Minotaur
Jonathan English
Initial release: March 11, 2006 (USA)
So, sometime in the Bronze Age (or something, it's not actually clear this is actually Earth) the kingdom of Minos make a disastrous attempt at creating a physical god via the copulation of their queen with the bull god they worship. It, uh, doesn't work out like they planned. The resulting abomination is thrown down into the labyrinth, and every three years, the kingdom goes to a village across the sea to seize eight youths and feed them to the beast. Supposedly this increases the kingdom's power... somehow. it's not exactly clear how this all is supposed to work. As the film moves into the main plot, it's been three years since the last culling and the ships are due back any day. A nearly fetal Tom Hardy stars as the main character, Theo (not Theseus? Okay then...) who's been exempt from the culling because he's the son of Rutger Hauer's village leader character. But see, Theo is all bummed because his girlfriend was taken on the last culling, and the creepy old leper woman who lives near the village tells him that she's alive and waiting for him to kill the beast and rescue her. So now he sneaks a ride.
What follows is essentially a slasher movie where 8 bad actors pretending to be teenagers get menaced by a bad CGI monster (which I must point out is not half-man, half-bull, but is basically just a giant white bull demon thing of some kind.) This is bad enough, but then there's the racial messaging of the Kingdom of Minos being a bunch of exoticized brown sexual deviants, led by Tony fucking Todd of all people. Throw in a little incest and you've got yourself a classic racist fantasy movie.
While I have definitely seen worse movies than this, the thing that bothers me (aside from the bad acting and racism) is how this isn't even a good take on the minotaur myth. Most of it was invented out of whole cloth for no real reason. Seriously, why claim to adapt Greek mythology if you're not even going to actually adapt it? Was the whole point just to make a dumb teen monster movie? Well, it succeeded on that front, complete with the most hilariously contrived finale I've seen in a long time. You see, the gas that the king and his sister have been huffing is actually... I dunno, some kind of methane or something? Whatever it is, it's flammable, and Theo's got a little memento of his girlfriend (who is in fact dead, despite the methane hallucinations telling him otherwise) that just so happens to be flint.
So what does he do? He uses the gas that wafts throughout the caverns (it's not even a real labyrinth!) to set the whole place on fire. Okay then! And even then the minotaur is still not dead, and he has to stab it with its own horn. Okay then!
Honestly, the only reason to watch this is for the big name actors... of which Tom Hardy was not one when he made this movie, and his acting chops are hilariously non-existent. The only good things I can say for the film is that the cinematography can be quite excellent at times. While the palace sets are few, they look great, much better than the cave scenes. The first act is decent, promising a much better film than what it actually becomes.
As a side note: I also can't help but feel like Dark Souls borrows some ideas and visual inspiration from this movie, which honestly would imply that From has a tradition of borrowing from semi-obscure bad movies for their games (see also Bloodborne cribbing a bit from Brotherhood of the Wolf.)
I'm so frustrated that it seems to be almost impossible to find a good Greek mythological horror film. They don't seem to exist — at least, not without getting into the whole "ancient evil causing problems in the modern day" genre, which isn't the same thing. So as far as I can tell, all we get is ten minutes of Medusa in Clash of the Titans and this fucking thing. What a load of bull.
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