar named Desire and Death of a Salesman nineteen fifty six is Unchained That's where We Get Unchained, Melody nineteen sixty one, Spartacus sixty four is
Cleopatra eighty five's Under the Volcano. He completed a score for two thousand and one, A Space Odyssey, but Kubert rejected it in favor of a needle drop classical music score, and I'm to understand he actually reused some material from the two thousand and one project in this film. Hmm. Now. He received an OSCAR nomination for Dragon Slayer, but lost out to Vangelists for his work on Chariots of Fire.
John Williams was also nominated that year for Raiders. But I mean, Charots of Fire is an all timer, so I mean, if you got to lose to Chariots of Fire, it's perfectly fine.
I think the music in Dragon Slayer works quite well, especially right at the beginning of the movie. There's it's you know, classic dark fantasy opening opens with like a black screen and these just lead heavy horns really working the brass section. It's dark, deep, ominous. It's really good.
Yeah, highly effective. All right. Now, this is a special effects movie. This is this is got This has tremendous special effects and we're not going to be able to do complete justice to them here. But the dragon does not play himself. This was the work of a vast industrial light and magic crew featuring such names as Dennis Murran, Phil Tippett, Ken Ralston and Brian Johnson. The film was nominated for a Special Effects OSCAR that year, but lost out too. The only other nominee, which was also an
ILM project, Raiders of the Lost Arc. This film so they used various methods to bring the dragon to life. The film makes use of the Go Motion system to create realistic motion blur and smooth character articulation for the dragon, as well as related miniature elements, and according to ILM on their website, the film inspired the development of the
Go Motion system. I think Tippet had previously employed some of the techniques on The Empire Strikes Back, but this was a big Go motion picture and if you want more details on what that consists of, again, I highly recommend the making of documentary that is on the Blu ray.
I was curious about how they achieved the shots of the dragon moving because it does look unlike really any other special effects shots of that type, I can think, and it looks wonderful.
Yeah, I think it's the So these different types of effects obviously see have large scale pneumatic limbs you got a large scale heads stop motion go motion miniatures, flying miniatures that are brought to life in a very kind of like Star Wars spaceship fashion, and then puppetry, flamethrowers
and so forth. But I imagine the scenes you're thinking of are particularly like the crawling around the cave sequences, and I believe that what we're talking about here are those go motion sequences that Phil tip It was in charge of, and indeed these are just just so magical. It just absolutely feels alive. I Mean, there's a reason that del Toro himself says like this, not only is this the best dragon that had ever been done, this is the best dragon that has ever been done.
In cinema still to this day. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what I would think was better.
Yeah, I mean even I've read other productions talking about their dragon and it's like they oftentimes acknowledge the DNA Dragon Slayer in what they do. You know, it's like, well, we looked at Dragonslayer, we looked at what worked, and we tried to build off of that.
All right, are you ready to talk about the plot.
Let's dive in.
So we begin in darkness, as I said earlier, with those the heavy, scary kind of horn melodies playing. And then eventually, out of the blackness we see a burning torch emerge, and then there's another and another, and the picture kind of differentiates from just pure black into an indigo nighttime sky in the background, and then the dark shapes of dead trees in the foreground. So a group of people are making their way across the hillside by
torchlight in the dead of night. And then somewhere else we see an old man in a dim cave like room, surrounded by arcane instruments, engaged in magic and alchemy, and he sort of waves a fire of sorcery into existence in a metal bowl and then stares into the flame like he's divining a scene from elsewhere or from the future, and we hear screams and the sound of metal clashing violence,
all this echoing in his mind. And then the party we saw traveling by night, they arrive at the heavy door of a hilltop castle and they knock and somebody answers the door. I believe it's Hodge. Here are sort of like a strange old man, and he tries to turn them away, but we learned that this is the dwelling of Ulrich of Kraganmore. He says, yes, you've come a long way, Yes, your business is urgent, it does not matter. He sees no one, and there's grumbling from
within the party. They are being led by a young man named a Valerian, and some of the unhappy travelers are like what now, boy. In fact, I think it's the guy who's going to later convert to Christianity that's being really grumpy. But eventually they get led inside the castle and the master of the castle is the great wizard Ulric of Kragnmore, and he has foreseen that he must meet with them. He also tells his young apprentice Galen, that he foresees his own death and matters that will
be of great importance to Galen as well. We learned that Galen is an eager young student. He wants to Basically what he wants more than anything else in the world is to become mighty in the ways of sorcery. But he is still learning. And then we get to the scene where Ulric comes out to meet the travelers, and I thought this was really funny. I love the use of what you might call diegetic special effects in
this scene. So you know, in many cases you might say that the mechanisms of special effects are non diegetic because they're just supposed to appear on screen as if
they are representing some kind of real magic. But here, as Ulrich comes out to meet the guests, Galen is like shaking some sheet metal to generate a sound of thunder, and then he throws exploding powder on the floor to create a flash of light and smoke as Elrick enters the room, so it's like he's still sort of got the sorcery training wheels on, you know, he's like using these materials.
