Dragonslayer (1981)

Dragonslayer is a simplistic fantasy story about a young sorcerer’s apprentice who decides to slay a dragon. A king made a pact with the dragon in which they periodically sacrifice female virgins by means of a lottery to the dragon in order to keep it from killing their people and burning their crops. A small group of villagers set out to find the last sorcerer named Ulric (Ralph Richardson), who appears incredibly old and unable to make the journey. So, when a cynical knight demands a test, Ulric lets him stab him in the chest and he dies instantly and anticlimactically. After finding his magical amulet, his apprentice Galen (Peter MacNicol) takes his new found powers and sets out to do what his master could not. This is basically the entire plot. There are a few little subplots here and there, like a tacked on romance between Galen and Valerian (Caitlin Clarke), the young girl who disguised herself as a boy in order to avoid being picked at the lottery. What does work in this film are the special effects. The dragon (considering this is 1981) looks surprisingly good. It’s large and detailed, looking both intimidating as well as actually part of the scenery. I would argue that the dragon in this film has aged better than the one in Dragonheart. As a mix of puppet and stop motion, the scenes showing the dragon up close, such as in the scene where Galen challenges it in its own layer, are particularly good, while the scenes depicting the dragon flying through the air are less impressive.

There are a few things about this film that don’t really work that well, and one of the main ones is Peter MacNicol. As the central protagonist, he’s not only bland, but he’s kind of a wimp. Maybe it's just his blonde fro, but there is something about him that never seems right in this scenario. There are several scenes where he’s supposed to be naïve and immature, but he’s not really that funny. It’s also hard to buy him as feasible threat to pretty much anyone he encounters in the film, let alone a dragon. He just sort of says his lines without adding anything meaningful to the performance. The other thing that hurts this film is that the main (and only) conflict is the dragon. This interrupts the story’s pacing, as there are two encounters with this dragon towards the end. The first encounter is intense and action packed while the second and final one doesn’t come close to matching it, which really hurts the flow of the story by the end. Also, there is a major twist/revelation towards the end that is not particularly satisfying. The journey to the kingdom that’s being plagued by the dragon is almost nonexistent (which is surprising because the villagers complain how long it is), and it could have helped the story to have a least a little bit of a journey involved for the sake of variety. When the locations are shown they are vast and green, as if to show that there is a large world in this fantasy, but you can't see it. Most of the sets are dull and dark like the castle and the village. The dragon’s cave is an exception to this, but it’s only one set. Some of the other characters are interesting like Ulric in his small role, and the knight who inexplicably wants to kill anyone associated with magic. Ian McDiarmid (also known as the emperor from Star Wars) makes a cameo as brother Jacopus, a priest who is killed after he declares the dragon the devil. While this scene is almost entirely irrelevant to the plot, for some reason I get a kick out of watching him get killed again. Dragonslayer is overall a light, generally forgettable fantasy film which doesn’t have any strong lasting power, especially when compared with other fantasy films from the 80s like Willow or Legend.