Dragon Crusaders (2011)

Review by Sean Patterson



After playing two weeks of The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim nearly non-stop, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that I popped in the Dragon Crusaders DVD I've had sitting around for a while. While the movie didn't quite sate my appetite for more dragon battles, it was a fun movie with which to take a break from killing dragons on my own.
A group of knights returning from the crusades stumbles upon a small town under attack by pirates. The help dispatch the raiders and then board the pirate ship to save a beautiful young woman who was kidnapped. When they do save her, they find she has cursed the pirates by using some enchantment that turns anyone who has spilt blood into gargoyles. Unfortunately, that means the knights themselves are affected as well. This spirals the story into a melange of fantasy questing to find and destroy an evil sorcerer-dragon and break the spell while their pure hearts stave off their impending gargoyledom.
The movie only has two modes: talking and fighting. The talking tends to get tiresome, and although some of the characters are quite good, I lost track of the story about halfway through. But that's ok, since those long scenes of expository dialogue don't seem to matter much. What does matter is the fighting.
It appears the filmmakers (Asylum Films, makers of movie-parodies such as 2012: Ice Age and Almighty Thor) had a pretty good fight choreographer on hand, as the fight scenes are fast and brutal, with a dance-like flourish usually reserved for kung-fu movies. Part of the reason the fights work so well is the editing. The cuts are so fast that I'll admit it would be hard to tell if the fighting were bad. While this does make things exciting, there were a few times the cuts were too fast and I found myself a little dizzy.
Admittedly, there isn't much here for hardcore horror fans. There isn't much gore, but there are zombies...and gargoyles, knights, witches, sorcerers, dragons, and a hot female rogue. It's all glued together with Syfy channel-quality CGI with which the actors interact at least as well as the actors in the Star Wars prequels. I'm not giving the actors their due, though, as they do a remarkable job acting out such outlandish scenarios. In fact, it comes through that everyone involved in the production had lots of fun making it. That sense of fun and light-hearted heroism lend the movie a good, easy-going personality.
I'm surprised that such a mish-mash of fantasy tropes works, but Dragon Crusaders is a nice diversion for those burnt-out on more serious fantasy.