Dear Joe Lynch, please let me see your Director’s Cut ASAP? Knights Of Badassdom is an unfinished product, but it passes based on the content our director was able to salvage.
It is an entertaining movie with a good cast but it has also a lot of wasted opportunities. On the positive side the nerd factor is high, most jokes work well and it has Summer Glau and Peter Dinklage in it. The ideas are O.K and the final battle is just awesome .On the negative side it feels like it could be improved on many aspects. The acting and story lines are decent with some bad dialogues / scenes. More references and in jokes for LARP and RPG fans could be added. The villainess is frightening first but gets really flat / bland later on. They could have played more with clichés and role types in this movie. Overall no masterpiece but an amusing movie.
Knights of Badassdom had the potential to be an entertaining, inventive, and funny cult classic comedy hit. The final product is none of these things, to say the least. Knights of Badassdom is disappointing at best and actually really bad at worst. The only thing that saves it from the 0-3 Red Scores for me are that there are a few moments that are actually pretty entertaining, and the battle scenes are quite well done. Not even the star power of Peter Dinklage can save this movie, though.
Knights of Badassdom actually delivers everything the 2011 Danny McBride-James Franco comedy "Your Highness" purported to be but fell short on. The film is "This Is the End" festooned with Middle Ages accouterments.
Those who’ve had Knights of Badassdom on their radar all this time are likely to get some mild amusement and satisfaction out of seeing the LARPing community depicted as something other than viral video fodder. Everyone else will find it a frustrating exercise of missed opportunities, as rough around the edges as the fake Frank Frazetta painting on your cousin’s van.
We're promised an ensemble comedy about LARPers when we are introduced to a fascinating world of LARPers with multiple Guilds and colorful characters (such as one king with a wheelchair converted into a chariot), and a highly gifted comedic cast including Peter Dinklage, Summer Glau, Ryan Kwanten and Dany Pudi. But once the players accidentally summon a "real" monster, the comedy is periodically interrupted by tedious scenes of random extras being hunted in the woods, and finally devolves into a rote and cringe-worthy finale. The succubus not only **** souls from characters, but the movie as well. The horror and comedy never mesh with each other, and at times even contradict, and what we are left with is a comedy-horror I can't recommend to comedy nor horror fans.
So much potential here, ruined. All star cast of true, nerdy actors really trying to pay homage to nerdy pastimes. Some promising things at the beginning. Then it turns into a horror comedy, and it all goes downhill. The tonal inconsistencies utterly ruins every single joke, and makes what could have been fun, campy dialog and plot insufferable. Too goofy to be creepy, too creepy to be funny, and somewhere along the lines, the homage turned into every other hackneyed portrayal of games out there. The end ultimately feels like a big F you to geeks, implying they are losers who are t0o detached from the real world to do anything worthwhile with their lives, with a barely passable self-insert fanfic holding it all together. But the real crime that I have to hate a movie with all these genuinely awesome people. And not liking Summer Glau or Peter Dinklage just makes me feel dirty. Just re watch the sweet trailer, and the movie you conjure in your head will be so much better then this.
I had no expectations for this, movies as such tend to go either way. But this one? Plenty of potential - fantastic cast of nerd icons, a silly and unique setup with a rich friend who is a LARP angel, unlimited fodder for humor... and then it gets jostled around in a box so stifling that when it's tipped over, it's a generic horror "comedy" that doesn't deliver on either front. Stripped of anything but banal storytelling and strange inconsistencies with tone and plot, it rapidly became the worst of Buffy, Xena and Hercules - without the budget. Which is saying quite a bit, unfortunately, that the special effects were on par with 1993 WB fantasy. If you're going to do a fantasy flick on little to no budget, either embrace the cheese(instead of pretending to be high level horror) or ditch it entirely and focus on the STORY. I really wanted to like this movie, but it feels like its sole purpose was to belittle nerds as cliche losers-in-the-parents'-basement crowd instead of empowering them, as the trailer promised.
This movie is in my top 3 worst movies of all time. There are reasons why it was shelved for years but the accountants of Hollywood worked their equation on this and figured they would coast on Peter Dinklage's popularity and hope some people might mistake this for game of thrones. Plus Summer Glau,blah blah blah nerds blah blah blah remember when she was on firefly?
From the trailer I thought this would be a comedy and while i didn't expect much I thought there would be a few laughs but its not a comedy, its a slasher. If you can prove I laughed once during the movie I will give you a comical amount of money.
The cast is fine, its not their fault the movie was made so badly but overall its a disaster. I know making some money is better than nothing if it was kept on the shelf but this was an unfinished product. Don't waste your time with this, and that's coming from someone who is a big fan of movies that others may find silly or stupid.