It also reminded me a bit of some of the themes they're explored in The Last Unicorn, like the idea of having to put a like a fake horn on a real unicorn so that normal people could see it, like a we're living in a world here where magic is leaving the world, there's less magic available, but also legitimate sorcery as we see it in the film has kind of like this kind of subtle quality to it, and there's kind of the sense that just normal folk might
miss it, they might not understand what they're seeing. So perhaps you've got to spice things up a little bit with some stage effects and so forth.
But of course Ulric is the real deal, because when he comes into the room, we see him immediately using real magic, like he raises flames on the candles and in the hearth with a And so he meets with the travelers. We learn they are a delegation from Orland, which is beyond Valvatia, and he says, let's see the artifacts, as if this is almost like a routine, kind of recurring type of meeting. He's just like, we go through the steps here, show me the artifacts, and they share
with him scales and an enormous tooth. Ulrich at first seems a little intimidated. He says, the beast that this came from must be enormous, and he suggests they try someone else. He says, try the Meridid sisters or Rimbau. These are other sorcerers that apparently have experience fighting dragons, but Valerian says, nope, they are all dead. Ulrich seems to be the only great sorcerer left in the land. Ulrich then discovers more of their plight. The king of Orland, Cassiodorus,
has made a pact with the monster. The dragon agrees not to attack the villages and burn the crops of orland. But this is only as long as at the spring and autumn equinox he receives a human sacrifice, they will send him a virgin selected by lottery. Ulric judges this arrangement barbaric, and then Valerian says to him, are you
afraid of dragons? And Ulric says, I'm going to quote him here he says no. In fact, if it weren't for sorcerers, there wouldn't be any dragons once the skies were dotted with them, magnificent horned backs, leathern wings, soaring, and their hot breath wind. Oh, I know this creature of yours, vermicthrax pejorative. Look at these scales, these ridges. When a dragon gets this old, it knows nothing but pain, constant pain. It grows decrepit, crippled, pitiful, spiteful.
It's a great moment because, I mean, obviously he's not just describing the dragon here, he's also talking about himself. He's talking about the of.
Age, that's right, So that's interesting. But also it's a strange take on the dragon. So you know, We were saying earlier that the dragon in this movie is very much a monster and is not one of the noble, intelligent, you know, higher dragons of some other fantasy stories. But it almost sounds like maybe this same dragon would have been many many years ago. But dragons, when they become old, become twisted and cruel. Yeah, and it's because they themselves are in pain.
Yeah, I mean, it reminds me a bit of examples we've talked about in the natural world concerning meat eaters, you know, particularly a man eaters, large predators that have just have turned to killing and consuming human beings. And in many cases that's not because you have a creature in its prime. You have a creature that's aging, that maybe has dental problems and so forth, and therefore has kind of been reduced to this status.
Yeah, it's having troubles in the way it always has before, and so is trying new things out of desperation. So Ulrich agrees to help them. He suits up to travel, and he says goodbye to Galen and Hodge. Hodge is his retainer there at the castle. Galen's his little magical assistant. That's Peter McNichol, As he's leaving, he says to Galen, keep your hands out of my reagents. But ooh, then
we're about to get a really great villain introduction. As the party is preparing to leave the castle of Kraganmore, they are intercepted by armed men led by Tyrian, the captain of Cassiodorus's royal guard, his king's guard, if you will. Tyrian is a large man. He is sneering and seemingly dangerous. He has that energy of someone who is calm for the moment, but could suddenly become violent. However, once he starts talking, I gotta admit Tyrian makes some good points.
He says, Look, I know what you're up to. You know you're gonna get a wizard to go kill this dragon. Well, I don't love the dragon either, but if you try to kill it and fail, you are going to stir up a huge mess of trouble and it may that may be disastrous for the people of the kingdom. So if you're going to try to kill the dragon, you better be sure that your wizard is up to the job. And then Hodge responds to this saying, ah, so it's a test you're looking for. We don't do tests, and
Tyrian's response is no, of course not. They never do tests. Not many real deeds either. Oh, conversation with your grandmother's shade in a darkened room, the odd love potion or two. But comes a doubter. Why then it's the wrong day, The planets are not in line, the entrails are not favorable. We don't do tests. And so Tyrian comes off like a villain in the scene. But he's making a lot
of sense. You do not want to send Uri Geller up to fight the monster that is going to react with swift and terrible revenge.
