Worst of Netflix: D-War

Every week, I scour Netflix for a movie rated at one star and put it in my queue, suffering through it for your entertainment so that you don’t have to. In the past, I’ve taken on anime cancer demons, softcore Iraq War porn and racist ventriloquism, and this week, I throw some D-Wars on that bitch.

D-War:  Dragon Wars (2007)

Starring: Ancient Korean folk heroes who have of course been reincarnated as pretty white people.

Sometimes, a movie comes across my desk that’s just not that easy to make fun of.  Maybe it’s a little too obvious that the people involved were pinning their hopes on what ultimately added up to a failure, or maybe it’s too boring and just doesn’t lend itself well to writing wisecracks.

And sometimes, I get a movie that opens up with a voiceover about how every five hundred years, a woman is born with “a spirit power that can turn a serpent into the mightiest dragon of all,” and the jokes pretty much write themselves.

Unlike a lot of terrible movies, D-War‘s problem isn’t that it doesn’t have anything I want to see.  There’s actually enough going on in this flick for about six movies that I’d actually like to see.  The problem is that it’s all happening at once, and while I never thought I’d say this, there are times when showing ten minutes of dinosaurs with cannons on their backs rampaging through downtown Los Angeles isn’t strictly necessary.

Movie #1 begins with our hero, Ethan Kendrick — a reporter whose vintage shirts and artfully clashing jackets give me the idea that he’s the star correspondent for the Hipster News Network — covering a strange explosion that involved a dragon scale, which sends him into a flashback about visiting an antique store when he was a kid.  While he’s there, the old man who ran the shop faked a heart attack to get Ethan’s father to leave the two of them alone, sending his dad to run for help after telling Ethan to watch him.  And that, my friends, is some bad parenting.

I mean, really:  Best case scenario, the guy’s telling the truth and you just commanded your child to watch an old man die, and worst case?  Pedophile.

In the world of D-War, however, there is a third option, in which cliches spring to life and the old man starts telling your kid an ancient Korean story about how dragons are made inside teenage girls.

This is when Movie #2 starts, as film technology is pushed to its limit by having an extended flashback inside another flashback, serving up a complicated retelling of the legend on which the movie is based.  I’d recap it here, but during this sequence, two different characters ask “What are you talking about?” in about three minutes, and if even the characters can’t keep this stuff straight, I’m not even going to try.

I will say, though, this part does turn pretty awesome when it essentially becomes Lord of the Rings, except that Gandalf can fly, do Tae Kwon Do, and make things explode by pointing at them.  That, I could watch for 90 minutes.  Unfortunately it doesn’t last, but the tradeoff is that Movie #3 is a buddy comedy where Ethan teams up with Craig Robinson from The Office:

As it turns out, Ethan is the reincarnation of Haram, a Korean warrior from 1507 – you know, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth – and he has to find Sarah, the reincarnation of the princess from the legend, before she turns 20 and either gives birth to a dragon or gets killed by another, more evil dragon, I’m not quite sure.  The problem is that the only thing he knows about her is her name, but through a series of increasingly ludicrous coincidences aided by the antique dealer (who is also a shapeshifting immortal wizard) and a subplot involving stand-up comedians Billy Gardell and Retta as wacky characters who try to convince people something shady’s going on (Movie #4), Ethan and Sarah finally meet.  And yes:  she’s certainly the kind of woman who can make my serpent turn into the mightiest dragon (mandatory rimshot).

After a flirting for a minute with being a slapstick comedy where Craig Robinson fights Fake Darth Vader (Movie #5) and a brief period in which D-War is a horror movie about a hundred-foot snake who kills people after sneaking up on them (Movie #6), Ethan and Sarah are eventually wrangled into a government conspiracy to sacrifice Sarah to the dragons (Movie #7), but escape only to be taken by the bad guy to what appears to be Mordor (Movie #8).  There’s a fight, and things start exploding because… oh hell, I don’t know.  The Power of Love?  I’m going to go with the Power of Love.

From there on out, the movie follows a pretty logical thread to its conclusion:  Ethan appears to shoot lightning out of his crotch to kill the bad guy, then two identical CGI snakes wrestle in the dark (note: not a euphemism), Sarah throws a glowing ball that I think is meant to be her soul at one of the dragons and the dragon eats it, then she dies and the dragon starts crying, but her Jedi Ghost shows up to tell Ethan she’ll be waiting for him when he dies.

And then the movie ends, and I’ve got to say, I actually wish it had kept going a little while, if only because while all this is going on, a crapload of orcs and dinosaurs are attacking downtown Los Angeles and fighting helicopters.  Presumably they go away for another five hundred years after the evil dragon is defeated, but what happens when Ethan goes to work the next day and has to cover the story of how LA’s being rebuilt after an attack by a bunch of cannon-toting stegasauruses?

It’s a pretty big plot thread left untied, but I’m hoping to explore it myself if and when the SyFy Channel finally picks up my as-yet-unproduced script, Megadino vs. Helicopter.

Check out the Worst of Netflix archive.

Chris Sims is a freelance comedy writer from South Carolina. He briefly attended USC before he dropped out to spend more time with Grand Theft Auto, and his career subsequently took the path that you might expect from someone who makes that sort of decision. He blogs at http://www.the-isb.com and creates comics at http://www.actionagecomics.com.

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