Shadow of the Knight (1998)

Posted on Feb 15, 2006 under Fantasy, Kidvid |

aka Dragonworld 2, aka Dragonworld: The Legend Continues

Written and directed by Ted Nicolaou
Starring
- Drake Bell
- Andrew Kier
- Tina Martin
- Judith Paris
- Constantin Barbulescu
Produced by Robert Bernacchi and Vlad Paunescu
Executive produced by Peter Locke and Donald Kushner (and possibly Charles Band, uncredited)

When I reviewed Dragonworld (1994), as I’m sure you’ll recall, I thought it a children’s fantasy with a fair amount of charm, but hampered by the inclusion of that most knee-jerk of plot devices, the Evil Capitalist. I was happy to see that the sequel from writer/director Ted Nicolaou jettisons that hoary cliche, that being one of the reasons its initial video release was under the title Shadow of the Knight (other reasons would include being released without the Moonbeam Entertainment credit, and the fact that Dragonworld probably didn’t have enough fans to justify tagging this one as a sequel up front).

Unfortunately, the lack of a moustache-twirling businessman is just about the only improvement over the original. Most of its glaring faults — a ludicrous man-in-suit dragon, a relocation of production from Scotland to Romania, a meandering time-filler script — can be blamed directly on a tightened budget, with the further demerit of a child actor lead who makes me dream of drowning kittens in a burlap sack.

“Agh! Damned static!”

The prologue fills in the revisionist mythology of an evil order of knights who roamed the medieval world, killing dragons and perverting their good magic to bad. Our particular Dark Knight named MacLean (Constantin Barbulescu) kills the last adult dragon off-screen in the Scottish highlands, then takes the final infant dragon to a stone circle to finish him off and drain his magical energy. Unfortunately, the faery folk take exception to that, whisk the baby dragon off into their realm, and imprison the knight within the standing stone at the center of the stone ring.

Footage from the first Dragonworld film fills in what we already know: That a wee American youth was sent to live with his Scottish grandfather upon the death of his parents, and that the fairies sent the last young dragon, “Yowler,” to be his companion.

Our story thus picks up about five years after the arrival of Johnny MacGowan (Drake Bell) in the highlands; he still hasn’t picked up the Scottish brogue that his twenty-something counterpart would have in the first movie, and has been saddled with one of those annoying bowl cuts that you never see on the head of a real live child anymore, but which Hollywood can’t wait to slap on its on-screen tots. But that’s not as bad as what has happened to Yowler; between the cable-puppet infant and the stop-motion mature version, both featured in the first movie, he is forced into an incarnation as a man in a lousy dragon suit that would probably get laughed off a Power Rangers episode. They spend their time around a castle which doesn’t even remotely resemble Castle McGowan from the first film (Romania, remember?), not even tending the sheep because the sheep have also disappeared between movies.

“Here now! Here! I’ll thank ye kindly to keep that kind of behavior in your private chambers!”

Thus it seems pretty reasonable when grandfather Angus (Andrew Keir returning again) and housekeeper Mrs. Cosgrove (now played by Tina Martin) get a letter from the Department of Child Welfare, wondering why Johnny hasn’t ever showed up for school in five years. Determined to give Johnny “an education” on top of the reading and writing he’s already learned, Angus takes him out to teach him about dowsing and ley lines. Yeah, I’m sure that’s exactly what the DoCW was talking about: Filling the boy’s head with a combination of New-Agey Gaiaism and metaphysics directly out of the Star Wars trilogy.

Their little excursion along the ley lines brings them to the stone circle, where Angus recites the history of the dragon-killing knight imprisoned within the stone. Then, in a scene which recalls the inciting incident of Return of the Living Dead (1985) more than anything else, Angus pokes his walking stick into the point in the circle where the two ley lines meet to demonstrate their power. Thunder crackles, lightning strikes, Angus gets electrocuted, the standing stone splits, and (heh) the Dark Knight returns.

Way to go, Grampa.

WARNING: Do not hit the ley nexus with a stick. Thank you.

While Johnny and Yowler go running home to Mrs. Cosgrove, the Dark Knight stumps off to his own castle, which has been sitting unattended and undisturbed all these years, and enters a secret room to magic himself a horse and other accoutrements. This allows time for Johnny to babble incessantly to the unbelieving Mrs. Cosgrove, for them to find a friendly local hunter (James Ellis) to help them, and to return to where Angus’ corpse lies. I’m guessing that in the highlands, medical inquests and such are a rarity, as the next thing you know, Mrs. Cosgrove and Douglas the hunter have planted Angus in the family plot, and Johnny’s playing the bagpipes over him.

So. There’s a magical knight on the loose, looking for Yowler’s blood. But that’s not nearly enough of a threat, so what do we need to add? Why, a government bureaucrat, of course. Mrs. Churchill (Judith Paris) arrives from Child Welfare, and she is of course the kind of hardened Grinch that movies always cast in such roles, the kind of person who looks upon children the same way that exterminators look upon rodents. So instead of defending against the Knight, we spend several minutes with Johnny and Mrs. Cosgrove trying to pretend that the dragon they’ve stashed in the cellar as really a howling dog. Ha! Komedy! That’s when Johnny’s not spouting phrases that should never be forced from a child with American diction, like “Unhand me” and “the likes of you” and “I’ll thank you kindly to hold your tongue.”

**Scottish castles are best defended with knock-off Conan the Barbarian swords, you know.**

Since the Dark Knight can’t enter the castle because of its magical wards, he has to wait until Mrs. Churchill drags Johnny off, kicking and crying (nothing like the portrayal of abject terror and separation anxiety to make for a good children’s movie, I always say), back to Edinburgh. The Knight attacks the car on the road at night, Johnny escapes into the woods…

…And we spend pretty much the entire second half of the movie with people wandering around our ersatz Scotland. Johnny’s out there and can’t find his way back to the castle (even when he finds the stone circle), Yowler escapes from the basement and goes looking for Johnny, Mrs. Cosgrove finds Mrs. Churchill and together they try to find Johnny, the Dark Knight stumbles around from here to there until he finally captures Johnny (because we just haven’t had enough scenes of Johnny pleading and whining and generally being helpless), and Douglas the hunter and a sheepherder catch sight of Yowler and put together a search party of Romanian extras dubbed with Scottish accents. From here to the closing credits, most of the running time is filled with nothing but uncommon incompetence on the part of all participants, engineered mostly to take advantage of cheap forested shooting locations. It’s like watching The Blair Witch Project (1999) without the finely-tuned plot and the artful scripting. Oh, and the ghost of Angus is out wandering the moors as well, but he doesn’t help much.

“Nooooo! Don’t sacrifice me to a giant ape! I really don’t think I’m his type!”

Always remember, of course, that I’m not exactly the target demographic. My eight-year-old son thought the movie was terrific, and expressed great offense when I started shouting, “End! Roll credits! End, damn you!” at the screen. But hey, when I was eight, I was an idiot too.