With Matthew Broderick. Really awful. One can only surmise Broderick watched this and decided Broadway was a better option. We saw him with Nathan Lane in The Producers and he was great. Maybe he just doesn’t do well with heavy FX action comedies, which is what this hoped to be. There was a lot of FX, of course, and it was all better than any of the dialogue.

SyFy. Brian Krause, Najarra Townsend. Your typical astrophysicist assembles a team to find a way to shield Earth from a devastating burst of radiation released. By an unstable star in a nearby galaxy thriller. It’s only 87 minutes, so it’s got that going for it. A scientist with an awesomely bad Russian accent, some mysterious middle eastern bad guys who don’t understand all the nukes we are sending into space are for good, not evil, a wife & daughter struggling an dessert road to get to shelter in that old cave the family used to visit, and the usual tornadoes being whipped up by the impending doom are all just added bitter flavors to this truly bad movie. SyFy is awesome. They must spend tens or even hundreds of dollars on special effects, possibly getting a two-fer as the same crack team of experts could do FX and script.

Katherine Heigl, Ron Perlman, and some others you will recognize are featured in this really bad movie from 1998. While some segments of some of the sword fights are mildly amusing the dialogue is only terrible, the costumes don’t suck, the special effects are of a level that would be envied by most middle-school productions, and the use of little people as fodder for catapult ammo is probably wrong for a number of reasons, but while understandable, poorly implemented. As a Doctor Who fan, I was particularly unimpressed with the reanimation of the Valiant’s true love at the movie’s end (oh, I’m sorry if this spoiler ruins the movie for you), so closely mimics elements used in the Doctor.

There are probably few who read Prince Valiant in the comic strips. I was an infrequent reader. It is not a stand alone, it tell an ongoing story, and much like today, my attention span for such was a bit limited. The comic artist Hal David started Prince Valiant in 1937 (yes, 1937) and it has now run more than 3900 Sunday strips and is in over 300 newspapers, so this has been, one can surmise, a pretty successful enterprise.

In my humble opinion, it’s fortunate it started as a comic strip, although, 3900 strips x 72 square inches x 300 newspapers = ~585,000 square feet or about 13.4 acres of paper that could have been spared over the years had the movie come first. I am 100% certain that if the movie had been the lead, this saga would have been a short one. I think it’s a should see if you really enjoy bad movies. Don’t expect truly awful. Just bad.