From the network that brought us classics such as ‘Mansquito’ and ‘Raptor Island’ comes the latest from the SciFi network, ‘Minotaur’.  Now nobody, and I mean nobody can dump dreck across the small screen like the SciFi channel, but ‘Minotaur’ God bless ‘em ain’t so bad.

Seems like, for some reason, this ancient civilization was trying to create a master prince or something, and mated the queen with a bull.  Make of that what you will, I’m not touching it.  From that union came the Minotaur, a crazed beastly thing that had to be thrust down into the caves beneath the palace and now feeds on sacrifices.  A local village run by Cyrnan (Rutger ‘I will do ANYTHING if the check clears’ Hauer) is forced to give up 8 of its youth every three years for the sacrifice.  His son Theo (Tom Hardy) is sent away each sacrifice harvest because he needs to be available to run the shanty village when Cyrnan kicks the bucket.  But when a leper tells Theo that his love, who was snared in the last harvest, is still alive, Theo arranges for himself to be taken with the mission of slaying the beast and freeing his true love. 

The land of the Minotaur is run by Deucalion, played by Tony Todd of Candy Man fame, who must have had extra pork during the shoot because he hammed it up to the extreme.   When Deucalion is taking happy sniffs of the magic horns head or sacrificing virgins to his

he’s dripping drool over the ultra luscious queen Raphaella (Michelle Van Der Water).  So, down in the minotaur pit go our 8 sacrificees and one by one they get picked off and devoured.  Including one rather horrific scene of a young lady getting speared by minotaur horn in the back of neck, then jutting out her yap.  Pretty violent stuff for TV, but I’m glad to see it.

All in all this flick is fairly standard hide and seek and be slaughtered stuff, which is a HUGE step up for SciFi original movies.  The movie is paced reasonably well, and CG minotaur was done quite well.  They probably went a little to heavy on the lore mumbo jumbo, but considering Michelle Van Der Water was either soaking wet, or half naked, or both throughout the entire movie, earns it a mumbo jumbo pass.   A decent SciFi diversion until eventual return of ‘Mansquito 2’.