One of the best films i have seen

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

FORBIDDEN KINGDOM is another big-bucks Russian fantasy flick that descends into lengthy and repetitive action scenes featuring plenty of CGI augmentation but not a lot in the way of voice or character. The film feels more like a Hollywood flick along the lines of VAN HELSING or I, FRANKENSTEIN than anything more distinctive. It's supposedly an adaptation of a famous Gogol story but is about as far from that as you can get. The underrated Jason Flemyng plays a traveller who heads off to a Romanian forest to find himself battling a malignant demon. There's one decent set-piece involving a headless creature attacking our hero but otherwise it's all rather predictable and gets tiresome about twenty minutes in. Charles Dance has a small role and is always welcome, but there are one too many over-the-top Russian characters in support.

In Viy also known as The Forbidden Kingdom, Jason Flemyng is Jonathan Green an ambitious cartographer forced to flee his prospective father in law in England and goes to create detailed maps of Transylvania and he stumbles upon a forgotten Ukranian kingdom with a roving beast.It is filled with villagers who fear witchcraft, monsters and legends with a cursed monastery high on the mountain that holds the body of Pannochka and is the source of all evil as she is some kind of spirit that controls the gateway to hell.Green as a rational man and a scientist does not believe in monsters and myths but the things he sees might just get him to believe in the irrational especially as Pannochka's father wants to give her a proper burial.The film is filled with wondrous special effects that would make Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton envious but the story is too muddled and the film veers from a twisted bizarre fairy tale to something more scary and bloodthirsty. The dubbing is very poor as well which is off putting but Flemyng provides goofiness and comic relief. The scenes with Charles Dance back in London have little reason to be in the final film.

"Viy", a.k.a. "Forbidden Empire" is a fantasy film with a confused story about a British cartographer that flees from England (actually from his future father-in-law) expecting to raise a fortune in the East to marry his beloved girlfriend but finding a cursed place. The film has wonderful special effects but is hard to be followed since the pretentious screenplay is not well-written and is totally disconnected with many plot points. The 1967 film is a Russian classic horror movie and a little gem. However this unnecessary remake is a complete mess and difficult to understand which the target audience is. My vote is three.Title (Brazil): "A Lenda" ("The Legend")

Just in case you didn't know (like me), this is sort of a remake of a 1967 movie. Though as some have stated here and on other places, it's not really a remake or people shouldn't expect it to be one. Whatever the case, this has pretty good special effects in it. The acting on the other hand is hard to rate.Why is that? While watching (in English in this case), you might realize that something is off with some of the actors. I can only assume, but most of them either couldn't speak English or their English was so bad, they had to be synced. And that is very apparent in many scenes. Obviously Jason Flemyng does not have that issue. And if you are a fan of Fantasy Fiction, you will still sort of love this. But there are things that just don't work or are too convoluted ...