Erik the Viking
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Movie Reviews of Erik the Viking
Movie Review: Not as good as the original
Summary: 2 Stars
First off, it's actually the director's son's cut. It is not as good as the original at all. They took out 23 minutes of footage, added bad sound effects, and the video quality was lacking. They sharpened some of the picture but didnt give it a very good transfer to dvd, so can easily see a lot of bluescreen effects. Dont waste your money on this, try to get the original instead.Movie Review: Ruined a great movie!
Summary: 2 Stars
The Editor's (son's) cut removed some wonderful scenes from the original movie. Had we known of the cuts - over 10 minutes worth, we would not have bought the movie. Hopefully the original will be issued in DVD or BluRay format.Movie Review: Every once in a while a movie comes along that makes me feel like a human dialysis machine
Summary: 1 Stars
The film goes into my mind, which removes its impurities, and then it evaporates into thin air. "Erik the Viking" is a movie like that, an utterly worthless exercise in waste and wretched excess, uninformed by the slightest spark of humor, wit or coherence.
Movies like this show every sign of having gotten completely out of hand at an early stage of the production. Perhaps everybody was laughing so hard at the jokes they thought they were telling that they forgot to tell any. The movie looks obscenely expensive, but the money is spent on pointless scenes without purpose or payoff, as for example an interminable storm sequence in which the actors hold onto masts and say inane things to one another while water is splashed in their faces.
The basic comic technique in "Erik the Viking" is the use of the deliberate anacronism. There is a scene, for example, in which Vikings attack and pillage a village, and Erik the Viking (Tim Robbins) finds himself required to assault one of the townswomen. But his tastes do not run toward rape, and so they engage in a discussion on the economic realities of pillaging, and then he asks her to shout "Rape!" as a courtesy so the other Vikings will think he has done his part.
If you can master the comic logic of that scene, you have exhausted 90 percent of the comic invention in this movie, which is based on Vikings speaking as if they were 20th century satirists of themselves. The other 10 percent of the movie consists of guest appearances by such stars as Eartha Kitt and Mickey Rooney, who demonstrate convincingly that Michael Todd exhausted the possibilities of cameo appearances when he made "Around the World in 80 Days" many, many years ago. (That was the movie where the piano player turned around to grin at the camera, and you shouted, "Look! It's Frank Sinatra!" More than 30 years later, a little Viking grins at the camera, and we are expected to shout, "Look! It's Mickey Rooney!") "Erik the Viking" was written and directed by Terry Jones, whose previous film, "Personal Services," was a splendid and intelligent slice-of-life about a notorious London madam who ran a genteel brothel for elderly gents. The two films could not be less similar. I assume "Erik the Viking" represents some kind of comprehensive lack of judgment on Jones's part, and that he will be back among the competent in no time at all.
Movie Review: Gods cannot make men love one another...
Summary: 1 Stars
...but they damn well ought to have prevented Terry Jones from hacking a fine film to pieces and repackaging it as a "director's cut".
The original 104-minute 'Erik' featured an impressive cast of solid actors and a surprisingly weighty story with plenty of laughs to keep things moving. Together with his son Bill, Jones has shortened scenes, limited our access to those fine performances, altered the running order of the film, botched the soundtrack (in several sections entire conversations have been removed, leaving characters' mouths moving with no sound at all coming from them), removed some of the better jokes, and on the whole pared down the film to 79 minutes.
You read me right - fully 25% of the film was chucked to the cutting-room floor for no good reason whatsoever.
The real catastrophe of this cut - aside of the shameless rape of one of my favorite childhood movies - is that there was no raw footage from which to assemble a new version. The Joneses had only a print of the original theatrical release to work with, thus they were only able to take parts out and shuffle them around rather than adding anything new. The result is that the entire first act is a chaotic muddle, the second act in Hy-Brasil feels overlong, and the Asgard sequence is a horribly rushed anticlimax with none of the impact of the original scene.
I'm completely mystified as to why this cut was made in the first place (let alone a cut by such an incredibly untalented editor as Jones), but I could accept it if they'd packaged the original version of the film with it. Inexplicably, they didn't - and it's not like they were hurting for space on this DVD. Don't buy it, don't buy it, don't buy it.
Movie Review: director's son's hack job
Summary: 1 Stars
the 100 minute original US release deserves 5 stars, this one gets 0 (but amazon made me give at least one star). here's why: **SPOILER ALERT**
the rearranging of the first few scenes in the film kinda bothered me, but not that much. i guess i just wasn't used to it playing out that way. i gave it the benefit of the doubt at first, then....
the first thing that REALLY stood out as being a bad edit was the chunk of scene that was removed after the ship started sinking. he cut out when they hit the sea floor and noticed it was peculiarly shallow. in doing this, one of my favorite bits was removed "how deep IS the ocean?" "very deep....usually". that scene was essential. if you were in a panic about your ship sinking into the ocean, and all of a sudden it wasn't, you would comment on it, right?! it only got worse from there...
this was the worst part: he cut dialogue and left the scenes in! the second half of the edge of the world scene looked like helen keller edited it. the dialogue track was removed and you SEE the yelling back and forth of lines between tim and imogen, but only hear background noise. then the middle of one of her lines was crappily tacked on at the end. it was painfully obvious that it wasn't what she was actually saying. no effort was made to match it up. unacceptable. they really should have just re-released the original. i did appreciate the sharper picture and widescreen format on the dvd, but other than that, it should have been left as it was. in trying to make the story more concise, he hacked it to nonsensical peices.