• Directed by Jeff Burr
• Written by Benjamin Carr
• Starring
  • Toran Caudell
  • Russ Tamblyn
  • Michael Ansara
  • Amber Tamblyn
  • Ian Abercrombie
• Produced by Mark Headley, Paul Paunescu and Vlad Paunescu
• Executive produced by Donald Kushner and Peter Locke (and Charles Band, uncredited)

Although it is part and parcel of the cranked-out-in-Romania kidvids co-produced by the Kushner-Locke Co. and Full Moon Entertainment in the late ’90s, Johnny Mysto: Boy Wizard almost rises above the production strictures and obligations that characterize its cohort productions. For one thing, almost none of the supporting characters are played by local Romanian actors who have to be dubbed in post-production to be intelligible; instead, we’ve got such possible familiar faces as Russ Tamblin (Twin Peaks), his daughter Amber (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and its sequel), Michael Ansara (several episodes of various Star Trek series), Ian Abercrombie (Full Moon’s Test Tube Teens From the Year 2000 and several episodes of Seinfeld), and professional fat kid Patrick Renna (The Sandlot, The Big Green and Moonbeam’s Beanstalk). Okay, it’s not an awe-inspiring list by objective standards, but compared with the standard hopeful up-and-comers who usually fly the Atlantic to shoot these things at Castel Film in Bucharest, this is practically an all-star cast.

The movie opens up in the past, as an urchin girl named Sprout (Amber Tamblyn) is pursued through a forest by mounted soldiers in medieval armor. She makes it safely to her hiding place, the underground workshop of the wizard Merlin (Ian Abercrombie), with her burden: a mirror. Merlin, speaking ominously about the perils and dangers that beset them which can only be conquered by a hero from the future, does some magical flashy thingie with the mirror, and sits back to wait for a savior.

Well, that’s one way to clean out those pesky cobwebs…

Flash-forward to the middle American neighborhood as habitually represented by the Castel Film standing suburban cul-de-sac set. Johnny Mysto (Toran Caudell) — and yes, “Mysto” is his last name — is an aspiring magician in his early teens. He puts on magic shows in his back yard for the neighborhood kids, assisted by his best friend Glenn (Patrick Renna) and little sister Andrea (Sarah Haseltine), but his tricks keep falling flat, to the derision of the neighborhood tough Bunko (Eric Countryman) and his posse. On the particular weekend on which our story takes place, Johnny and Andrea’s parents are off to see the Grand Canyon, leaving them in the charge of housekeeper Rose (Magda Catone, the sole exception to the “no dubbed Romanian supporting roles” rule mentioned above).

Johnny is naturally discouraged; after all, it all looks so easy for his idle, Blackmoor the Magician (Russ Tamblin), who plies his trade on cable access TV. Under Glenn’s encouragement, Johnny decides to ask Blackmoor — as one magician to another — for some tips and encouragement.

“And for my next trick, I’m need my amazing sideways hat!”

But Blackmoor turns out to be an irritable has-been who sports a Brooklyn accent when he lets his stage demeanor slip. At the urging of his assistant, though, he gives Johnny a “Dumbo’s magic feather” sort of knickknack that he pulls at random out of an envelope from his small stack of fan mail: an ornate ring. Heartened, Johnny goes home.

The problem is, the ring really is magic. It starts glowing in the middle of the night, and Johnny gets up and finds that he can do the pour-water-into-a-newspaper trick perfectly. The next morning, he pulls a forty-foot rope of tied-together handkerchiefs out of his mouth, plus Glenn’s watch. At the magic show he puts on that afternoon, he makes a disappearing coin reappear in Bunko’s pocket, and then displays Bunko’s magicked-off boxer shorts with a flourish. He even makes Andrea disappear in his “disappearing lady” box.

And then he can’t get her back.

“So if you don’t mind my saying, I can see you’re out of aces…”

He goes back to Blackmoor, who admits the ring was just something he pulled out of his mail. Together they visit the address on the envelope, where an old woman (Pat Crawford Brown, one of Hollywood’s professional old ladies) explains that yes, the ring really is magical, passed down in her family from mother to daughter for hundreds of years, and the only way to find out how to bring Andrea back is to travel back in time to ask its original owner, Merlin. (Why she sent the ring to a cable-access hack in the first place is left unexplained.)

This is where the movie takes a nosedive into the rut worn by the rest of the Kusher-Locke kidvid co-productions, as the plot was pretty clearly dictated by the need to use the Romanian castle and medieval costumes that have become so familiar to anyone who’s watched more than a few of these movies. (The castle gets its best screentime in Spellbreaker: Secret of the Leprechauns (1996) and Shadow of the Knight (1999).) Johnny and Blackmoor travel back in time, run from guards, meet up with sprout, and save Merlin from the clutches of the evil usurper Malfeasor (Michael Ansara in pale greasepaint and latex scars). Blah, blah, blah… Somehow, even though their mission expands to save all of Arthurian England (and possibly the world) from the depthless and motiveless evil of Malfeasor, Johnny still acts as if saving his sister in the future is still the most important part of the whole enterprise. Given that the script is credited to Benjamin Carr, though, I should be happy that it all doesn’t revolve around some contrived rule-based system of magic and curses.

If you can name more than three movies that feature this castle, you’re a bigger geek than I am.

While the main plot is bottoming out in the pseudo-medieval folderol that we’ve seen a bazillion times, though, Glenn is leavening things a bit in the here and now. With two days before Mom and Dad get home, Johnny can only promise (or hope) that he’ll be back to make Andrea reappear before they pull in the driveway. (Everyone assumes for some reason that time that elapses in the present will mirror time elapsing in the past, despite the fact that, you know, they’re time-traveling.) But Rose will go crazy if Andrea goes missing for that long. So under the old woman’s guidance, Johnny magics Glenn into Andrea’s form. His/her voice, though, stays the same. So while Johnny is fighting sword-wielding Romanian extras, Glenn is trying to pretend to be Andrea in front of Rose, while also spinning a cover story of Johnny going camping with Glenn.

They named him “Malpheasor” because “Bad Guy” wasn’t subtle enough.

Eventually, of course, all works out right, Johnny gets to meet King Arthur (Jack Donner), and he learns a Very Special Lesson… No, wait, he really doesn’t learn anything, since the trouble they got into didn’t result from a character flaw on his part; anyway, he gets to keep the ring in the end. Blackmoor learns about Believing In Yourself and suchlike, but all that really means is that his smile is a little less phony when he’s performing on his cable access show. The closing shots of the movie show that Johnny has joined Blackmoor’s TV show, which is a fulfillment of his wishes from the beginning of the movie. Though after time-traveling and exchanging energy bolts with Malfeasor, you’d think that card tricks and disappearing coins would seem beneath him.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• dwarfs: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • Michael Ansara (Malfeasor) played the Klingon Kang in the original episode “Day of the Dove,” the DS9 episode “Blood Oath,” and the Voyager episode “Flashback,” and played “Jeyal” in the DS9 episode “The Muse”
  • Ian Abercrombie (Merlin) played “Abbot” in the Voyager episodes “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Spirit Folk”
  • Jack Donner (King Arthur) played “Subcommander Tal” in the original episode “The Enterprise Incident,” and “Vulcan Priest” in the Enterprise episodes “Home” and “Kir’Shara” (and “Special Wedding Guest” in the fan film Star Trek: Of Gods and Men)