Yeah. Yeah, he does make some great points here. You know, it's like, again kind of in support of the status quo, but it's like, are you gonna actually solve any problems with this or are you just gonna make things worse. He's very much of the mindset I think, you know better better one hundred years of tyranny than a day of chaos, that sort of thing.
But they have experience to base this on, because they will reveal later that the king's brother long ago did try to go slay the dragon to free the people from its from its oppression, and in response to this, attack. The dragon burned all their crops and attacked their villages and many were killed and it was horrible. Yeah, but anyway, Ulric says, yeah, okay, Tyrian, I will consent to a test. And it's what test is it? It's the old stab me with the magic dagger test. So Ulric assures Tyrian.
He like gets Peter McNichol to go get a special dagger for him, and he puts the dagger against his chest and says, go on, you can't hurt me. And then Ulrich he uses magic to trap Galen inside his workshop to prevent him from intervening, and Tirian does the test and oh no, Ulrich is killed.
This is a really great scene and one that I
enjoyed rewatching with commentary. So Richardson really does a lot of subtle, fascinating work here, Like there's kind of like ritualistic handling of the dagger leading up to the test, the bearing of his breast for the dagger, and there's the look in his eyes, you know with this at first with the boldness and assuredness of a powerful wizard, but then it, you know, it kind of transitions into like the certainty, the the the mundane nature of death, you know, and del Toro talks about this a bit
on the commentary track, compares the overall blocking and cinematography of the scene to like a Rembrandt painting. You know, it's really a great sequence and really a showcase for Richardson's acting.
Yeah, you know, there are a lot of things about this movie. I think you could regard as a bit rim brandy. There are these scenes of orange light and shadows. But also, yeah, the blocking, like the way the wizard kind of collapses, Yeah.
Because he does do Like the death here does not feel magical. It feels like an old man foolishly getting himself stabbed through the heart and just dying there in the mud.
It makes you wonder did he actually have any powers at all? I mean, we saw him light some candles and stuff, but was that it?
And it seems very much a world where that is a strong possibility that he had no magic left in him. There was no great magic left for this guy to do.
So we see funeral rights for Ulrich. Galen burns his body on a pyre. There's a green flame that emerges and Galen looks on with terrible sadness. We see shooting stars streaking across the heavens, and the next morning Hodge comes in scrapes up the ashes from the funeral pyre into a leather pouch, and we see Galen kind of moping around, covering up Ulric's things with cloth and wondering what to do with himself. But his adventure is just
beginning because some magical selection is at work here. Galen finds Ulric's enchanted amulet burning for him, burning with this eager orange light in his presence, It has chosen him as its next owner. You are the wizard now, Galen, and.
Just fills him with the foolish self confidence he needs to set out to slay the dragon.
That's right. So we see Galen and Hodge on the journey to Orland. They're making the journey and they're like catching up to the party of visitors that came to them earlier. Galen seems excited and a little bit overwhelmed by his new power, like he's levitating an egg in his hands while they walk across the country. This is the first time we see some really gorgeous exterior location shots.
They're going through a green valley framed by mountains and they make their way through these misty, sun dappled woods. It's very beautiful, but Galen is also he's playing with and arguably abusing his wizard powers. Hodge is complaining and Galen starts like magically stealing his cloak and stuff. Eventually, Galen and Hodge catch up to the traveling party and Galen introduces them to his new powers and says, you know, he's saying, I take on the burden of your request.
I am Galen, I am the inheritor of Ulrich's knowledge, and I am the sorcerer you seek. Now Here we cut away to somewhere else in Orland, where we are going to witness a sacrifice to vermic Thrack's pejorative the Dragon. I don't know if we even took a moment to comment on the dragon's name yet, did we know?
But it is such a wonderful name, and it is kind of left a little vague whether this is thought of as an individual name or like a species sort of name, given the wizard's identification of it earlier.
Oh, I hadn't thought of it as a species name. I thought of it as like a proper name. But you could be right. It works either way, I think, Yeah, but how does anybody know this is the dragon's name? Like, does the dragon use this name itself? We never hear it talk.
I don't know if it can talk, it doesn't, or it no longer speaks. Yeah, this is not a dragon with anything to say and say with words. It speaks instead with flames and violence.
