Madmartigan vs General Kael - Capcom's arcade coin-op game vs Willow movie

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dreamkatcha

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Published on November 30, 2019 6:45:35 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb4cm7wH_ew

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Willow (1989)

Duration: 3:08

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Madmartigan squares up to evil sorceress Bavmorda's chief henchman, General Kael (played by former wrestler and 'Auf Wiedersehen Pet' star, Pat Roach). George Lucas named the army commander after caustic movie critic, Pauline Kael, who had previously taken great delight in castigating his filmography, Star Wars in particular.

She hated almost everything that was popular and successful. Just to be contradictory and controversial? Who knows? Here's what she had to say about Willow...

Willow (The villain of this George Lucas/Ron Howard spectacular is "a Darth Vader-like giant in a death's-head mask, General Kael - an hommage a moi.")\n
George Lucas, who produced Willow, says, "It's a pure fantasy film that came out of my psyche." Maybe only a movie mogul can believe that he's the source of the world's treasury of legends and movies. If you took Bible stories and Peter Pan and Robin Hood and the Oz books and the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales and Gulliver's Travels and Lord of the Rings and Ran and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (and the Star Wars trilogy) and put them in a hopper and spun it around until it was a whirring mess of porridge, you'd have the mythical-medieval Willow, or something close to it. The evil sorceress Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh) in killing all the newborn babies in the Daikini domain, because of a prophecy that an infant born with a special mark will bring about her downfall. The savior baby girl is sneaked away to the forest by a midwife, and after she has been put on a raft of rushes she drifts downriver into the land of a peaceful, elflike people, the Nelwyns. Willow (Warwick Davis), a young Nelwyn farmer, takes her back to Daikini territory and tries to protect her. Eventually, with the help of a Daikini scalawag, the swordsman Madmartigan (Val Kilmer), and a rebel Daikini, Airk (Gavan O'Herlihy), Willow storms the evil queen's black castle. (Queen Bavmorda's armies are led by a Darth Vader-like giant in a death's-head mask, General Kael - an hommage a moi.)\n
There are said to be about four hundred special-effects shots (from Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic), but they're not prepared for dramatically, and there's no feeling of wonder in them. When vicious black boars tear the midwife apart, or when a bunch of little platinum-wigged Tinker Bells flit about, or nine-inch-tall men called Brownies scurry around, or the baby is on a shield that rockets down mountain after mountain, or men and women are transformed into pigs, you feel as if you'd fallen into a pile of mixed metaphors. Disguised in a dress, Madmartigan does a drag act; later, the queen's beautiful warrior daughter (Joanne Whalley) threatens to castrate him; two of the Brownies bustle about like miniature Catskills comics. It's doubtful if any action-adventure director has a strong enough style to give this script (by Bob Dolman, based on Lucas's story) a tone and a shape, and Ron Howard, who's got the job, is lost. When the death's-head general, holding the baby aloft, gallops through the troops on his black horse, slashing right and left, and crying out "No mercy! No mercy!," there isn't any real threat in it. And at the climax, when the baby (crying) is on a high altar, about to be slaughtered, while the evil sorceress queen battles with a good sorceress - it's like Johnny Guitar - you're too embarrassed for the moviemakers to feel any suspense.\n
Ron Howard shows his gentle talent only in his handling of Willow: the three-foot-four-inch Warwick Davis has a sweet-faced humility, which could make parts of the movie appealing to kids. It's always great to see Billy Barty. He plays the High Aldwin of the Nelwyns; i.e., he's Gandalf delivering the message: You have to believe in yourself. The baby (played by Ruth and Kate Greenfield) has endearing little drops of drool hanging from her lip, and the decorative use of chain mail is very chic. But maybe George Lucas should believe less in himself - he keeps trying to come up with an original idea, and he can't. Yet something from his psyche does come through: Lucas, who has undergone a costly divorce, has made a sword-and-sorcery epic in which all the power is in the hands of women.\n
May 30, 1988

You can read my free ebook covering Willow the movie and Mindscape's accompanying game at...

https://archive.org/details/willow-dreamkatcha-review

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