Pagan Warrior (2019)

In general, I try to approach low and micro budget productions as gently as possible while still being honest. I understand these are working with resources orders of magnitude below the level of even small Hollywood movies, and many of these feel like labors of love being made to develop skills or just have fun. Comparing something like Two Front Teeth with Nosferatu would be like rating a pinewood derby car against a Formula 1 racing car: it's not even supposed to be the same thing. That why I usually refrain from being dismissive around movies like these.

But handling these with kid gloves is contingent on the people making these putting in the effort to deliver the best movie possible given their circumstances. Pagan Warrior, a movie which features multiple typos in the text opening the movie, is not conducive to a feeling of goodwill. So, let's be frank: this is bad, and not in a way I found particularly interesting, though the premise is outlandish enough, your mileage may vary. However, once I tell you that premise, understand the movie does not deliver on what's implied. I was left with the sense the effort ended with the creation of the premise - once you press play, you're on your own.

Okay, the idea is in 812 AD, an overthrown English king summons Krampus to kill a bunch of Viking invaders. So, in theory, this is a Krampus versus Vikings movie in which the demon hunts down and kills his enemies. Sounds bonkers, but fun, right?

Yeah, not really. The main issue here is one you won't be surprised by: you need at least some money to pull off a premise like that, and this seems to have been produced for next to nothing. Like, right next to nothing. In practice, that means the costumes (with the exception of the Krampus) are laughably cheap, the action is on par with what you expect teens to manage in their backyard, and the cast consists of less than 20 performers with no extras. The biggest battle - between the king's forces and the Viking horde - includes around five people on each side.

It's an unforced error. There's no reason this had to be a force invading a king's lands, rather than a group of merchants being attacked on the road or something. If the setting is what's important, this could have been scaled down to work with what was available. And if the story was what mattered... look, let me stop you there - the story very clearly was not a priority on this movie.

Okay, there's one reason they wouldn't have wanted this scaled down: the people making this apparently had an opportunity to shoot on location at a castle (probably only for a day or two, based on how much they stretch a handful of shots). The castle doesn't do much good if there's no king, so the story needs to be adjusted appropriately. Hence the not-so epic tale of a king forced from his throne by Viking invaders.

This absolutely feels like a movie written around a handful of assets. I earlier excluded the Krampus outfit when I said the bulk of the costumes were well below what you expect. That's not to say this is a fantastic piece, but it's a decent enough Krampus suit, nowhere near the best you'd see photographed during modern runs in Germany, but on the higher end of what you'd expect to find in a US costume shop. If you saw someone dressed like that on Halloween, you'd be impressed. If you saw someone dressed in it in a real movie, you'd assume it was supposed to be a human character in a Halloween costume.

This is more than I can say about any other costume in the movie.

As a rule, the expectation with micro-budget fantasy is "renfaire performer." If you can't manage that level of verisimilitude, you're going to stand out in a bad way. And, to be fair, a couple characters have cloaks that hit that mark. But the vast majority are dressed in what appear to be a combination of homemade costumes and outfits from Halloween stores. The Vikings, in particular, look as though their vests were plucked off a shelf... and not the expensive shelf.

So my best guess is they had access to a castle and a Krampus costume and wrote a movie around those, reasoning that no matter how bad it was, the synopsis alone would generate enough traffic on streaming to turn a profit. As always, I'm proud to have done my part.

Let's talk a little about what that movie entails. This will not take long.

It opens with a sort of prologue in which a prince encounters Krampus in the woods, interacts with the demon, and eventually gets eaten. This sequence takes an absurd amount of time and establishes the movie's style: namely, drawing out the dialogue to stretch the runtime as close to movie-length as possible. I should add this sequence, like the entire movie, was clearly shot in spring or summer.

Cue the aforementioned background text, which establishes this is set in Sussex, England in 812. Well, actually one bit of text says "812", then a few moments later "December 1812" appears on screen. But since this is about a Viking invasion, I'm guessing they meant 812.

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I should also note this text establishes the movie begins three days before "Yule Day," which is... a choice (as a reminder, Yule is a multi-day festival - there's no such thing as Yule Day). I assume this is a pretext for having the demon's manifestation limited to a single day, but... they could have just used the Winter Solstice. It's right there. You're already asking me to ignore the fact you're moving Krampus, a Germanic Saint Nicholas Eve tradition originating closer to the 1812 date than the 812 one, to England - I give movies a lot of leeway when it comes to folklore, but there are limits.