Right, So we see a procession of soldiers, carts, robed priests winding up a mountain path of dark rocks. They are escorting a prisoner, a young woman dressed in white with flowers in her hair. She is a sacrifice that is meant for the dragon, so they take her up the mountain and they leave her chain to a stake near the mouth of a cave, and the priest produces a scroll and begins reading an official decree commemorating the sacrifice.
Though while he's reading this, there begins a great deep rumbling, and the soldiers and the teamsters with the carts they all panic and they start just trying to get out of there as fast as they can before the cleric even finishes reading the statement, which is really funny. So everybody's trying to run away, like the carts are getting stuck in the mud and people are freaking out. But
this scene is actually quite scary. Yeah, the young woman being sacrificed, she struggles to free herself from her manacles. We hear these heavy footsteps approaching. We don't see the dragon yet, but these sounds are coming from the yawning mouth of the cave, their steam rushing up from the gaps in the rocks. And then we see a giant, clawed pair of toes curling around the corner of the rock, and the beast reveals itself in full to her, but
not to us yet. We get the feeling we sort of see from its point of view, and get the feeling that it is towering, monstrous. We do see that it has a slimy tail covered in these these spikes protruding bones. Not like the elegant sort of patterns of ridges and bumps you see on smoother dragons of recent media. This looks more like a gigantic spine of fish bones, you know, like broken in places, irregular modeled, with age, covered in scales and mucus. Just horrible in every way.
And again we don't see it in full us the viewer. We see bits and pieces of it the full shape of the dragon is implied rather than stated overtly.
Right, So the young woman actually the last moment, does manage to free herself from her from her manacles, but it's too late. The dragon is there. It's looming over her, a giant, stinking, hateful mass, and then finally it just unleashes a breath of fire. It's an incredibly effective scary scene.
Yeah, this is like a horror movie sequence right here,
and it uses the tools of horror quite well. Like you mentioned her trying to free yourselves from herself from the manacles, and of course that they're cutting up her wrists there she's straining and having to squeeze, like and it's one of those small touches, you know, where we can more easily imagine that pain and that desperation than we can like the larger, more fantastic aspects of and extreme aspects of the situation, and therefore, like the familiar
makes the fantastic more real to us. So it's excellently done. And yeah, when we start seeing these glimpses of the dragon, just utterly terrifying. On the commentary track, Del Toro just loses his mind over this sequence. He's just He's like, oh, what of what I wouldn't give for a scene like this? You know, It's like, find someone in your life who loves you as much as del Toro loves these dragon sequences.
That is a good point you make about the way that it combines different types of horror in the same scene, for this greater than the sum of its parts effect that the horrors of the scene are both large and small, both sort of concrete and familiar, and then fantastical and magical. Yeah. Anyway, after this terrifying sequence, we see Valerian wake from a nightmare in a cold sweat at their camp in the forest.
And then here at the river beside the camp, Galen wakes up and he decides to go bathing in the water, which Valerian is also doing as well, and in this process he discovers that Valerian is not a young man but a young woman in disguise, and this is where
we get the story she fills him in. We find out that she has lived her whole life in public disguised as a boy to hide from the Vermicthrax sacrifice lottery, and Galen promises he'll help her keep her secret he's not going to tell anybody, and they have conversation where Valerian reveals also that it's only the daughters of the common people who are in danger. If you're rich enough, if you're the daughter of the king, you can avoid
the lottery. But of course Valerian's father is just a blacksmith's he's poor.
Now on the commentary track, they do point out like the obvious connection here to like the military draft, particularly you know, during the nineteen sixties in the United States, and so there's you know, there's this is one of the many moments in the film where there's actually some there's a lot of food for thought in the scenario that's being drawn out for us here. You know, it's it's it's fantasy, Yes, it's it's it's supposed to be centuries ago in this you know, somewhere a little adjacent
to history. But he does have you know, there are various comparison points for modern life in the modern world. Yeah.
Yeah. So also in the scene though Galen sees a vision in the water, his like amulet activates and he starts to use the water surface as a divining mirror, and he sees soldiers riding on the road and Tyrian, the captain of the King's guard, overlooking the camp, drawing his bow, and now he sees Tyrian has shot Hodge with an arrow. So Galen is like, no, no, no, and he runs to intervene, but it's too late. Galen finds Hodge dying of his wound, and Hodge instructs Galen.
He says, our master had dying wishes. Take this pouch of Ulrich's ashes, find the lake of burning Water and throw the ashes in, and then Hodge dies. Galen tries, I think, to resurrect him with magic, but this fails. So the stakes are up, and this sort of marks roughly the end of act one.
