Adventures of a Teenage Dragonslayer review (DVD) ★★

Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Hunter Allan, Lea Thompson, Wendie Malick,
Abigail Victor, Eric Lutes, Jordan Reynolds | Written by Jamie Nash
UK Certification U | UK RRP £9.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 91 minutes | Directed by Andrew Lauer

The poster and cover art for Adventures of a Dragonslayer leave a lot be desired when you actually sit down and watch it. They make it looks as though the film, an action-comedy for all the family, is a colourful and rather epic romp, but this could not be further from the truth, as it's a dark, grimy and incredibly bland 90 minutes of visuals for the eyes that do not make up quite the feast that you may be expecting, though this lack in eye-friendliness will not completely detract from the experience for young audiences.

The story follows the adventure (yes, singular) of teenager Arthur and his closest of friends who collectively refer to themselves as the Knights of the Square Table. Consumed by the trading card game Elixir Quest (think a sword and sorcery version of Pokemon), the friends spend their post-school afternoons playing around in sewers. Yes, because teenagers like to knock around in sewers, right? Uh huh. But, in the midst of their foul-smelling fun, they stumble upon a blue-skinned (or unconvincingly painted) troll in the sewers and discover that what they thought was a fantasy world of dragons and magic in the card game is actually reality, and they soon find themselves brewing potions and standing in the warpath of an evil dragon with a taste for setting things ablaze with its breath.

There are a few laughs but most of the humour is cliché – it may be entertaining to the 8-12 year-old demographic having said that, but even so it's pretty restrained on the gags. It's interesting to see Lea Thompson back in a feature film, but she's really not done anything of note since her portrayal of Lorraine in the Back to the Future trilogy, which is quite unfortunate. When you do eventually get to see Darksmoke the dragon, his computer-generated design is far from impressive, but then again this is a very low-budget film, so I do think the film-makers did a decent job with the money and technology they had at their disposal in their efforts to make an entertaining movie, but it's still an overly ambitious concept for what they could have ever pulled off. While I like the intentions of this corny little film, there are so many better out there with the same target audience, especially involving dragons, so there really isn't much point in checking this out.

EXTRAS None.

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