"We'll create our own destinies."
Hello everyone!
BUT.
I found out a little while back that there's a BUNCH of direct-to-video films which feature a rather favoured actor of mine, Jake Stormoen (he of The Outpost fame, that is).
So I decided to sit down and watch them.
And I have to say, for relatively low-budget productions? This project looks rather COOL, all things considered!
Which means fasten your seatbelts, everybody: and let's check out Mythica, Quest for Heroes.
Since this is the first in a series, there are no other movies to link it to, but keep in mind we'll be building on this.
Our story begins in a temple of some sort that seems to be in the middle of a raid; the high priest, or whatever he is, hands an important stone to one of the women there, who tries to run off with it, but she gets side-tracked by an ogre, so she tells her sister to find help and come save her.
Meanwhile, the priest is killed using necromancer magic, forbidden magic that is, but the orc leader learns where the stone went.
THEN, in a confusing jump, our focus shifts to a slave girl with a limp; her name's Marek, her owner's a swine, and Kevin Sorbo's been teaching her magic in his downtime.
Yep, Hercules graduated to casting spells now.
After she's late returning home from her latest escapade (because of the crutch and her limp), she has a run-in with a disgusting rich man, is rescued by a soldier named Thane, and gets beat for her efforts by her master after she loses the money she was supposed to bring home to a thief in a hay wagon (our very own Jake Stormoen).
Mid-beating though, Marek suddenly has enough and seems to channel the same type of necromancer magic that we've seen before, killing her owner; she then runs away using a contraption that another slave made for her so she could move faster, and ends up at Hammerhead Inn, where the priestess Teela pops up, looking for heroes to undertake a quest to save her sister.
Now, a little note: the inn seems to be a gathering place for anyone looking for work of any kind, but mostly the insane kind, so it's no wonder that this is where she ends up. She is, of course, the sister who's come looking for help, trying to rescue the one the ogre took, and Marek is the one to take up the quest, saying she has a team and she'll meet her at sunrise.
Freeing Thane from the cage he was locked up in after helping her, they find Dagen and bring him along, and the four unlikely heroes set off on a bickering march ... er, quest.
They find the orc camp of the band that attacked the temple, and get themselves embroiled in a fight after Dagen listens to Teela's advice which goes horribly wrong, but Teela also realizes that her sister isn't here; and after they hunker down in a cave with a hurt Thane, who took a few arrows in his body during said fight, Dagen storms off, saying his part is over and done with.
Marek begs Teela to heal her and her gimp leg like she healed Thane's wound earlier, but Teela says that she can't: the leg is an outward sign the gods placed upon Marek, as a warning for the darkness inside her.
This of course upsets the girl but, she's determined to see the quest through, although she does feel more and more like a third wheel since Teela and Thane are making goo-goo eyes at each other.
They're interrupted by the same ogre who took Teela's sister, and now he snatches the pair of them, leaving Marek on her own; but she's resourceful and determined enough to find Dagen first, who'd been captured by orcs previously (and Teela and Thane voted against looking for him, since he left them behind anyway). Together, they then set off to the ogre's lair, where, right after Dagen unexpectedly kisses Marek, they find not only their friends, but Teela's sister as well.
It's also where Marek once more taps into necromancy to save Teela and Dagen, moving them from one spot to the other by siphoning Dagen's life force (it's worth mentioning that she prays to Teela's goddess at one point, seeing her in a vision, but the goddess refuses to help her, so Marek's like, screw you, Imma do this myself).
They then run away from the ogre towards a den of spiders - there are ALWAYS spiders - and BACK to fight the ogre, at which point Thane's been bounced around a couple of times and hurt again, and everyone's down EXCEPT Marek who ends up defeating the beast all on her lonesome.
With Teela's sister safely on her way, stone in her possession once more, our motley crew finds itself back at Hammerhead Inn where they've earned some respect from the others, particularly Hammerhead (who loves taking off the heads of anyone who disobeys his establishment's rules, by the way). They've also at last formed tight bonds of friendship between them, which is a GOOD thing, because right outside the inn?
Is the necromancer orc leader who's been tracking that stupid stone Teela's sister sashayed away with, so they'll need to work together some more in future!
Which should be bright indeed, considering there's at least four or five more movies in this series, and I'm actually interested in watching them all.
The budget might be low, but they sure were filmed better than some higher-budget projects nowadays, and the acting is actually not too cheesy at all. In fact, you find way more cheese in Hallmark on a regular basis than you do here. The CGI might not be top quality, but it's also not horrible, and everything else really works to immerse you into this fantastical world.
It's a believable first entry into this world, where we spend the majority of the movie building the group together into a cohesive unit, so I can't wait to see what they do when they're actually not arguing left, right and center.
Keep an eye out for a review on the second movie, it should be arriving here pretty soon!
xx
*images and video not mine
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