Ish yeah, yeah, I think so.
So Galen, Valerian and the rest of the Erlanders make their way back to Dragon Country, and again lots of absolutely gorgeous outdoor location shots here, the landscape, the rocks covered in moss, waterfalls, mountains of gray boulders, and on the way they pass by the Lair of vermathrax b Orative and Galen wants to go straight to it. I think they're like, well, let's go home first, but he's like, no, get me there right now. So they go to the
cave mouth. Galen is just he has so much zeal he just goes straight inside, against the warnings of Valerian and the others. It's very tense when he goes in. The atmosphere in the dragon's cave is wonderful, and he tries to call out vermath Rax, and there are these blasts of smoke and dust, but the dragon does not appear. So Galen comes back out of the cave, and he's been told by the others that there is only one
entrance and exit to the cave. There's no other way in or out, so seemingly kind of chastened by fear a little bit. Instead of going in to fight the dragon inside, he does a magical incantation to cause a boulder to fall down and plug the mouth of the cave. Again, we've been told this is the only entrance, but it's almost like he doesn't know his own strength, because it ends up causing a gigantic rock slide with all of these rocks coming down and piling up over the mouth
of the cave, and it seems to have worked. The mouth of the cave of Vermathrax is filled in with rocks and they say he's done.
It, all right, mission accomplished, kind of like a lucky first blow there.
All right, yeah, good thing, the movie's over. But it's not so. Back at the village, everybody is celebrating being freed of the dragon. There's a bonfire. They're burning the cult effigies of the dragon that they'd previously carried up the mountain in fear. Galen is telling stories to the children, and we meet Valerian's father, who is the village blacksmith, and Valerian finally now free of the dragon's curse. She in this scene puts on a dress and reveals to
everyone that she is a girl. And there's also a funny development in the scene, which is where we meet the Christian missionary and it's Ian McDermid and some of the villagers are talking. I think, I forget the villager's name, but it's the one who seems to be really into what the Christian is saying. He's like, don't you think it's strange that there's a holy man in the villa at the same time that the dragon was defeated?
Makes you think, yeah, I think this is the character Griel played by Albert Salmi who lived nineteen twenty eight through nineteen ninety. He was an American character actor. It was in a bunch of things. He was in Caddy Shack. He was on episodes of the original Twilight Zone and Night Gallery. And I think his voice is dubbed in this, but he has a very recognizable face.
Yeah, but record scratch. The party stops when soldiers come riding into the village on horseback, led by Tyrian, the captain of the King's guard, and they're like, we need to take Galen off to meet the king. The king wants to meet the wizard who delivered them all from the power of the dragon. And so we see Peter McNichol in front of the king trying to do demonstrations of magic. It's not going super well, Like he tries to levitate a table and just kind of knocks stuff.
All over the place a little bit nothing convincing.
Yeah, but this is where we hear the stories that I alluded to earlier, where the King explains like, look, we have had to kill the dragon before my brother tried to do it, and all it led to was horrible reprisals from the dragon. So we have to make sure did you really kill the dragon? Is it really dead? Galen promises, yes, it is, but the king is suspicious of him. He doesn't believe it, so he takes Galen prisoner, throws him in the dungeon, takes away his magical amulet.
And in the dungeon here Galen meets Princess Elspeth as she comes in, saying like, oh, I heard you muttering spells in Greek and Latin. It seems like that's not working because you know of your amulet. But I speak Greek and Latin too. And in this scene they sort of talk about what goes on with the dragon, and it's revealed that she is naive about how she's been avoiding the dragon's lottery. Galen fills her in like, yeah, your dad's covering for you, like your name's not going into the lottery.
Yeah, where she thinks, I've just I've had the same risk the whole time, and you know, I've been lucky. But he's like, no, that's that's complete complete bs that the fixes in obviously.
Yeah, And she goes directly to her father, King Cassiodorus and confronts him about this, and so he's he's about to sort of have to answer for misleading her about this, letting her think that she'd been competing fairly, not competing, and that she'd had the same fair risk as all the other girls. But instead they're interrupted. There's like the quaking of the earth and on no vermoth Rax is alive. And in the middle here Galen escapes the dungeon because
the princess comes and frees him. She's she's sort of like his revelations have rocked her world, and she's like, Okay, i gotta let him out of the dungeon and I'm in rebellion mode. Now Galen gets on a horse and runs away from the castle. Meanwhile, the villagers are led up the mountain in terror by the Christian monk, by brother Jacopus, and the Christian tells them this is not a dragon, it's Lucifer. But vermuth Rax comes out of the earth and faces off against the Christian wizard here
and it is no contest. There is a breath of hot wind and the dragon is so scary.
