Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America (2007)

When I pop in a film about Vikings, I expect to be lost in a land of hardships, battle, destruction, etc. When I popped in Severed Ways I got a boring 109 minute sequence of random shots, a story that couldn’t have actually been more then twenty pages long, and poor excuses to drop some death metal into this cinematic brain fart. Are there worse films out there? Oh, I’m sure there are, but Severed Ways makes Rob Zombie’s Halloween look like an Oscar-caliber flick, and that’s saying something considering I think Halloween (2007) is one of the worst horror films I’ve seen of late. Yes, Severed Ways has Vikings (2 of them) and yes, there’s a few scenes of action (maybe 4 minutes out of it’s ridiculously bloated running time), but over 100 minutes of random shots of woods, guys sitting around and cutting down trees, a film does not make.

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Barbarian Queen (1985)

Swords and Sandals flicks can be extremely entertaining. Hell, Conan the Barbarian proved that way back in ’82. Yet, the ones that fail, fail hard. Barbarian Queen proves that. In a film with as much violence and nudity as Barbarian Queen gives the audience, the last thing on viewers’ minds is that they’ll be bored, but, that’s exactly what this reviewer dealt with (fighting to stay awake).

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Since the review’s epically short, here’s the final battle in it’s entirety.

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Beowulf (2007)

After creeping me out with the dead-eyed characters of Polar Express, Robert Zemeckis takes another stab at a film populated entirely by CGI. This time, he tackles the Old English epic poem, Beowulf. While the film does contain fair amount of the source material, writers Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary made some changes to get it to the big screen. Paramount released the Blu-Ray today, so let’s check out the trailer and then after the jump, check out my review of Beowulf.

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The Flyboys (2008) – Mikey B

I was lucky enough to catch a screening of The Flyboys at the Newport Beach Film Festival on April 27th. The theater was packed. We found our seats and the film started soon after. Let me just get this out of the way right now. As of this writing, The Flyboys, directed by Rocco DeVilliers, is one of the best films I’ve seen this year. The film is winning awards in the local film festival circuit and details two 12-year-old boys in a small town, who accidentally stow away aboard a private airplane owned by the mob.

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