Dragon Storm and Dragon Fighter



Last night Sci Fi showed their latest made-for-cable opus, Dragon Storm (2003). These day b-movie makers seem to love dragons, largely because they are ready excuse to include jets of fire and explosions in a medieval setting. Dragon Storm is no exception, with plenty of explosions and countless slow-motion shots of people on fire falling over tables.

In this case the dragons are alien creatures, they fall to earth inside meteorites. After an initial wave lands near the castle of an evil king (John Rhys-Davies) the king flees and takes refuge with a rival king. The rival king sends a loner huntsman, his tomboy daughter (Playboy playmate Angel Boris!), an alchemist, a Chinese guy, and a woman who owns her own ballista to kill the dragons.




Dragon Storm was shot in Bulgaria, and was obviously very low budget. The sets are nondescript, the extras listless, and there is much evidence that flubbed lines were kept in the final cut simply because there wasn't time to do more takes. Despite all this, Dragon Storm isn't all that bad. The dragon effects are reasonably good, and the scenes where our heroes hunt the dragons are fairly exciting. I do wish that the editing had been a little tighter. No matter how many dragons our heroes kill, there always seem to be three dragons flying around.

Sci Fi also repeated Dragon Fighter (2003), a much more typical Sci Fi original movie. It's awful, with interminable scenes of Dean Cain and the rest of the cast bickering while being stalked by a cloned dragon in an underground base. Sci Fi seems to be intent on showing this exact same movie with the monster played by a giant variety of every reptile and insect God's green earth provides.

Posted: Sun - January 25, 2004 at      

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