Fantasy

The Magic Sword

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Magic Sword
  • IMDb: link

The goofy 60s fantasy film The Magic Sword stars Gary Lockwood as an orphan raised by a sorceress (Estelle Winwood) who steals a number of magical gifts from his foster mother to save the princess (Anne Helm) he’s fallen in love with from afar when she is abducted by an evil sorcerer (Basil Rathbone) who has a habit of kidnapping princesses and feeding them to his dragon. Armed with a magic sword, armor, and steed, along with chivalrous knights, Sir George begins his quest to fight through the seven curses put in place by the sorcerer while also dealing with a traitor in his midst.

The magical effects, as you may guess, are pretty limited for the time and haven’t aged that well, likely one of the reasons the movie earned a spot on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (although two of the characters admitted it was better than they expected).

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Fantastic Beasts: The Politics of Dumbledore

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
  • IMDb: link

I’m not the biggest fan of the Fantastic Beasts series. The Harry Potter spin-off has offered the opportunity to explore other corners of the wizarding world outside of Hogwarts, but the results have been mixed. While I still enjoyed both Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and The Crimes of Grindelwald, I’d rate them as the least engaging of the Wizarding World films.

So what does Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore offer us? Secrets into the life of Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law)? New spells and magical artifacts? Strange new creatures? Instead we get… politics. I think given all the possibilities what fans would least expect is wizard politics, but that’s where Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), Dumbledore, and their various allies journey into trying to protect a wizarding world election from being stolen by Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen replacing Johnny Depp).

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Red Sonja #7

/ / Comics

Kicking off a new arc, Red Sonja #7 opens with an introduction to Baroness Drang who has locked away Red Sonja in her dungeon for a week proving on drugged food and water which the She-Devil with a Sword has refused to consume. Meanwhile, Sitha is working with Kebra others to loot Drang’s treasure chamber bidding her time waiting to break out Sonja.

Despite being the beginning of a new story, it feels like we’re plunged into the second or third issue of an arc with Red Sonja #7, and I’ll admit feeling a bit lost as both Sonja and Sitha seem to have at least a week worth of tale untold with us jumping into the middle just in time for a weakened Sonja to faceoff with the powerful, but not all that interesting or well-developed, Drang and Sitha to come to the rescue.

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Dragons: The Nine Realms – Fault Ripper

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Dragons: The Nine Realms – Fault Ripper
  • wiki: link

The six-episode First Season of Dragons: The Nine Realms concludes by turning its attention to the earthquakes that have been rocking the the ICARIS research station since the show began. While the adults come up with a plan to collapse the fissure, our intrepid dragon riders discover the source of the quakes is a burrowing Fault Ripper dragon. With all the kids of ICARIS now having their dragons, this episode acts as the first real mission for the group working together for a common goal while still keeping their secret from their parents.

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Red Sonja: Black, White, Red #8

/ / Comics

Three more tales of Red Sonja in black and white, and more than a little red thrown in, are collected in Red Sonja: Black, White, Red #8. In “Last Words,” my favorite of the three, Red Sonja confronts Master Valik the Merchant known for finding lucrative, but dangerous, jobs for thieves. These jobs are so dangerous, Sonja wonders just why any thief (including a few she knew) would ever take them.

Red Sonja and fifteen sailors survive the trip to Sleeper Island only to face the wrath of a demon even deadlier than the storm in “Fifteen Men on the Sleeper Chest.” And “Cursed” gives us Red Sonja and a young girl in the midst of a winter storm talking over the legend of a witch, killed by Sonja years ago, whose memory still haunts those in the woods demanding a sacrifice to be made to her.

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