A Knight's War

This horror/fantasy mashup conjures up some gruesome delights, but often feels like the playing of a Dungeons & Dragons module -- and not a particularly original one.

Gosh knows I’m a sucker for the sword & sorcery genre. It enjoyed something of a heyday right when I was in the sweet spot of boyhood to lap it up — “Conan the Barbaran,” “Excalibur” — later enjoying a second resurgence with the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter franchises.

Otherwise, this genre tends to lay forgotten and dormant for years, like some rotting bones awaiting a necromancer to summon them back to fell life.

“A Knight’s War” also has the added feature of mashing up with scary movie tropes; it’s basically a gory horror flick with witches and demons and such. Sounds exactly my wheelhouse, or so I thought.

A decidedly lower-budget affair, it does conjure up some gruesome delights: severed limbs and heads, stabbings, bitings, a magic spell or three. But mostly it felt like watching the playing of a Dungeons & Dragons module — and not a particularly original one.

Written and directed by Matthew Ninaber (“Transference”), “War” is one of those big-small stories. The premise is pretty grandiose — a typical play on a ‘chosen one’ coming to wipe widespread evil — but it plays out on a very tiny scale. Our roleplaying party is just two characters, arrayed against maybe a half-dozen total antagonists.

It’s being released in a few theaters, but you’ll have a better chance catching it on VOD.

Bhodie and William are brother knights — played by Jeremy Ninaber and director Matthew Ninaber (I’m guessing real-life brothers but I’ve not been able to verify). They belong to the order of Light, fighting on behalf of goodness and virtue. They are also believers in a prophecy that a chosen one, a girl with red hair who is impervious to fire, will rise up to banish the old gods who want to plunge the world into darkness.

They’ve tracked the woman they believe to be this one to a blackened temple, but are unable to prevent her from being dragged through a watery portal into the realm of the fallen. William sends Bhodie there to be her protector… and not entirely with his consent.

Bhodie awakes in a prison tended by a Keeper (Shane Nicely, very creepy and charismatic), himself a demon who strikes a bargain. If he is able to defeat three dark lords and obtain their magic stones, Bhodie will take the Keeper with him back to the real world. In exchange, the demon offers a talisman that will resurrect him 100 times. When the light within dies, so does Bhodie.

The knight-errant soon finds the girl, Avalon (Kristen Kaster), who has apparently been on the same quest as him. Even though she disappeared through the portal a moment before Bhodie, she claims to have spent years there fruitlessly seeking the stones.

At first adversaries, they join forces, though Avalon seems quite indifferent to the notion of being anyone’s chosen one. She has her own motivations, which remain hidden for now, along with some extra abilities that will come into play.

Their first opponents are a pair of witch/vampire sisters who wear elaborate masks — one is bony hands with the fingers forming a crown of sorts — who taunt the adventurers seductively. The witches kill them and suck their blood, over and over again. They try every trick they can think of, but nothing seems to work.

Eventually they’ll encounter the Invoker, a classic evil wizard type with a horned skull mask. Rather than just attempting to kill them, he tries to enlist Bhodie to be his servant, tickling his resentment against Avalon, who often seems to barely tolerate her companion.

More twists and turns come, with the appropriate sword-and-magic play.

The production values are decent, and the armor and swords Bhodie and Avalon bear are quite convincing. I will say Bhodie’s heavy plate armor doesn’t seem to do a very good job of protecting him from being repeatedly killed (and resurrected). Certainly it causes him to trip and fall a lot. In general he seems to be quite a mediocre fighter at best for a fantasy movie hero.

The direction really focuses a lot on close-ups of the actors, instead of pulling back and letting us see the fights in their full glory. Perhaps it’s the lack of sufficient backgrounds or stunt choreography. Overall the production value is better than your average “Xena” episode, but not by much. The movie could also have used about 25% less talkie-talk.

Ninaber and Kaster are both good physical types for this type of flick, and do their best with dialogue that sometimes clunks. Bhodie sort of reminded me a little bit of Jamie Lanister from “Game of Thrones” without the sinister element. Avalon is the warrior woman with seemingly ambiguous morals the audience is left to puzzle out.

“Cramped” is the best word I can to describe “A Knight’s War.” It needed more characters, more backstory and more fighting. It feels like the movie they were able to make with the resources available rather than the one they wanted. It’s akin to a sorcerer trying to summon a wolf and he gets a collie instead.