Oh my goodness, Yeah, this is this is another great sequence.
This is another sequence that del Toro loses his mind over because it's just just it's the way it's blocked, the way it shot, the way Vermathrax rises up out of these flaming pit, this flaming pit with it with these horns, like some sort of Satanic figure emerging out of hell, and then like it very quickly, I think becomes obvious to our Christian missionary friend here that he is out of his element, that this is not something that he's going to be over to be able to
overcome with his religion and his faith.
Yeah, he is. He is vanquished by the power of evil. So we cut to sometime later where we see Tyrian arrive at the house of Valerian and her father, and Tyrian and his men are searching the village for Galen. So they're going around the house like looking in baskets and stuff, being like the wizard hiding in here, and Tyrian threatens that you know what, because the dragon is now so angry that somebody tried to go kill him, there's going to need to be an early sacrifice ahead
of schedule. And you know what, now that everybody knows about your daughter, she's gonna have to be in the lottery too. And they tried, they try to find Galen, but they don't find him anywhere, so they leave and it turns out he was hiding in like a secret compartment under the anvil.
Yeah yeah, standard issue, I think.
Yeah. But here we get a forging the weapon sequence where we find about how we find out that Valerian's father has created a secret dragon slaying weapon that he's got like hidden in this cage that's hidden behind a waterfall. That this is really cool. It's like this giant spear that he's made, but he never had the courage to use it himself. And Galen sees it. He says it's a beautiful weapon, but he it will be useless unless
he unless he has the amulet back. That's the only way he can, like, I think, infuse it with the power it needs to fight the dragon.
Yeah.
Then we get the big lottery scene where they're gonna select who has to face the dragon next and who gets picked. When they pull the tiles out of the big pot, why it's Elsbeth, the princess. The king tries to say, like, no, no, no, my minister read the name on the tile wrong. Let us draw another tile, But all the tiles say Elsbeth. In fact, she arranged it that way because she thinks it's only fair given that she has been protected unfairly all these years past.
There's no changing it. She's now selected. The king is desperate, trying to talk anybody into helping him get out of this, Like he tries to talk Tyrian into saying, let's figure something else out. It can't be her, But Tyrian's like, yeah, it seems fair to me.
This is a great sequence, And I love how I mean, first of all, for plot reasons they do it this way, but also I think it plays into the overall theme of the picture. There's this sense that the lottery is this thing that, once it has been created, is no longer entirely in control, in the control of the king and his men, you know, Like there's this energy between the king and his men and the crowd, like they're channing, stir the tiles, stir the tiles with kind of urgency,
like you know, obviously like stir it up. You've got to make sure it's fair, got to make sure it's fair. Like it's this great kind of semi chaotic feeling that things could get out of hand very easily.
That's right. It's almost like the people themselves have a frenzy for the outcome of the lottery selection. So the king feels utterly helpless, like he can't really and it's happened in public, so he can't really undo it. So he thinks of the only other thing that occurs to him is we have to actually kill the dragon. So he catches Galen, having snuck back into the castle looking for his amulet. He catches him and he begs him, and he says, you can have your amulet back if
you kill the dragon and save Elspeth. So Galen is and given like official sanction. Now we see him and the blacksmith trying to like magically fire the dragon slayer weapon, like using the amulet to power up the spear. I love the following scene. By the way, there's a scene where Valerian goes up up the mountain to collect scales from the dragon to make for Galen a dragon scale
shield that he can use to face vermath Rax. Oh, and also while she's up there, she discovers there are baby dragons in the cave and they are also scary and must also be destroyed.
Yeah, they are not cute and they and I say this lovingly, they have some real Gromlin energy. They did. It's great. So this is definite puppetry used here, but to great effect.
These Vermras babies would be popping out of a toilet in another movie or another movie cover some VHS box art. But also here we get the culmination of a I think, if I'm going to be fully honest, a somewhat underdeveloped love story. But you know what, it's fine. It's fantasy adventure.
There's just kind of like acknowledge it, like we we're most of the way into this picture. We love each other, right, yeah, yeah, of course we.
Did, right. Galen and Valerian they announced their love with the in love with each other. Valerian initially thinks, oh, Galen, you must be in love with the princess, but he's like, no, no, no, I love you a good thing.
Yeah, silly doc. That relationship hasn't been established either.
