Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness (2012)

Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness (2012)

Gerry Lively had already directed the previous opus: Dungeons & Dragons 2 – Wrath of the Dragon God, which I like. But it seems to me that it flopped quite a bit!

Yes, it was quite painful to watch this film, despite the good moments. It’s as good or as bad (you decide!) as the first one. Courtney Solomon is also, admittedly, a bad director, but he’s also, and above all, a poor producer.

Some scenes are so ridiculous they’re funny. It’s fair enough to say that I’m not really a fan of Dungeons & Dragons. But now that the fourth one is out, I’ve wanted to see them all, more or less, in one go, to make up my own mind. On the other hand, I’ve always enjoyed the second one and I’ve just seen it again for at least the third time. It gives me a certain amount of pleasure, although it’s a long way from a masterpiece.

So: same director, but not same result!

Of course, most people hated the second one, as this review shows: “After an astonishingly bad second episode, Gerry Lively takes up the camera again to continue the saga clumsily begun by Courtney Solomon. Unsurprising and cartoonish, it’s as bad and ridiculous as ever.”

After that, there’s something for everyone, given that this opus is also some people’s favourite, as this sentence shows: ‘Thanks be to Moloch, finally a worthwhile Dungeons and Dragons!’

Barry Aird plays a kind of insect-man, a kind of fat, disgusting vermin.

Jack Derges is another of those actors who look like Tom Cruise, Nicholas Hoult or James Marsden. He pulls it off rather well.

The charming asset and main female character here is clearly Eleanor Gecks, as we don’t see much of Charlotte Hunter (The Herd, The Containment). Eleanor is an actress (Dark Signal, The Anomaly), and screenwriter ([Lay Me Down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay_Me_Down_(film), 2014), known for Alice in Wonderland (2010), You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) and The Anomaly (2014). She plays the great warrior with magical powers and Charlotte plays a prostitute who holds information vital to the start of the quest.

Despite her best efforts, Eleanor Gecks won’t be able to make me forget Ellie Chidzey in this third instalment. It’s obvious that her character is a reference to the barbarian from the previous instalment.

It’s interesting to note that Habib Nasib Nader appears in this film! He is best known for his recurring role as Gregory in the BBC comedy Little Britain, but also for winning the award for Best Supporting Actor. The funny thing is that Habib is my real first name, while Nader is my second brother’s name!

There are quite a few sexual references in this film. There’s the main sex scene, but there’s also an orgy scene. It’s crazy! I wonder what the director was thinking. Did he think that D&D fans started out as kids, but have all grown up and become teenagers? And what do you tell parents when they buy a boxed set of these films simply to please their children without knowing what it’s all about?

Let’s get straight to it: this film is a Z-series subplot, chatty, bare-bones and pointless. There aren’t really any dungeons or dragons here. There’s no budget, no sets, no script, no costumes, no actors, no action, just crappy lines, shouting and sound effects made in cacaland. It’s almost worse than a sleeping pill!

Well, the scriptwriter read at least some of the rules of the game before making the film, which must have pleased some indulgent gamblers. The most interesting aspects of the film are probably the 5 main characters, the mercenaries! The ending’s pretty botched, though!

On the whole, the shortcomings of these films are the same, they are quite visible and they were even highly anticipated before the film even began. The project clearly lacks the budget to come up with anything that holds up in this type of fantasy world. It really feels like you’re watching a TV movie, with the photography extremely smooth and unpolished. Inevitably, this has a major impact on the visual aspect, including the special effects, but also on everything to do with the writing. The story is, once again, insipid, developing new characters and a new context in an attempt to start afresh. Except that, in the end, these new elements don’t add up to much. Our main hero is extremely hollow, and the story isn’t very exciting at all. So we’re bored from start to finish, even if the ridiculousness of certain situations clearly shows that we’re dealing with a nonsense film. In the end, perhaps that’s simply what this film should be about. It was a very bad idea to bring out a new instalment with so little desire; it would clearly have been better not to attempt anything. In conclusion, the quality was disastrous, but predictable.

That said, we had to wait until 2023 to finally get a really good D&D film!