WILLOW (1988) Moat monsters!!! Sort of... Another one of those movies I saw way back when, didn't remember much of, and decided to revisit recently. There are a lot of movies I'd like to give another look to, but I picked this one because I remembered it had a moat monster in it. Moat monsters! I love moat monsters, more movies need moat monsters in them. Having given Willow that second look, I have to say that it sucks. Oh, how it sucks. Total McMovie plot, one of the worst on-screen romances in movie history (curiously resulting in an off-screen marriage and, maybe not so curiously, divorce), gay French brownies as comic relief, one of Val Kilmer's worst performances ever, lamest Darth Vader-style villain ever...George Lucas, what were you thinking? I mean, this has many of the basic elements of a movie like Star Wars, but a list of ingredients does not make a recipe. It is an age of swords and midgets, where the evil Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh) has dispatched her goons (led by skull-masked General Kael...more on this guy's name in a minute) to fetch every pregnant woman in the land because its has been prophecized that one of these babies is gonna bring her down. Augh, the Prophecy of the Chosen One who will Lead Us Out Of Bondage, yuck. Minor twist: since we know this movie isn't going to have the patience to show this kid growing up and defeating Bavmorda, it's a good bet that she'll be brought down merely by her attempts to capture the baby, so really, the prophecy could've been referring to anything. I'll bet that back then, there were people who made prophecies like that all the time, toppling rulers left and right by playing on their superstition. So one of these captured pregnant women manages to have her baby (who Bears The Mark) spirited away and sent down the river in a basket. Yes, this sounds familiar, but I'll bet that back then, babies in baskets were swept away by rivers all the time. You know, you go out to the river with your baby in the basket, you set down the baby while you're doing whatever people do in the river...next thing you know, baby's gone. It happens. The baby is found by Willow (Warwick Davis, the only actor that doesn't completely suck in this movie), a member of a diminuitive, apparently much-hated race everybody calls Pics, and you know it's not a term of endearment. Willow for some reason kinda reminded me of Fry on Futurama but with a wife and two kids - a nice guy who tries to do the right thing but is irresponsible enough to just send that baby back down the river. Willow hopes to be the village "wizard"'s apprentice, who mixes charlatanism and leadership skills to apparently benign political effect for the conned villagers, who dance merrily about (yes, there's an all-midget dance number). This human baby causes problems though, and one demon-dog attack later, Willow and a few others are sent off to bring the baby to...well, the first tall person he comes across. That first tall person would be Madmartigan (Val Kilmer), who happens to be imprisoned, hanging around in a cage, vulture-bait. With no regard for his own dignity, he says anything to get out of that cage, ultimately (after a very long time) settling on agreeing to take care of the baby if he's let out, which Willow agrees to. Then brownies steal the baby from him, and that's how those gay French brownies got into the picture. One of these brownies hits him in the face with a bag of pixie dust, which causes him to fall in love with Sorsha, one of Bavmorda's chief goons, played by Joanne Whalley. (apparently, pixie dust is actually Ecstasy) This might, conceivably, have been funny if handled in a way which allowed Sorsha to keep her marginal dignity, but as it turns out, Sorsha was just afraid of being loved, and Madmartigan breaks down her defenses and melts her heart and I was so swept away by their romantic bliss I wanted to barf. Kilmer provides a few laughs, but four or five groans for every one of those, like one scene where he has to dress up as and pretend to be a woman, or another where he rolls downhill inside a giant snowball. He's being a good sport but he clearly looks like he'd rather be elsewhere. The action scenes are pretty tame, only getting particularly violent at the very end, and all that violence is most of the appeal of this kind of movie. That's the inherent problem with these PG-rated sword-and-sorcery flicks - they're too gentle. General Kael, despite having a scary skull mask, scarcely does anything menacing at all, even getting bitch-slapped by Bavmorda in one scene. Never mind that the battle tactic at the end would never work, except against a castleful of defenders that all need glasses. The effects in Willow are impressive, featuring the first "morph" in the movies ever, quite a big deal at the time. The moat monster is the "Siskbert" (or, depending on who you ask, the "Ebersisk"), a fire-breathing two-headed creature, ugly and kinda dorky looking with those overbites. It doesn't really live in the moat, though...a troll turned into it and it fell into the moat, which is more of a puddle. Siskbert, General Kael...I don't know what the makers of Willow had in mind while they were naming (ugly/villainous) things here after movie critics, but surely, it couldn't have endeared this movie to them, since they all panned it. Directed by Ron "Master of Vanilla" Howard, Willow takes over two long hours to get to its overdue conclusion. It ends with two midgets seeing each other from across a meadow, and then running at each other with their arms outstretched, crying out each other's names. A lot of people have fond memories of this one - but then, a lot of people haven't seen it in a long, long time. Every one of these movies I see reminds me of how much Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings movies kick ass, so far anyway. BACK TO THE W's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE