...and end up surprisingly good movies.
Stan Lee's Harpies is not one of them. **WARNING: SPOILERS FOLLOW**
Let's see...where to start?
Ah, yes -- The Harpies themselves. You'd think, given that they are the title characters of the film, that there would be great time and care and attention given their design. Instead we get abominable CGI, and the live action harpies looked like emo girls wearing badly-done halloween wings.
The Action Sequences. When the harpies attack, it doesn't show us anything that convinces us that there's a battle going on. You see a bunch of people waving their swords, then you see a shot of the harpies giggling and flailing their arms. Yeah, real convincing.
The battle scenes, such as they are, show a bunch of guys bumping into each other with swords drawn. One poor nameless extra got skewered by a sword, and when he fell down, he fell at an angle showing that he was holding the sword between his arm and torso, rather than sticking out of his trunk, as it should have been.
In the museum, we're supposed to believe that these mercenaries are not only bad shots, but that an ancient cup, hit by a bullet, is just going to fall as if it were knocked over, and protect our hero.
The Casting Not too much wrong here, other than they're rather unseasoned and ill-suited for a fantasy film. Also, they got the cast wrong on here. Scott Valentine (yes, the guy from Family Ties who said "Ay!") played Vorian.
There are other stretches of the imagination, people jumping when they're supposed to be "sucked in" or "thrown clear" of the blast, etc. But this movie was just "That Which Should Not Be Made" on so many levels. My friend and I made better student films than this in college. Did anyone notice the dearth of slavic names in the crew? I thought only the Italians made ridiculous movies ("Naked Gladiators" and "Texas Rangers 2020", anyone?).
Ah well, I suppose that if they enjoyed what they were doing, that's what counts. I didn't.
