- Directed by David Schmoeller
- Written by Benjamin Carr
- Starring
- Billy O.
- Jamieson K. Price
- Tricia Dickson
- Andrew Ducote
- Gerald S. O’Loughlin
- Produced by Christopher Landry and Vlad Paunescu
- Executive produced by Peter Locke and Donald Kushner
I always get this movie confused with The Shrunken City (1998), yet another Kushner-Locke kidvid from a Benjamin Carr script that concerns adolescents discovering a miniaturized civilization. Of course, once you get to watching them, they’re very different movies. For one thing, The Shrunken City isn’t quite as lame as The Secret Kingdom.
It starts out promising, though — by which I mean that it starts out somewhere other than the generic suburban cul-de-sac set at Castel Film in Bucharest. No, this one is set in New Orleans — and by golly, we see New Orleans! Co-protagonist Mark (Billy O’ — yes, that’s how he credited) walks around the city on his way home, beating his drumsticks. He runs into a strange old man (Gueydan T. Verret) who looks like Samuel Clemens; this old man is hawking bizarre lightning rods and tries to force a free one on Mark. Weirded out, Mark runs away from the pursuing old man, which leads us and our camera past some jazz street musicians in the French Quarter, through one of the famous above-ground Louisiana cemetery, and generally in the vicinity of everything that identifies this as New Orleans short of boobs and beads.
“It smells April-fresh under here!”
When Mark gets home, though, we say goodbye to the say spent in New Orleans; we’re spending the rest of the movie in Romania. What makes it worse is that the scenes shot in New Orleans serve no purpose except to distract us from the Romanianness of everything that is to come.
Mark’s parents are out of town, leaving older sister Callie (Tricia Dickson) in charge of him and the littlest brother Zachary (Andrew Ducote, right off his run on TV’s Dave’s World). Callie and Zachary have more than a little bit of friction going on. Callie’s always writing in her journal and neglecting the tasks her parents have given her in their absence, like meal prep. Zachary responds by snatching her journal (he lasts about two laps of the house before she gets it back). She responds by throwing out a half-dozen of his favorite toys. Mark wisely stays out of the sibling warfare, comfortable to sit back and drum on things instead.
“Wow. Coolest Wii peripheral ever!”
Later that night (during a lightning storm, naturally), Zachary ventures downstairs to retrieve his toys from the kitchen garbage, and starts hearing a voice from his walkie-talkie set. The person at the other end identifies himself as Chartwell, of the kingdom of Relkin, looking for contact and help from “the outside.” The signal’s kind of spotty, so Zachary wanders around pointing the antenna for better reception, and ends up under the kitchen sink where, behind the various cleaning products, is what looks like a teeny-tiny medieval kingdom.
Mark comes down to investigate all of the clatter in the kitchen and just happens to be holding the walkie-talkie when Chartwell activates his doohickey that sucks a normal-sized person into Relkin. When he materializes there, Chartwell (Gerald S. O’Loughlin) has abandoned his lab because of an invasion of low-rent stormtroopers. Mark escapes into the streets where he’s given the Pod Person treatment by the locals, half of whom have no eyes — there’s just skin covering the eye sockets. He’s quickly rounded up and given over to the Regent (Jamieson K. Price), smug leader of the fascist government and a convincing body double for Kenneth Branagh.
See no evil, see no evil, and see no evil. (They frown on diversity in Relkin.)
The Regent declares as heresy any mention of a world existing outside of Relkin, since Relkin is all there is. He forces Mark to sign a confession that Chartwell and his rebels raised him in secret (thus accounting for the lack of a “registration mark” somewhere on his body), and then…
Now, this is one of the better ideas to come out of this movie, though as usual, it’s pitifully under-explored. The Regent is also head of the Ministry of Perfection, which “perfects” the citizenry by removing organs and body parts to suit them to particular roles. That explains the eyeless people after a fashion, though no one offers an explanation for what putative improvement that imparts; the Regent says that at an early age he underwent Perfection which removed the part of his brain governing mercy, thus destining him for effective leadership. It’s an idea more suited for an adult SF film set in a dystopian future than in a light children’s fantasy, which is probably why the idea isn’t mined for more dramatic effect.
It would just make my day if there were a typo in that sign.
Mark is rescued by Chartwell and his associates, but later that night Callie also gets zapped into Relkin while looking for Mark, and is honey-talked by the Regent from the get-go, so much that she’s eager for the (only vaguely explained to her) Perfection. This is the second idea that gets short shrift in the script, especially when one realizes that this could have been played like Edmund’s betrayal in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Here, though, when the rebels attack and rescue her, they simply explain the error of her ways and she switches sides.
Unlike most Benjamin Carr scripts, which usually involve a complicated and legalistic setup to the bizarre circumstances in which the youthful protagonists find themselves, this one actually goes the other way, leaving the main concept — a miniature city stuck under the kitchen sink — largely unexplained. Chartwell refers to legends which contain the words “sun,” “rain,” etc., which is a nice touch, but leaves unanswered the question of how exactly Relkin experiences day and night, which they clearly do, without a sun. (And no, it isn’t ambient light from the kitchen; the cupboard doors under the sink shut pretty tight.) Then there’s the problem of how long a tiny kingdom could remain undiscovered under the sink, and how long they’ve been there, anyway. Chartwell believes that Relkin was once a part of a normal world and somehow got ripped from its place and deposited here, but he speaks of that being back in the misty past. The natural inclination is to assume some sort of time dilation effect along with the change in size, but there is no evidence of any dilation here; events in the “big” world take place in parallel to events in Relkin. (That’s right, I’m discussing the plausibility of an unstated time dilation effect in a Kushner-Locke kidvid. I may need some perspective.)
Oddly enough, Zachary does not immediately start singing, “Ding, Dong, The Witch Is Dead.”
The movie benefits from some profession direction from David Schmoeller, but even good direction can’t disguise a cranked-out screenplay crafted expressly to take advantage of cheap Romanian shooting locations. By the end of the movie, the viewer is forced to admit that what’s going on makes no sense, but nobody cares by that point anyway.
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 0
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 1
- ominous thunderstorms: 2
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
- Jamieson Price (the Regent) supplied the voice for “John Tarkinton/Marqa” in the videogame Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, but I don’t think that counts
