Pegasus vs. Chimera

Othos, however, is the impatient type and even though it looks like to us he has everything under control in this sparse land her rules over, he wants everybody whose hiding out in this sparse land to die much quicker so he has Actae summon The Chimera! A mythical beast of hell that looks nothing like it's described in ancient mythology, but we will take what we can get. Fortunately for the good guys, Philony's mom Queen Caria (Mimi Kuzyk) is BFF's with the Sorceress Mayda (Rae Dawn Chong), who has The Pegasus on speed dial and the winged horse descends from the stars to help the cause. Without its wings. I'm guessing it was a little cheaper to just use a real, albeit marginally trained horse as opposed to a CGI horse which was flashed to on the rare wide shots when we saw Pegasus actually flying. What would've been cool if they had stapled a pair of fake wings on that nag. Now that would've been funny.

Anyway, stuff happens, the Chimera is straight murdering folks, the Pegasus isn't doing much of anything to stop this except getting itself caught, and worse still if anything happens to the Pegasus, the world as we know it will come to end. The Pegasus is kind of worthless. Unless it's stomping on you in a mindless rage which is something any old horse could do.

True enough, director John Bradshaw's 'Pegasus vs. Chimera' is fairly awful, this we can't argue, but it does have some quality actors gamely giving it all they had in this generally awful movie. Sebastian Roche probably isn't one of these actors acting gamely because my man really didn't look like he enjoyed wearing that toga or wildly waving his sword at the air at monsters that weren't there, even though I know he was told that a vicious monster would be subbed in eventually… which sometimes didn't happen… and I could tell he didn't enjoy fake flying through the air on a horse that wasn't really there either, and to be completely honest I can see where he might've thought the whole exercise of this movie too terribly silly to pretend to care, but he was getting paid a couple hundred bucks to do this movie so maybe a little more effort was forthcoming. But his fellow actors did seem to be giving it all they had.

Nanzeen Contractor, tiny and cute, made for a solid warrior princess and she didn't seem to mind fake flying on that non-existent horse, Mimi Kuzyk has been in some awesome shows over the years, this not being one of them, but she too treated this disposable role with some respect. The best work was probably done by Carlo Rota, and while he might look more like a guy who works behind the counter at a New York Deli as opposed to a medieval king, his scenery chewing was the highlight of the show.

But alas if one is making a swashbuckling medieval film with mythical beasts… and the swashbuckling is beyond lame and the mythical beasts look like ass… then our swashbuckling mythical beast film is probably gonna struggle a bit. But does having swashbucklers who don't know how to fake swashbuckle and crap mythical monsters make 'Pegasus vs. Chimera' a bad movie? Yeah it kinda does. We need to be sold that this stuff is actually happening to get the full effect, and considering our actors took this thing so deadly serious and considering this movie was completely devoid of any humor to deflect the swashbuckling and CGI shortcomings, we were stuck focusing on these shortcomings. Nobody wants that.

But we do have a high tolerance for this nonsense and 'Pegasus vs. Chimera' didn't come close to breaking that tolerance. We do like to end these things on a positive note, if at all possible.