Princess Venetia and the Dragon
By John Oak Dalton • Jan 25th, 2006 • Category: NewsA princess finds her true destiny hunting and slaying a dragon in writer/director Joshua Budd’s heartfelt, and heartbreakingly poor, fantasy short Princess Venetia and the Dragon.
Budd’s short opens with some woeful pencil sketches detailing the slaying of our princess’s family at the scaled claws of this dragon, barely a step above lined-paper doodles during study hall; but after this alarming overture the overall production values improve from there as our princess (Dawn Barber), who of course has been living with a noble poor family, learns her family history and promptly heads out to some spooky caves to slay her family foe.
Costuming and set design are all appealing, though perhaps at a Renaissance Fair level, and when our princess finally meets her enemy we find him to be a surprisingly nicely rendered CGI beast. But the storytelling never rises above the level of an average night of “Dungeons and Dragons” around the kitchen table, a waste of talent and resources. An attractive score helps some overall pokiness and flat presentation.
But Budd is sincere in his work, and his straight-faced execution will certainly have appeal to role-playing gamers at Cons across the country. The average viewer might rate this modest sword and scorcery opus a bit lower, and the D&D fan a bit higher; thus I will split the difference and let the viewer, like our true-blooded heroine, find her own path.
Two and a half stars.
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John Oak Dalton is a Community Television Station Manager by day, and a DIY acolyte by night. In the 80s he made Super-8 movies and his own basement mix tapes. In the 90s he hosted a cable-access show and made his own zines and minicomics. In the 21st Century he began working with grassroots video and microcinema and writing b-movies, and has more than a dozen projects on the shelf, on screen, in development, or in production.
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