Dragonquest (2009)
[+]
(Foreign Titles)
Nomination Year: 2014
SYNOPSIS: Evil threatens the world in the form of a mad monk (Brian Thompson, looking like he just fell in a vat of Joker Toxin) and his pet CGI dragon. The only hope of defeating them is the Keeper, a young boy who fate has chosen to fight evil thinks to his purity of spirit uncanny resemblance to Elijah Wood. He is apprenticed to retired warrior Grandfather -- seriously, that seems to be the guy's name; even people who live hundreds of miles away and have never met the man refer to him as "Grandfather" (must have really sucked in elementary school). Of course, before Frodo's training can be completed, Grandfather is killed by the dragon. But not before he tells Frodo to seek out Marc Singer to learn how to train ferrets be a B-fantasy-movie hero.
On his way to find Marc, Frodo is ambushed by bandits and nearly loses the artifact that Grandfather gave him, but is saved at the last minute by a beautiful young warrior in bondage gear, who turns out to be Marc's apprentice. She leads him to Marc, who appears either be really pissed off about the lack of ferrets or to have suffered a recent stroke. He explains that Frodo has to recover the seven Stones of Virtue, each of which is tied to one of the seven virtues. Grandfather had tried to undertake this quest in his youth but had failed when he got all Mr. Big Shot about finding the first six Stones and couldn't get the Humility Stone. This is the sort of shiny object finding quest that ferrets would be ideally suited for, but Marc has to make do with Frodo and Bondage Warrior.
Fortunately, since there are seven Stones to find and only about 50 minutes of screen time to devote to finding them, the Stones prove surprisingly easy to locate even without ferret support. Pretty much everywhere they go, they happen upon a Stone. For example, their first stop is a village where they stay overnight. In the evening, a village girl tries to seduce Frodo, but he declines. The next morning, an old woman gives him the Chastity Stone (which is totally going to be my stripper name) as a reward. Later on, he meets a homeless refugee to whom he gives all his money in exchange for a promise that the man will find other homeless refugees and share the treasure with them, in exchange for which the man gives him the Gullibility Charity Stone. Eventually, things get even easier when the writers start getting bored with the whole Virtue schtick and Frodo is able to start picking up Stones for doing random stuff unrelated to any obvious Virtuousness, like when he stupidly walks into a creepy cave for no reason and comes away with the Ignored By Spiders Stone.
Which is not to say everything goes perfectly. Frodo gets captured and, lacking ferrets to get the keys for him, has to rescue himself. (If you're in a fantasy movie with Marc Singer and you look round at the rest of the cast and don't see the ferret, then you're the ferret.) Later on Bondage Warrior gets mind-controlled for a bit; random extras get eaten by the dragon; and Marc Singer gets a chance to show off the fact that he's the only person involved in this movie who knows how to swing a sword, before sacrificing himself heroically so he can go be in a movie with some actual animals.
Finally, Frodo and Bondage Warrior make it to the enemy lair, where it occurs to them that they've only actually gotten six of the seven required Stones; the writers having earlier lost count. Lacking the full power of his Stones, Frodo is no match for the Joker, who takes his artifact and the six Stones he did find and throws them into Mt. Doom. Fortunately, at this point, Frodo remembers Marc Singer's last words, "They promised me a goddamn ferret!" "The Virtues are in your heart," and realizes that he never needed the artifact or the Stones, anyway, and the entire movie up to this point has been a complete waste of time. Suddenly, he summons a blue and white ferret dragon to fight the Joker's black and red dragon and gains the ability to shoot laser beams from his hands. The dragons fight in the air; Frodo and the Joker shoot lasers out of their hands at each other on the lip of Mt. Doom; and Bondage Warrior fights a horde of henchmen in the valley below, while desperately trying to pretend this will have anything to do with the outcome of the movie. Eventually, all three of the heroes win their battles and the world is saved. Frodo and Bondage Warrior kiss, Chastity apparently no longer being so important.
No ferrets were harmed in the making of this film.
Greg Pearson