At any rate, a very mean Viking king and queen are invading Sussex, which is ruled by an improbably kind king. Realizing they lack an army big enough to fight the five or so guys coming after them, the king and his immediate family flee. One of the guards stays behind in the hopes this will improve the royal family's chances of escaping, leaving them with just the king, queen, princess, a servant, and a Viking who's betrayed the other Vikings. They try to escape via the woods, but the Vikings find them. Literally everyone pulls out a sword (princess included), and there's a very big small battle.

No one seems to be familiar with the basics of stage combat, so mainly this consists of characters slowly and lightly banging their weapons together while the editing tries and fails to make this seem at all exciting. This seems to end with the princess and good Viking captured and the king, queen, and servant killed. I say "seems to" because the king and queen are found by two local women, who turn out to be witches (the movie uses different terminology, but that's the gist), who manage to save them. The king wakes first, explains what happened, and desires vengeance, but he lacks the power to retake his castle. Also, he assumes the princess is dead, despite the fact the leader of the Vikings was pretty explicit he had other things in mind for her.

At any rate, the witches tell the king they can summon something that will kill the Vikings, but that it will return in ten years and claim a reward it deems as valuable as the kingdom it returns to him. So... try to act surprised when the movie acts as though the kid at the beginning being the king's future son is some kind of twist. He agrees, one of the witches kills herself because they also need a blood sacrifice, and Krampus goes on the hunt. Only there's a problem: for some dumb reason he tells it to kill everyone in the castle, rather than being more specific. At the time he makes the request, his daughter, the good Viking, and his remaining guard are held captive in that castle. So they're technically on the demon's list, too.

Meanwhile, the princess leverages the knowledge the Viking leader is attracted to her to steal a knife from him, which she later uses to escape. Everything about this subplot is, as you'd expect, bad, from the awkward fake seduction sequence to the cliche sequence where the Viking queen is jealous. Aside from the princess getting a knife, none of this goes anywhere narratively, in keeping with the movie's trend of filling time wherever possible.

The princess and the other two prisoners escape into the woods. Actually, everyone winds up back in the woods on "Yule Day". Krampus kills a bunch of Vikings as the king - finally realizing his error in not exempting his daughter from the demon's hit list - goes looking for her. I'll spare you the details: all the Vikings (including the "good one") wind up dead, but the king tells Krampus to leave, despite the fact the job hasn't technically been completed and he's still got a bit of time left. For some inexplicable reason, Krampus does so, and everything ends happily.

Until the twist! The one you didn't see coming in which... ugh. Yeah, obviously the kid's the king's son ten years in the future. Krampus showed up to collect on his debt. The king is in shock, because somehow he forgot about all that until it played out.

So. Yeah. That's the story.

In addition to the setting I've mentioned, they had a handful of establishing shots of some authentic looking cabins owned by the witches. I don't think there was a single shot of any characters in front of these, so I'm assuming they didn't have the actors handy when they were at whatever location these were shot at. If you're wondering why I'm mentioning something as trivial as exterior shots of huts, understand there's virtually nothing else in this movie worth discussing.

Though, while we're talking about establishing shots, they had drone footage of a bunch of fields which were pretty clearly not from the Middle Ages even before you spot the modern day house in the background.

That stuff is all forgivable, though. Same goes for stuff like the new glass window visible in the castle. What's harder to ignore is extraneous dialogue and unnecessary scenes. The movie makes very poor use of its time, the characters aren't interesting, and somehow it makes Krampus killing Vikings boring.

The holiday stuff is basically just the hook: this is clearly trying to cash in on the recent interest in Krampus. Setting it in the early 9th century is interesting in the abstract, but the movie clearly doesn't have any ideas for how to actually follow through on the premise, let alone the resources to deliver anything worth watching.

The reconfiguring of an alternate holiday to resemble Christmas is a somewhat common trope in fantasy media. The use of Yule here is a puzzling one, because there already was a midwinter holiday that would have been celebrated in Britain at the time the movie's set: Christmas (perhaps you've heard of it). The area had been converted to Christianity a few centuries earlier. Things would become a bit more complicated over the next few centuries due to Germanic influence due to the Viking invasions this is referencing, but my understanding is in 812 people would have been celebrating Christmas. It seems silly to import a separate holiday as a Christmas stand-in (particularly since Christmas is already being used as a stand-in for Saint Nicholas Day, but that's a whole other kettle of fish).

This was probably never going to be good, but there's no reason it couldn't have been fun. If this couldn't manage scary or exciting, it should have settled for ridiculous and entertaining. "So bad it's good" would have been a smart target to aim for. But no such luck. A couple performances rise to the level of "fine," but at the end of the "Yule Day," there's just no reason to watch this. The people who released it clearly didn't care what they were producing - you shouldn't either.