Beowulf [1999]

A would-be epic shot in Romania by Graham Baker [The Final Conflict, Impulse], this feels like a slightly more healthily-budgeted version of the sort of quickie Charles Band or Albert Pyun have been making for years. The setting is a mock-Dark Age pseudo-future, with few gadgets and an American idea of ethnic diversity [plus a terrible rock score from Juno Reactor] to distinguish it from the past, and the script mutates the Anglo-Saxon epic poem into a castle-bound remake of Predator. Christopher Lambert, still clinging to the rim of the toilet into which Rutger Hauer flushed his career, is the white-haired, acrobatic warrior who hacks his way through a besieging army to the border castle where Hrothgar [Oliver Cotton] commands a company that dwindles nightly because a CGI Grendel is picking off his men one by one. There's a relatively complex backstory about Hrothgar's murdered brute of a son-in-law, the resentful love of his head man Roland [Gotz Otto] for his daughter Kyra [Rhona Mitra], the death of his wife and a blonde succubus [Layla Roberts] who appears to him in erotic dreams. It turns out that the succubus is Grendel's mother, and after Beowulf has hacked her son apart she morphs into a manga-style vagina dentata bat-spider-crab creature but is swiftly seen off by CGI fires. It offers amusingly ridiculous moments, courtesy of the sultry Mitra [model for the computer game character Lara Croft] as a well-spoken princess in low-cut leather gear, but is mostly a dreary, murky tour of the castle with frequent busy but unimpressive swordfights.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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