Dragonslayer (1981)
Directed by Matthew Robbins
A sorcerer and his apprentice are on a mission to kill an evil dragon to save the King’s daughter from being sacrificed according to a pact that the King himself made with the dragon to protect his kingdom.
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What critics compared Dragonslayer to
And, although the beast is a lot more impressive here than the one featured in 1981's Dragonslayer, not even the thrill of a dragon attack can save this film.
A couple years ago at SXSW I saw Guillermo del Toro host a screening of Matthew Robbins’s 1981 Dragonslayer, and after the film he spoke so eloquently about sympathizing with the monsters in monster movies – about finding beauty and otherworldly humanity in their lumbering destructiveness.
I think often of when Hellboy kills the Earth Elemental in Hellboy II, of the enormous moral complexity of that sequence, the peril, the sense of ecology, and the feeling of loss once the monster is vanquished--all things seldom felt at the movies since Dragonslayer, perhaps (making apt del Toro's screenwriting collaborations with Dragonslayer helmer Matthew Robbins on Don't Be Afraid of the Dark and the upcoming Crimson Peak), and none of which is especially evident anywhere in Pacific Rim.
The screenplay by del Toro and Matthew Robbins (who co-wrote and directed the grim early ’80s fantasy epic Dragonslayer and co-wrote del Toro’s first Hollywood foray, 1997’s Mimic) hits all the right notes and covers all its bases without ever really elevating the story to the level of the visuals, but the film works anyway because the images have such a powerful force of their own.
I was surprised at the end to see the great Matthew Robbins, screenwriter of Dragonslayer and one of the many script doctors on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (i.e., good movies), credited as a co-writer on this.