This is one from my favorite Direct-to-Video company and yours that somehow managed to slip by me. I stumbled upon this particular Asylum Mock Buster ‘Dragon’ while adding another missed Mock Buster ‘King of the Lost World’ to my Netflix cue. ‘King of the Lost World’ obviously was robbing the legacy of ‘King Kong’ but I had no idea what ‘Dragon’ was stealing from. As it turns out ‘Dragon’ chooses to lift from ‘Eragon’ which in hindsight might not have been the best movie around to steal from considering that ‘Eragon’ was freely stealing from a large number of sources in its own right. So with director Leigh Scott behind the camera, who’s like the Cecil B. DeMille of horrible movies, we bring to you, from The Asylum, ‘Dragon’.

Princess Alora Vanir (Amelia Jackson-Gray) travels the wooded country side of this mythical land on a mission from her father to meet with Lord Somebody Whose Name I Forgot to convince him to ally with her kingdom to vanquish the ever growing dark elf menace. Perhaps Dad shouldn’t have sent his baby girl out in the woods in her princess gear and no weapon because in no time she is attacked by a group of dark elves, who certainly would have killed her were it not for the timely appearance of the chintzy CGI fire breathing dragon who eats a few of the stupid ass elves. The surviving elves still want to mess with the princess who is saved this time by a couple of round table like knights in Cador (Matthew Wolf) and Artemir (John-Paul Gates). The knights kneel before their princess and give her decent traveling clothes as opposed to the shiny green lemay evening gown her stupid ass father sent her out in, and also give her a blade which she claims to know how to use. She was lying.

The princess informs the knights of her mission who agree to accompany her, though they have to go through the Forest of Scythe – or something – that is home to the great dragon. Fortunately they run into a trio of dragon slayers led by the caddish Gareth

(Jeff Denton) who agrees to tagalong as long as princess gives he and his crew some loot after all is said and done. They also stumble upon some sorceress calling herself Freyja (Eliza Swenson) and her bow toting nymph sidekick Damara (Jessica Bork) who also agrees to go along on the mission, but advises them that salvation for the kingdom isn’t with Lord Whatshisname but in slaying the dragon. Well Gareth and them thinks that’s some b.s. but the future queen of Mysteryland seems to trust this Freyja who will lead this skeleton crew of hopeful dragon slayers to what appears to be certain death from where I’m standing.

It’s probably not fair to say ‘for an Asylum movie ‘Dragon’ wasn’t so bad’, because let’s say you’ve never seen an Asylum movie and ‘Dragon’ is like your first one ever, then you’re gonna be mad at me because your going think it sucks, and rightfully so because it does suck. However veterans of the Asylum will know exactly what I’m talking about, particularly after suffering through fare such as ‘Super Croc’ or ‘The Da Vinci Treasure’. There were issues with ‘Dragon’ to be sure but it is reasonably well acted and the CGI dragon might have looked pretty bad in spots, but there were also some scenes where it was almost passable as a decent special effect. The film was also mercifully brief and some of the dialog was halfway decent in spots as well, too bad there so much damn much of it.

The set design was pretty much non-existent since the entire movie took place in the woods, but this posed problems because it looked as if they were using natural light for this film which meant the production team was a slave to the sun in shooting and there were more than a few times where it looked like the sun had pretty much gone down and yet they still kept shooting. A tight schedule I would assume. This made for some wildly inconsistent looks from scene to scene for our heroes. And though some of the dialog was good, damn did they talk a lot in this movie. On and on and on they droned on in their fake little accents about some made up myth or that made up situation and it did tend to grate on a nerve. I understand that there’s only so much you can do with action and CGI since all that crap costs money, and I’m sure they were working with next to nothing, but there was less talking in ‘The Verdict’ than there was in this film. Scott really isn’t much of an action director either as his sword battles had some of the worst staging I’d ever seen as it looked like the actors were simply trying not to get hurt as opposed to actually fighting each other. Y’all need to really think about buying insurance next time out.

I’m not trying to trick you into thinking that this is any good because it’s not, but, and it’s true, it’s not so bad for a film coming out of The Asylum. I mean it’s no ‘I Am Omega’ or anything but if you can stand the scores and scores and scores of tireless dialog, ‘Dragon’ might not piss you off that badly.