BEOWULF I liked it. Stay away! Happy happy, joy joy, just when I was starting to give up hope on seeing a movie which looked like it was gonna be crap but pleasantly surprised me, I catch two in one night. Their reputations be damned, I liked this movie AND Space Truckers, and I sure as hell didn't expect to like Space Truckers. Loosely based on the ages-old epic, Beowulf is set in what the back of the box calls a "techno-futile" future. After the initial gigglefit subsided, I couldn't help but imagine a Star Trek movie where the Borg goes back in time to assimilate medieval Europe. The tag line would, of course, be "Resistance Is Feudal". I know, that's terrible, but at least this box didn't lie to me. This is a far-off future where the secrets of old technology are, for the most part, either locked away or have disappeared altogether, although a few seemingly random things have stuck around (natural gas, public address systems, electronic telescopes). There's this one fortress surrounded by soldiers who kill anyone who tries to leave, because the people within the fortress are beset by a demonic beast which seemingly cannot be killed (I don't think they ever actually call it Grendel in the movie), and...well, I was never really clear as to why those surrounding the fortress want to kill anyone who leaves. By the time they pack up and leave, they seem like they were trying to help. I guess they thought that the escapees were carrying the beast with them, in some way. So one day a white-haired warrior named Beowulf (Christopher Lambert) frees one escaped girl (Patricia Velazquez from the recent Mummy movies) from their grasp in a battle scene that's heavy on the backflips and VERY funky-looking weapons. But she'd rather take her chances with the mob than go back, and she runs back to them, where she's promptly hacked up. Beowulf goes to the fortress alone, and meets up with their leader, Hrothgar (Oliver Cotton) who's desperate enough to be the only person to initially believe Beowulf's claim that he's here to fight the creature. People die, Lambert does a few more backflips, and we see some more seriously funky weapons and costumes. Now, this is not a great movie. But I found it to be a lot of fun, at least when it's not taking itself TOO seriously. The action scenes are a real hoot; they're kind of Xena-inspired, defying gravity and at one point having one man handily defeat an entire army. But they're bloodier than anything you'll see on Xena, and man, those are some funky weapons! I particularly liked the baton that turns into a knife that turns into a flail, and Hrothgar's weapon, which puts the "broad" in "broadsword". I liked the suits of armor and other props too, like the army's guillotine-like device which looks like a giant folding straight razor. No surprise that this was filmed in Romania, so they could spend the rest of the budget on props. Maybe a little more spent on monster effects would've been appreciated, but still, I do dig the props. Christopher Lambert is not much of an actor, and I've never understood how he's managed to ride the success of Highlander for all these years. But he's better than usual here, possibly because he gets to wear a fun costume and bleach his hair white. The rest of the cast is surprisingly good; Oliver Cotton is sort of a lightweight version of King Osric in Conan The Barbarian, and Rhona Mitra has an intense, icy sexuality as his confrontational daughter. Lots of cleavage in every scene she's in, yummy. Unfortunely, plot-wise, she has very little to do; three times she insists that this time, she's going to fight alongside the men, and every time, she's basically sent to her room. I also liked Gotz Otto as Roland, Beowulf's rival for Mitra's heart (she loves him as a brother - dude, give up!) - the inevitable romance between her and Beowulf is the film's weakest aspect, since Roland seems more interesting. On the downside, the horrible techno music sounds like it's from a video game (I don't understand how anybody can listen to this without being on drugs, which must be why drugs are so popular at raves, but then, a lot of people say the same thing about my beloved metal, so I don't let it bother me). Brent Jefferson Lowe's character, on a jive-talkin' scale of one to ten, is about a six. This makes him a jive-talkin' black dude, and you'd think that far off into the techno-futile (heh) future, concepts like "jive-talkin'" would have long since run their course. The movie comes close to nudity a few times, but VERY narrowly avoids it, once so narrowly (the camera pans up a naked torso high enough to see the very bottom of the breasts, and then cuts away) it just pissed me right off. As for the creature design, it's pretty mundane, but director Graham Baker keeps it wisely semi-hidden in an optical distortion. There's a second creature later in the film (if you're familiar with the poem, you know what it is), rather goofily elaborate but still pretty cool, once you get past the not-quite-Jurassic-Park CGI, and the fact that its voice (even before it turns into a big monster) seems like it's been looped by someone else. Beowulf is awkward in a lot of ways (written by a couple of first-timers), but I had a lot of fun watching it. Maybe I wouldn't like it so much if I hadn't subjected myself to The St. Francisville Experiment, Phantasm IV: Oblivion, and Black Evil in the past few days. But like it I did; I make no promises about you. 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