Beware the Jabberwock, my son, for it shall inflict on you 90 minutes of tedium, bad special effects and even worse acting in the form of a TV movie space filler.

Already shown on Syfy or similar before its delayed DVD, Jabberwock: Dragon Siege (the subtitle presumably because the producers belatedly decided that no-one would know what a Jabberwock was) is in many ways critic-proof. Clearly, the mainstream critics who dismiss summer fantasy blockbusters are hardly likely to be impressed by this low rent effort, and genre critics too are likely to be dismissive – but these disposable, CGI-heavy monster movies obviously have their audience, or there wouldn’t be so many of them. I wonder if, in twenty years time, these will be remembered as classic titles by thirty-somethings? Seems unlikely, but then who would’ve predicted people getting excited about a Blu-ray of Chopping Mall back in the day?

Jabberwock – doomed by the title to be forever in the shadows of Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky – is pretty bad, even by the standards of such things. Telling the story of a village blighted by the re-emergence of the mythical beast, it’s a surprisingly ponderous tale that is remarkably dull for a monster movie. While the dialogue is decidedly and incongruously modern, the film nevertheless plays the story completely straight-faced, and that’s a problem given that the cast are really not up to the task of creating believable, realistic characters. Kacey Barnfield, as the predictably spunky heroine, is very pretty – but that’s about the only compliment I can give the cast, who sleepwalk their way through the whole film. Worse, the film takes several clichés that are already the subject of movie mockery and delivers them as if they can still be taken seriously – most inadvertently laughable is the old man who spends the whole film on his deathbed, continually recovering before finally meeting his end in a fight with the Jabberwock – though not before delivering the longest dying speech since Richard Harris in Tarzan the Apeman.

What’s really depressing about this is that it is directed by Stephen R. Monroe, who had hinted at being better than the TV movie rubbish he had been making with the flawed but not awful I Spit on Your Grave remake. Here, he reverts to going through the motions.

All in all, a rather depressing effort that breaks the one cardinal rule of this sort of film by being dull. clear.

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