User Reviews

Imagine a standard story about the evil terror of the land, the good king, the bad king, the corrupted king adviser, the good princess and the valiant knight. Any number of scripts and movies could have provided inspiration for this. But no, they wanted to do it the MediaPro way. That is, BTW, a Romanian production company.

The result is some nicely drawn dragons, although completely disconnected. If they weren't "the terror", I would have guessed they came from another movie altogether. Then the script is completely boring and there are some absolutely horrible action scenes and acting.

Arnold Vosloo plays well, I think he is one of the good actors around, too bad he is not cast in decent roles. Why did he accept this role? Did he need money so badly? Or are people in casting just oblivious to acting talent and he plays what he can get?

Same goes for John Rhys-Davies. He plays his usual "Professor" type and has the decency to die when the part got just too ridiculous. His acting wasn't good either, although I have to admit, any actor would have been hard pressed to feel motivated in a movie such as this.

The Romanian actors were decent enough, except Cabral Ibacka and Loredana Groza, who are Romanian TV celebs, not actors, and it painfully shows. I liked the evil king, too, not because the part was interesting or the acting great, but because I remember the actor living in my neighbourhood :)

Bottom line: avoid this. But do look for the extended 5 minute or more trailer. It looks great and has more production and direction values than 10 Fire&Ice movies. Maybe they will extend it to a complete feature film some day :)

The movie is so bad that I didn't even bother to finish it.

The story is simple. We have this kingdom called Carpia or something. People living there used to be happy and all that stuff until a fire dragon strikes simply because it felt like destroying things. After all, that's what dragons do. The burn stuff and kill stuff. So the tomboy princess of the kingdom decides to be a hero and tries to reach an ex-knight who is known for being someone who knows ways to defeat a dragon. Unknown to her though, this ex-knight happens to be dead. However, he has a son so everything's OK. So the tomboy princess reaches this guy and asks him to get rid of the dragon, which he kindly refuses at first. He eventually agrees when she offered to pay him. I guess it's probably because: "Cash rules everything around me, C.R.E.A.M., get the money, dollar dollar bill ya'll" - Wu Tang Clan Meanwhile, the king is being persuaded to give in to the terms offered by the evil ruler of another kingdom in order to keep the dragon away.

Seriously, if any of you who actually plan to watch this expect this to be as good as any fantasy-related blockbuster movie, then there's a problem with you. But this movie is flat out bad. Yes, even by TV movie standards. TV movies are known for having cheesy and amateur script writing as well as B- acting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are always bad. On occasion, they are fun to watch. XIII is a great example.

This movie however, has a really terrible script. While most things in the plot do add up, the characters are incredibly weak (A dragon slayer who cares only about money but later becomes a hero? I'm damned). No matter what they do, you just can't help but think that's just stupid (Charging in while the guards are changing shifts isn't an advantage). And given the fact that this is supposed to be set in the medieval times, there shouldn't be any projectors present at the time.

Of course, given that this movie has a horrendous script, it's difficult to expect any good acting to be seen. It's actually surprising to see Arnold Vosloo in this flick, as you know, he had always been a good actor and was very consistent. Most of the actors/actresses are bad in this one, especially Amy Acker. I have to admit I'm kind of a Amy Acker fan. Still, I have to say that she's horrible in this one. If you can't perform well due to a bad script, at least get the accent right. In this case, her accent is just flat out unbearable. You can clearly hear the American accent in every line she says. Seriously, a Chinese like me can play out an English/Irish accent better than her, and it's not even like I'm good at playing accents. Amy Acker is just annoying the this flick.

Maybe whoever in this film participated for a paid vacation? That's the best explanation I could come up with.

The soundtrack and the CGI stands out in a positive way, not because they're extremely good, but because the other aspects didn't quite work out. That's why it's surprising to see watchable CGI and a somewhat original soundtrack which was actually close to bringing up the tone in the movie.

To be honest, had this movie live up to its potential, it wouldn't score more than 6 or 7 out of 10. The whole movie was a bad idea to begin with anyway. This is also why I'm surprised to see a theatrical release in Romania, as this disaster wouldn't even qualify for a straight-to-DVD release.

TV movies doesn't necessarily mean bad movies. While they are actually stereotyped as cheesy, that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. I enjoy cheesy movies and lines. I enjoy corny love-hate relationships and all that. You don't need a huge budget to make something great, you just need the heart and determination. You can clearly see that all of those who were somehow related to the production of this movie don't have the heart to make a good movie.

