If nothing else we have to give director
Lorenzo Sena's SyFy Channel extravaganza 'Dark Relic' and A
for Effort. We've all seen our fair share of SyFy
originals over the years and a lot of the times it looks like
the filmmakers, due to the burden of time and financial
constraints, don't even try, but I could feel the attempt to
do right with this one. Of course the execution didn't
quite live up to the effort put in but sometimes we take what
we can get.
It's been a long hard road for Templar Knight Sir Gregory
(James Frain). The Crusades have finally come to a
merciful end and Sir Gregory and his loyal knights have to
make one quick stop before heading back to Rome. Somehow they
got word that a piece of the Crucifixion cross of Jesus Christ
is available in layaway, and after Friar George (Samuel West)
verifies its accuracy, now these knights have the perfect gift
to present to the monsignor when they get back home.
And if by 'perfect gift' we mean 'Satan's Curio', then that's
what we mean. Things start off pretty bad for these
knights from the word 'go'. The ship they were cruising
on finds it's fresh water turned to salt water, it's food
turned to maggots… which can be tasty when properly prepared…
followed by a murderous storm, finally ending up beached on
some forgotten land. And that's the good news for these
guys.
Still, the goal is to make it to Rome
with their treasure and along the way they've picked up a
Muslim Turk in Hasan (Alvy Khan), his double blade wielding
hot wife Safa (Marija Karan), and the non-believing wench
Rebecca (Clemency Burton-Hill). They pick up a few more
people but these losers will only be devil fodder so we
won't concern ourselves with
them. So the knights and their new crew walk
through the woods, magic box in tow, and evil straight from
Revelations seems to be following them wherever they go.
Dead birds fall from the sky, carnivorous locust appear out of
nowhere, poorly rendered CGI wolves cause a ruckus, and monks
turn into wall crawling zombies. That's probably from
one of the missing books of Revelations.
Well this doesn't make any sense since these cats are carting
around a piece of wood that has the blood of The Savior so
they should be safe, not cursed, but what if some lunatic… I
don't know… like Satan… cursed this piece of the cross.
He does that kind of thing you know. And what if Satan,
or some reasonable poorly rendered facsimile thereof, is
flying around cleaning up what the pestilence he has sent
couldn't finish off? How do you stop that? And
what if this now evil box of wood makes it all the way to
Rome? End of days perhaps? Not if Sir Gregory,
beat down, depressed, disillusioned Templar Knight has
anything to say about it. Or his new woman Rebecca the
Non-Believer who is starting to believe stuff all the
sudden. Wall crawling zombie monks will do that to
you. And while Satan might seem like a big tree to chop
down, it's been my cinematic experience that if you have a big
enough weapon, he can be summarily dealt with.
Where is this effort that we spoke of in this movie Dark
Relic? For starters we can point to actor James Frain
who is a fine thespian and has been in a number of high brow
productions and he brings a certain sense of legitimacy to his
character of Sir Gregory. Sir Gregory has been through a
lot and seen way too much and Frain effectively translates Sir
Gregory's weariness to his audience in a way that only a
seasoned, talented actor can. Across the board 'Dark
Relic' has solid performances, including the 'Bulgarian Crew'
which includes actors Mike Straub, Velizar Binev and Antanas
Sebebrev… clearly I watch too many low budget movies shot in
Bulagaria… but these actors and most of the cast straight away
pushes this over the usual SyFy original fare. Also this
movie tries to have a little bit of brain as the characters
will speak of religion, the similarities of certain religions
and things that we will do in the name of God which is also
welcome. True, it's probably not the most intellectually
challenging of conversations, but this is a SyFy original with
a bad CGI Satan floating around so this too is appreciated.
What's holding 'Dark Relic' back? It's the same thing
that restricts almost every other fantasy based SyFy movie,
and that's the bad CGI. I know that there's no real cure
for this because top notch CGI costs money, but it's still a
problem because every last one of us knows what decent
computer graphics are supposed to look like so when we see a
fake looking boat being tossed about by fake looking waves on
a fake sea, it takes you out the cinematic moment. Fake
looking CGI wolves that growl real good also kind of ruin the
deal. The CGI Satan did have its moments, at least in
comparison to some of the other bad CGI we were looking at,
but it too was kind of chintzy the majority of the time.
Obviously no one is listening to my advice but I still think
if you one can't pull off decent special effects, then let's
concentrate on a real world work-around. Like instead of
a CGI satan, how about a dude in a rubber suit? It
worked back in the day.
So we admire 'Dark Relic' for what it succeeded at, and we're
sad for 'Dark Relic' for what it failed at which added all
together makes for an above average SyFy original. When
the SyFy curve is applied.
