Sunday, March 16, 2014

Robin Hood: Ghosts of Sherwood (2012)

The description of this movie said "While battling the Nottingham Sheriff, Robin Hood and his band of merry men are slain. Distraught over these horrific turn of events Marian and Little John attempt to resurrect Robin and his comrades. In doing so they inadvertently turned the one-time heroes into the living dead."  Now a zombie Robin Hood sounds pretty awesome.  It's so ridiculous.  But as with so many movies that just add zombies to pre-existing stories, this was not a good idea.

As you'd expect, the movie begins in a forest, but it's just repeated shots of trees and horses accompanied by a voice over that is so boring that I didn't hear a word they said.  My friends, who were listening to the voice drone on, questioned what the words had to do with the images they were showing us since it didn't seem related.

Not the most exciting opening so when men started fighting, it seemed like things would be picking up.  Unfortunately the  soldiers clanged swords by sound effect only (since visually their weapons didn't connect), and did poorly choreographed fights which ended with all the knights dead. I guess Maid Marion should have picked some better guards since she was a better fighter than they were, and if I remember correctly, she didn't even have a sword.  So the fight ends with Maid Marion and Robin Hood as the lone survivors. Hurrah?

Robin, who looks like a hippie, has a conversation with Marion that is so boring that the words eventually turned into an unintelligible drone of white noise.  The gist of it is that Robin invites her to his camp. But Marion wants to stay alone in the woods since she is rightfully uncomfortable going to a camp full of men who haven't seen a women in ages. Lucky for her, Robin has a camp full of men, women, and children, so off they go.

When they arrive, the camp is partying it up, accompanied by music which would be appropriate for a dancing dwarf at a Renaissance Festival.  In another scene that is severely lacking in anything of interest happening, the hippie clan talks which I heard as blah blah blah because they're all so freaking boring.

At this point, we were about twenty minutes into it and so bored that we couldn't take it anymore. I suggested we fast forward through it to see when the zombies showed up, and  I'm glad we did because there were no zombies until at least 70 minutes into the film. Even then the zombies were just guys with dirty faces, so whatever.  We also zoomed by Tom Savini as the Sheriff.

We did stop once we saw Kane Hodder as Little John, since he and Marion were the ones to bring the men back from the dead.  Looking emotionless, Marion and Little John have a deadly dull discussion where they basically say, "Oops, that wasn't a good idea."
Robin Hood or hippie? You make the call.
Another exciting fight scene comes to an end.
One of the many talking scenes that go on forever 
in this film, zombie = drooling toothpaste and a dirty face


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