Jabberwock: Dragon Siege
Jabberwock: Dragon Siege DVD (Chelsea)
I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t love Dragons. The mystery, magic, horror and terror that giant winged serpents and reptiles instil reduces, and returns, each of us to our seven year old selves, to a time in our lives when we still believed that anything was possible, and where the line between fantasy and reality was still blurred. I’m not ashamed to admit that I still believe in Dragons, that I still believe in a world where fantasy means that anything is possible. And, that’s why, I don’t believe in Jabberwock, or more specifically, why I won’t be watching it again. Set in either the dark ages or medieval Europe, it’s hard to tell as the film isn’t exactly specific, although I’m guessing that it’s supposed to be closer to the former, although some of the weapons, clothing and armour used would tend to suggest it’s the later unless they were just used in the film as props to carry the story forward without any thought being given to accuracy or the five hundred year gap is history between when I’m guessing the film is set and when said props actually came into common usage. Think I’m being pedantic? A little too picky maybe? Folks, that’s just the tip of the iceberg, trust me. The central idea of the film, the story around which it revolves, is that the Lewis Carroll poem, ‘Jabberwocky’, is actually an ancient prophecy about the beasts that used to terrorise the sky before the Romans (yes, that’s right folks, Roman Legions used to hunt Dragons. Apparently) hunted them to extinction bar one egg. An egg that’s magically brought back to life in a lightning storm. Actually, that last bit, the lightning storm animating the egg is kind of cool, just like it was in ‘Monkey’. Anyway, I digress, a poem written toward the tail end of the nineteenth century around a thousand years after the film is set, is actually a warning, told as bedtime story to frighten children, from pre-history. See where I’m going? Then there’s the dialogue, which is awful and the cast, who apart from Tahmoh ‘Helo’ Penikett, aren’t really up to much, but then again, they don’t really have much to work with. There’s so much wrong, continuity, clichéd characters and relationships, the “comic” relief, I could go on and on and on, but it’s probably easier if I just break ‘Jabberwork’ down to it’s limited core appeal and audience. If you’ve been desperately seeking a low budget fifties style B-Movie that could, and should, have served as a warm up feature in a sixties drive-in theatre about a monster laying siege to an ancient village, then this my friend, is definitely the film that you, and you alone, have been looking for…. Tim Mass Movement
