If you were counting down the worst adaptations of the Beowulf story (which I guess I kind of am), this one would be fighting it out for the bottom spot with the 2007 big-budget version. I only rate that one as a bigger failure because that movie was a $150 million major studio effort with a huge amount of talent to draw on, while this one is a bargain-bin straight-to-video disaster of the kind that were all over video stores in the 90s. With a bleached-blond Christopher Lambert in the title role and a then-unknown Rhona Mitra as his bland love interest, this one is a complete mess from minute one.
Rather than attempt a historical epic, this movie sets the Beowulf legend in a vaguely-defined post apocalypse, with Heorot replaced by an “Outpost” on an undefined border between warring armies of leather-clad S&M fetishists in ridiculous costumes. Everything in the wardrobe design is way over the top, with horned helmets, spikes, straps, and skull masks. You would think that would make it cool, but this is so cheap and so poorly filmed that it just looks dorky.
Hrothgar is not a king in this movie, just the lord of this bleak outpost that is now plagued by a monster that kills and blah blah – we know the deal here. This kind of thing doesn’t have to be boring, but again, this is very badly directed, and so the performances are bad, the dialogue is bad, and everything just seems to take way too long. Takes are long, the shots are static and just look at people doing nothing, saying nothing. Everything comes off as tremendously awkward, like an amateur theater production.
They spent a lot of effort on the fight choreography, adding in a shit-ton of unnecessary backflips, jarring cuts, and wacky-looking weapons to try and inject some pizzazz, but it just comes off as tremendously silly. Beowulf has an arsenal of weapons that seem to have been designed by 9-year-olds, including rapid-firing crossbows, a telescoping flail with a spike that comes out of the bottom, an axe that has a sword hidden in the hilt, and a bunch of daggers concealed everywhere in more and more elaborate places. The backflips, in particular, look ridiculous, as Lambert’s stunt double will do literally 15 backflips away from the monster and then get smacked down anyway, so all that work never seems to do him any good. His fighting style seems to be “when in doubt, do a backflip,” to the point that if you took a shot every time, it would kill you.
The Grendel design is kind of not bad, even if it has the expected Giger vibe to the look of it. They obviously just had a cheap rubber suit, which they try to hide by putting a camera effect over it, to try and simulate the monster having some kind of field that makes him hard to see. That’s a cool idea, but executed here it just seems like he’s got a blur filter on all the time, and it’s painfully obvious they are just trying to cover up the rubber suit.
Interestingly, this movie arrived at the “Grendel is Hrothgar’s bastard son” idea almost a decade before the Zemeckis movie. When Grendel’s mother shows up, she is literally some Fredrick’s of Hollywood model in a wispy negligee and fucking crimped blonde hair (not kidding) who gives a long speech about killing Hrothgar’s men, leaning hard on the “hot blood pumping down my throat” and similar vulgarisms before she turns into a ludicrous CGI monster. She looks like a spider made of bat wings rendered by a PS1, and has an entirely unconvincing battle with the backflipping hero until she is incinerated by the Outpost’s negligent fire safety standards.
It really is painful. Believe me, if my description of this makes it sound like it might be a fun kind of terrible, it really, really isn’t. It is mostly just boring and clunky, and Lambert especially seems like he is wishing he were somewhere else every moment he is on screen. I only rate this as the second-worst Beowulf movie because it is just 80% painful to watch, as opposed to 100%.
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