This all leads up to the Great Final Confrontation, where where Elsbeth is taken up to be sacrificed to the dragon. Galen appears and announces his intention to kill the dragon first, and everybody runs away in fear, everyone but Tyrian, and Tyrian says, you know, this is the way, and if you intend to interfere with the sacrifice, I will stop you.
And they fight, and initially Galen is not a fighter, he's not trained to, you know, fight a captain of the King's guard, but through a combination of pluck and luck, he does prevail in this duel.
He also has a magical spear weapon, which he doesn't completely know how to use, but it is a magical weapon.
So he's got like a plus three on this baby exactly. So the princess, Yeah, it's funny. It's like it's a hand to hand combat battle between what would you say, like a level six fighter versus a level two sorcerer. Yeah, but yeah, he has a magical weapon, so it makes up the difference. Ah, But it was kind of all for nothing here because the princess determined to be a sacrifice.
She's like, no, it's got to happen. She runs into the cave and then Galen runs in after her, and in a really shockingly unexpected and horrifying scene, the princess is in there just being like eaten up by baby dragons. They're just like tearing off her limbs and eating them.
Yeah, they have what They've killed her and are now like taking her apart.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, these little like disgusting little gromlins, and yeah, it's really a daring choice for again, a Disney co produced fantasy answer to Star Wars picture. I remember the Yeah, the director in commentary with Del Toro kind of said, you know, there's a lot of stuff we got away with in this in part because we were making a film abroad and you know, so far from from studio heads,
and so they you know, they weren't getting dailies. They didn't know that, you know, we had, you know, the way we were shooting some of these choices.
Well, the movie is the more remarkable for it these are choices.
Yeah.
Yeah, So Galen goes in and fights the baby dragons and he defeats them pretty easily, but then he goes deeper into the cave and finds a burning lake. Now that meant something to me when I saw it, but apparently Galen doesn't really remember at this point, like, oh, yeah, that's significant. It will come up again. But there's a
big confrontation here between Galen and Vermathrax. They have their first big fight and the dragon in the scene is finally revealed in all of its hideous glory and wow, Rob, would you like to say anything about what what vermuthrax looks like when revealed?
Oh? I mean, there's so many ways to approach it. I mean the simple thing to say is like, this is a real dragon, like you feel. Yeah, you can put your mind in the appreciating the special effects and trying to see all the things they've done to bring this dragon to life. But for most of this it just feels like a real creature. And they make so many wonderful choices in the design to make that possible, things like making sure that is a quadruped that it
doesn't have like four limbs plus wings. Its front limbs are wings and therefore when it's crawling around in the cave, it's moving like a bat on.
The ground, the bat comparison. That's great. The way the wings are folded as it crawls and ugh yeah yeah.
And then the way they've shape the head. A lot of a lot of folks have pointed out like it has this kind of brow, so it has a lot of like I want to say, personality, but personality befitting a great beastly dragon like this. You know, there is an animal intelligence there.
It reminds me a bit of a skexis.
Yeah, yeah, I think it's a solid comparison.
So they fight and they there's a bunch that goes on in this fight. They get their jabs in, it blows fire and all that, but it's a stalemate here. The fight is not fully resolved. And the next day Valerian goes up the mountain and she finds Galen unconscious on the rocks. She wakes him and takes him back, but he is still alive, and so is the dragon. So at this point, Valerian's father talks them into leaving or Land. He's like, you know, y'all are young, you're
in love. Just live in peace, go somewhere else and share your love, he says. He says, magic magicians. It's all fading from the world, all dying out. That makes me happy. That means the dragons will be eyeing out too. And they try to leave. They take their stuff and they start loading up a boat to go live their life somewhere else. But then something changes. There's a darkness growing in the sky and it is a total solar eclipse.
And here's your eclipse. Tie in the eclipse. I don't know if maybe I miss something about this, if they said it had any particular magical effect on the dragon. But one thing it does seem to do is cause Galen to remember that his master Ulrich wanted his ashes to be thrown into the burning lake, and he remembers there was a lake of fire inside the Dragon's cave.
Yeah, I was. My wife watched this movie with me for rewatch it. She had seen it before many years ago, and afterwards we were like, yeah, did anybody say there was going to be an eclipse? Is that factored into the plot at all? It does very much feel like and then a total So a total solar eclipse happens because it looks awesome.
It does look awesome, and there is a total solar clips going on for the entire rest of the showdown with the Dragon.
Yeah, it's like it's a solid twenty minutes of totality.
