Okay, so I’ve watched this film and I have one thing I wanna say: the movie poster is really weird and misleading.
Y’see that girl in red? She’s not the main character, yet she’s in the middle of everything and is most prominent among every character. She’s more of a side character than anything, though is also one of the returning characters from the last film (Yes, this is a sequel). And the bearded dude in the background? He’s more of a lackey than anything; the main antagonist is the woman with the trident, so why is she not in the back, looking super evil and dominating? Lastly, the main male character(?), a mirror image of “Prince Charming,” is featured nowhere on the poster, yet is featured prominently in the film, and is integral to the plot within. So, what the hell is this poster? It matches the product, in any case.
Okay, okay, I will address the elephant in the room. Why did I watch this? Well, you see, I have actually seen the prequel to this, and documented it via March of the Movies format. For any context to it, I would recommend reading that first post, as it not only covers the prequel, but it covers the “point” of this film and any other film that comes out of this production studio: Asylum. In a “tl;dr” fashion, it goes like this: in the recent trend of “So bad, it’s good” films, Asylum has decided to take advantage of it and have made blatant rip-offs of various popular works in ironically bad fashion. Sound lazy? That’s because it kind of is.
As for the film, I can honestly state one positive attribute it has: It’s better than the original. I gave the original film a 2/10. Take that as you will.
A lot of the reviews for Time Wars on film databases such as imdb or letterboxd have it easily shown to be an atrocity to cinema. I think that’s too harsh, as there’s enough to it that separates it from other unintentional “terribad” films like The Room or Troll 2 (the two examples I used in the prequel post). The story makes (enough) sense, the production is value is, with heavy quotation marks, “fine,” and it’s a fairly open-ended good vs. bad storyline, which apparently has not gone out of style yet. More than anything, though, I wasn’t nearly as bored as I remembered being with the original film, so I suppose there’s that. Then again, I was expecting the original to be more like Sinister Squad, which is a little more akin to “terribad” than either of these films, which may have diluted my interest. The original also had more starpower to it.
All of this build-up brings me to the most difficult point of this post: I’m not really sure how I can continue to elaborate upon this film. It’s bad, one can see that just from trailers and knowing the prequel film. On top of that, it’s just pretty dull and doesn’t really develop anything. I discussed at one point in the post for the original that there was some “moral” point to the first film. In this sequel… there’s nothing. A pretty bland attempt at telling a story of good versus evil with no real backbone or substance to anything. Characters don’t grow or have some sort of crutch that hampers their progress. Everything here is driven by a predetermined romance between the male and female leads(?) that is never really emphasized.
Everything else is… bland. It’s all very bland. Action sequences, acting, cinematography, story; there’s nothing that makes this film really worth watching. The only thing that has any sort of “oomph” to it are the characters, many of whom suffer from being carried along by the plot (and some subtle objectification; Sleeping Beauty’s top shows off an enormous amount of cleavage throughout the entire film). The performance by “Rumpelstiltskin” is probably the best because he’s also somewhat insane, therefore showing off a little personality, but the writing doesn’t allow most of these characters to do anything of note.
That’s pretty much it. I watched it because I have some strange duty to Jeremy M. Inman, who directed the first film and Sinister Squad (and because he contacted me via Twitter and commended my review). Inman wrote the screenplay for this film (not your finest work, dude). At the same time, it felt nice to be able to blaze through something with an empty mind after so many great films in the past few days. I say this film is better than the original, but perhaps that’s only because I went into it with zero expectations. I was comfortably immersed for a good portion of it, which is less than I can say for the original. Perhaps that alone is enough, because this film is a very glowing 2/10. Oops, spoiler.
Final Score: 2/10
The rating for all other films can be found at Letterboxd.
For more, check out the March of the Movies Archive!
Thank you for your time. Have a great day.
The Visualist's Veranda 