And one more thing, Sci Fi should stick to science fiction.

This was a cheapie DVD from the supermarket checkout bin. It stars Amy Acker (Fred from Angel), Arnold Vosloo (Imhotep from the Mummy movies), John Rhys-Davies (from any fantasy movie which will stand still long enough for him to get into costume and nip in front of the camera), a chap called Tim Wisdom who I've never heard of before and never expect to hear of again given his achievements in this movie, and a couple of dozen people whose names end in -escu (which also applies to most of the crew).

Intrepid princess Amy Acker gets stuck into finding a way of defending the kingdom from a fire-breathing dragon. Which involves setting an ice-breathing dragon onto it. Which, as it turns out, isn't actually that great an idea.

Thing is, there's actually some potential here. Acker is OK, Vosloo is always fun, Rhys-Davies does his usual thing (Brian Blessed-lite), and the assorted -escus manage to be in the right place at the right time. More importantly, it looks good. The cinematographer plainly knows what he's up to, and the film is very attractively photographed. And despite a less than generous budget, the CGI dragons (clearly based on stingrays) are, for the most part, well animated and well integrated into the background plates, far more so than is usually the case for this sort of movie.

But everything is massively let down by the script. Every plot development is either signalled well in advance or else is hugely predictable. There are constant exhortations to the princess to stay where she is, remain out of danger etc., and she takes no notice of any of them. By about the 10th time she has ignored all advice and rushed into peril, they even make a story point out of it.

The -escus all swordfight by rushing at their opponent brandishing their swords over their head - clearly they all had the same swordfighting teacher, and he was crap.

And regrettably the showdown scrap between the dragons is also crap - well animated, but nothing actually happens. And it doesn't happen A LOT. In fact you wonder whether it's ever going to stop not happening. And then factor in endless riding across the same hill, field, and bit of forest....

In the end, though it's the script which lets it down.

I was actually quite excited to see Fire & Ice, simply because the Sci-Fi Channel rarely makes fantasy-productions, as they tend to produce more horror and natural disaster trash than anything else.

The acting is okay in this, John Rhys-Davies and Arnold Vosloo were the strongest, and the rest of the cast were ho-hum. The special effects are predictably terrible, however, that only applies to the stingray-like dragons because the landscapes are quite enjoyable to look at. The dragons do not look good, and it was quite a letdown to be honest.

The other flaw would have to be the cinematography and editing. I don't think there's one shot that doesn't try to be "artsy" and "flashy", as the majority of shots are all done in a sweeping-pan. Another flaw would be the mediocre story. The problem of the fire dragon is so quickly solved, that defeating it is the remaining two acts.

The music is bland, and hardly worth listening to a second time. The action is dull, and poorly shot and edited.

All in all, Fire & Ice has an overall okay production value, making it seem like an expensive project, but with a mediocre story, all it really adds up to is a snooze-fest. It's a good thing i recorded this, because I fell asleep the first viewing and unfortunately had to re-watch it to know how it ended... which is predictable, go figure.

I highly recommend on skipping this, unless you, like me, are into Sci-Fi's lame productions.

This movie has way too many shots of the same thing that makes the action sequences feel like a turtle running a 5k marathon. So many scenes should have been cut out entirely. Imagine watching the dragons fighting(doing somersaults around each other, then cut back to princess looking on, see dragons flying not really attacking each other, cut back to more looks of worry from princess, back and forth of this pointless dragon fights and worry looks for what seemed like way too long until finally i caved and just had to skip fwd a bit more until it was over. Bad directing is the key to why this movie sucked. The acting was alright i guess, some actors better then others. On the jacket it states "A Visually Spectacular(imo outright lie...unless they meant spectacularly awful), Fantasy Adventure(yeah its that) from the director of Catwoman(uh -oh catwoman sucked too)." That is supposed to be some thing good? (That made me laugh.) I mean the CGI is from 2008, it should be better then stingray like dragons that clearly don't blend into the background and looks real. Jurassic Park had better CGI then this and that was made back in 1993(so visually spectacular???? yeeeeah-right.) Costumes were meh.... I see they tried but it looks like a low budget webisode project and i've seen better webisode shows with much better wardrobe.

My thinking is why did they even bother making this? Yeah, i only stuck around because Amy Acker(Angel) was a main lead.

If your looking for a drinking game maybe watch this with friends and drink every time they say "dragons" or "princess", and you will be drunk real quick.