Yeah, So Galen does remember this. He does as he was instructed. He goes back up to the Dragon's cave, goes inside, throws the ashes into the water, and in a cradle of green fire, Ulric is resurrected. He's back. The power of the Dragon's fiery lake like brought him back from the dead, at least temporarily so he can face the dragon with them.
I have to say, I wasn't sure this was gonna happen. It's easy to in retrospect expect this to happen, but Ulric's death early in the picture just felt so final and so yeah, Mundane like it just the film worked. The trick worked here, and I really wasn't expecting him to come back.
Meanwhile, you know, back down in the village, this is when one of the guys is converted to Christianity, the gray old guy, and he's baptizing everybody. Yeah, and then we get the final showdown. So now it is vermath Rax versus the three of our heroes, Galen, Valerian and Ulrich, and so Ulrich goes up on like a mountain peak and he's casting down lightning bolts at the dragon and
the dragon is dive bombing him. Vermathrax is like flying by the dragon in the scene, has a kind of jet fighter quality to him, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, And I believe it was one of the extras with Phil Tippit talking about though I it might have been Phil Tippit. But I don't think Phil Tippitt did these effects sequences so much. I mean, he was I think therefore it, but he was. I think he did with some of the other stuff more. But they did talk about how, like most of the scenes of the dragon in flight, you're not getting that flapping, sort of labored takeoff effect that we've seen in other dragon films.
This is a dragon like swooping down from peaks and indeed flying with this kind of like fighter jet kind of severity, so we are very effective.
It's almost like you can hear a jet engine roaring as he goes by, and he goes by so fast. A lot of other movie dragons have more of a helicopter quality, you know, they just kind of like hover around somewhere. This one like swoops, he goes really fast. And what Galen and Valiering have been told to do is to smash the magical amulet at the right time. They're going to know when it's the right time, and ultimately Ulric is snatched up by the dragon. He's being
carried away. They know, okay, it's the time. Now they smash the amulet, and this apparently has like a detonation effect on Ulric. That's like the detonator for Ulric's resurrected form, and it blows up the dragon. The eclipse ends, Vermuthrax is dead. There's a big, gory, charred skeleton laying on
the ground, and who gets credit. Well, they bring the king in, They like bring him up in a in a carriage and they hand him a sword and he stands there and he just kind of pokes the corpse of the dragon and they're like congratulations.
Yeah. Yeah, So he ends up appropriating the church, the kingship, the rulers, as Del Toro puts it, the man co ops everything completely, completely claims all the credit for the victory over the dragon.
Yeah that's right. The now baptized villagers come up and say, ah, just the church that saved us from the dragon. But there's also a nice ending where we see Galen and Valeria and they're still in love. They've survived this and they get to travel on together and who knows what kind of adventures of pagan sorcery they can get up to in this rapidly christianizing land.
The end, yeah, their final there's this final bit where they sort of accidentally summon a horse, like a really beautiful horse, which is you know, it's it's a little bit kind of like cheesey ended on a nice note, but also I like it. I was talking about this with my wife. It's she was like, yeah, it's kind of like there is still magic, it's just a different
type of magic, you know. And and so the world, at least for these two characters, is not going to be devoid of magic, but maybe magic ends up taking a different form.
Maybe it increasingly looks less and less like hidden forces operating and more and more like luck. Yeah, anyway, that's what I have on Dragon Slayer. But I'm glad you picked this one, Rob. I really really liked it. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean credit to my wife for because I was I was looking at a number of things for this week and she was like, well, we got to watch an Eclipse movie do Dragon Slayer? And so I was like like, well maybe, and she's like, I'll watch it with you. I'm like, okay, So she doesn't always always watch him with me. It's a lot to ask. So so yeah, this was a lot of fun. Oh and you know, I forgot to mention and mention the
special effects. I do want to call out that one of the main individuals credited with the design of the dragon and also the typeface was man by the name of David Bunnett, who you know, I think also worked in like the video game industry, but yeah, he It's even said that if you look at a picture of this guy, the dragon kind of looks like a self caricature, like there's sort of elements of his face, like his brow and the dragon. So anyway, you know, it's a
credit where credits do there? He had a hand in designing this tremendous dragon whoa Verma thrax pajorative.
A finer name has never been conjured.
All right, we'll go and close it up here then, but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Do you have memories of seeing Dragon Slayer for the first time, be that in a theater, on video or like on a Sunday afternoon on A and E. I think they were they aired it there. I remember seeing promos for it. Write in. We would love to hear from you. Just a reminder that Weird House Cinema is the Friday episode that we published in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
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