P-51 Dragon Fighter (2014) Reviews

• What a great little 'B' movie

  amunro-368-743782014-11-01

  Please don't misunderstand me. This movie is just crap. Wonderfully so. Tarantino, Rodriguez, et al, eat your heart out. This was not an 'A' movie pretending to be a 'B' movie. It is most definitely just a 'B' movie. The best I've seen in at least a decade. I downloaded it simply because I thought it might be an interesting 'B' movie (and no, I wouldn't have paid to see it - I will however try to pay them as a thank you though). You know how it goes, sitting at home alone, family at a jazz festival, me working. Need some non thinking down time. Have no expectations other than badly scripted, badly acted, nonsensical plot, but a wonderful representation of this second tier, cheap genre. Which I kind of expect was the producers point. Just what I was looking for. The best nonsense I've watched in years.

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• Hire to fire

  unbrokenmetal2015-10-23

  Somewhere in Northern Africa, back in WW II. Nazis discovered dragon eggs, raised many grown up dragons a little later, and hire four witches to control the dragons by psychic powers. Then they attack allied forces, planes and tanks are destroyed by the fire of the mythic beasts, until a British general develops a cunning plan: shoot back... Another trash movie from director Mark Atkins I remember best for 'Princess of Mars' and 'Sand Sharks'. The budget was obviously very low, for example the pilots in the cockpits are always shown in a close-up with a narrow focus range against a blue studio background, so nobody can see interior details of the planes. The acting is ridiculous, just for example take the the French pilot. Well, you knew from the subject of 'Dragons vs. Planes' it wouldn't be Shakespeare, still this is entertainment on a very modest level. The fantasy element of the co-operating witches is interesting, but will work better in a different background, i.e. a pure fantasy movie. The best scene of this movie was, which is telling a lot, the drinking contest. Maybe I'll recommend the same to 2 people I really don't like some time.

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• A 4 year old could actually make a better film

  dreamwalk19862014-11-01

  This, just like Mark Atkins other attempts (generally rip off's of other big movies in order to trick people into buying the DVD, "Jack the giant killer" is his perfect shameless example) is yet another flop in literally every way possible, there is literally no saving grace at all. To cut a long story short, the directing, cinematography, writing and acting is all shocking. I watched it purely out of curiosity and I wish I could have that time if my life back. I am generally a very positive person and find "something" good on most things, but this is just abysmal - needless to say, don't bother.

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• Why, oh why, is 1 star the lowest you may rate a film?

  bcamptx2015-08-26

  SPOILER ALERT: This film is among the most specious piles of bovine excrement ever made with a WWII related theme. (The film FORTRESS, released just a couple of years ago is also in this category.) The supernatural theme of Nazis calling on witchcraft, demon worship, fantasy creatures, etc. is taken to an all-time low attempt at suspension of belief. Let's examine some of the problems with this little jewel. 1. Dragons. Okay dragons are tough. Dragons are mean. Dragons can fly nearly 400 mph? A P-51 gets chased down by a dragon. Really? Maybe Nazi dragons... 2. I noticed the guy who wrote this career killer also directed it. He should be banned from doing either ever again. There obviously was no technical adviser as each and every military uniform in this movie is hilariously incorrect. From collar tabs on wrong lapels, overseas cap badges used on uniform blouses, an American commanding officer with British collar tabs (maybe he was a Canadian?)... the list goes on. No one with even a rudimentary understanding of WWII history was involved in this project. 3. The major cliché in all of this is the group of pilots gathered together to stop the onslaught of the evil Nazi dragons. Without giving away any further "plot" elements these guys are the same people you'd find at a fraternity kegger (if you had one with foreign exchanges students.) The rest of the movie looks and sounds as if it were translated from the original Japanese monster movie without the benefit of someone who speaks Japanese. It was an hour and a half of my life that I'll never get back. I'd already read the reviews and figured it just couldn't be that bad... It was that bad and more. Do not waste the electricity it takes to view P-51 Dragon Fighter. Use some water instead and flush this t**d to where the sun doesn't shine.

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• Proof that the alternate reality and mash-up crazes have their limits!

  MartinHafer2015-02-27

  In recent years, there have been a huge number of films offering strange mash-ups that combine things that really have no reason being combined. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a great example. And, there also have been films with alternate realities—where the rules of the franchise can be changed. The recent Star Trek films clearly fall into this category. While such bizarre reinventions might be entertaining, films like P-51 Dragon Fighter would seem to indicate that these trends have about run their course…and thankfully so. In this bizarre film, dragons, yes dragons have been brought into a WWII film. But it must be an alternate reality also because so much of the history in the film is wrong. P-51s did not serve in North Africa (and if they had, they wouldn't have been the late models you see in the film), V-2 rockets were not launched until well after the North African campaign, black men unfortunately did NOT serve on the front lines with whites and folks would have had different haircuts and no beards—because it was the 1940s, not 2014. But considering there are freaking dragons, I guess bad history isn't exactly a huge problem here. The film begins with a couple soldiers having a punch each other in the face contest to see who is the most manly (I am not kidding about this ridiculously macho scene—it IS in the movie). The film then shows that a cult of weirdo sorceresses and some Nazis are working together to control dragons that they recently discovered. These dragons work for the Germans and sport cool German insignias. They can out-fly the best American planes of the day and look unstoppable. It looks like the Allies are screwed until they assemble a group of about 8 pilots to take on the dragons. Considering that they COULD have had thousands of planes and pilots at their disposal, it IS odd they'd go with these 8 and it's also odd that they were NOT all American pilots but a United Nations sort of group (I guess the film was trying to be politically correct). At the same time these pilots take on the dragons, an equally tiny group of Allied commandos attack the dragon enclave on the ground. Again, they could have sent in 50,000 troops…but that many men mean a much higher budget than this low-budget film would have allowed. So is the film any good? Well, I liked the music….and the CGI was nice. The bottom line is that P-51 is indeed a bad movie—and this should come as no surprise to anyone (except, perhaps, the folks who made the film). It does have some decent production values and might be of interest to the really undemanding and possibly demented film buff. My only worry is that if the film manages to somehow make money that we'll see even weirder mash-ups. What's next—Cavemen with Nukes, Jesus and Gandhi Versus Hitler or perhaps The Obaminator--where we learn that our president is a robot sent from the future to wipe out mankind?!

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