Pulpmovies Reviews

If you take a classic story, remove it to a post-apocalypse setting, throw in a couple of western clichés and add a few martial arts sequences you may end up with a film that is bad, but fun enough to be watchable.

However, Beowulf goes a stage further by hacking the story completely to pieces so that, instead of the classic tale of heroes, honour and monsters we have some nonsense about Beowulf (Christoper Lambert) being damned and having to seek out and fight evil in order to avoid becoming evil combined with a revenge-but-not-really-revenge plot featuring Grendel’s Mother (Played by former Playboy Playmate Layla Roberts… ’nuff said) And then there is the inevitable love interest with Hrothgar’s daughter, Kyra (Rhona Mitra).

Christopher Lambert appeared in Mortal Kombat… Rhona Mitra was the original live action model for Lara Croft. The trailer proudly announces that Beowulf is from the makers of Mortal Kombat. The soundtrack is the type of repetitive techno beat that sounds like it belongs in a video game. If I wanted to watch a video game I’d go and stand in an amusement arcade. This is supposed to be a film, dammit!

And the nylon body bags… Okay, so the setting is some sort of unexplained post-apocalyptic future and we have the usual anachronisms of pseudo-medieval weapons (most of which look too bulky, unwieldy or blunt to be of any real use) and elderly looking electrical equipment. But with this sort of setting, it tends to be implied or (in the case of Beowulf) taken for granted that the pre-apocalypse stuff can no longer be made, is wearing out and is therefore intrinsically valuable. So the idea that the people of the a besieged outpost would still be zipping up their dead in these things before dropping them into an incinerator - especially since Grendel is still around increasing the mortality rate on a nightly basis - simply doesn’t make sense.

Hrothgar’s kingdom has been changed to a besieged outpost. Inside is Grendel, travelling unseen through the techno-medieval corridors of the outpost and nightly killing off the occupants in the manner remeniscient of Alien. Outside is an army who appear to believe that the evil can be contained by executing (by means of an unfeasibly large straight edged razor) anyone who tries to leave. This is another plot device that makes no sense and appears to be there simply because the scriptwriters were unable to come up with a more convincing reason for keeping Hrothgar’s forces in the outpost. What does this besieging army expect to happen once everyone in the outpost is dead? This appears to be what they are expecting, so are they intending to keep the place quarantined forever? Hasn’t it occurred to any of them that Grendel might get hungry later and leave the outpost? Who sent them?

The besieging army is symptomatic of one of the major problems with this film - if not the major problem. Inconsistent plot devices and illogical settings are put in front of us without even a vague attempt at an explanation.

I’m an easily pleased sort of person and I’ll swallow most nonsense if it fits into the film, but here… nothing fits. Throughout the film there is a sense that someone has said “There was this cool idea in such-and-such a movie, lets chuck it in.” The resulting film is a chaotic mess of genres, styles and storylines.

Then there is the monster himself. Grendel is basically a man in a suit… so far so cheap and, with a bit of moody lighting and some fast cuts it would have been possible to get away with this (for me, at least). But no… someone found the “purple fog” button on his CGI console so we are treated to a monster that parades it’s cheapness in the tackiest manner possible.

That said, the film does have a couple of good moments. The first action scene in which Beowulf rescues Pendra (Patricia Velazquez) from the besieging army is fun in an exploitative, over the top kind of way…

I’ll rephrase that - the film has one good moment.

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