Quest for the Mighty Sword

I'll always have a special place in my heart for this movie, bad as it is. My sister and I ran across it years ago on HBO and quoted lines from it all summer. In fact, we taped the movie and I often made other people watch it, but nobody seemed to think it was as funny as my sister and I did.

I think what I find most interesting about this movie is that the filmmakers would even try to produce an action-fantasy epic with the $500 budget they apparently had. Usually, your independent filmmakers have a general sense of their limitations. They tend to shoot small films that can get by on small budgets. But the folks who made "Quest for the Mighty Sword" thought BIG. They must have had remarkable confidence in their film-making ingenuity--a real belief that through a little clever camera angling, they could turn their fifteen cents into a dollar--turn their plastic sword, overweight lead actor, and single troll costume (used for almost every monster who shows up in the film) into a passable fantasy experience. This isn't "the little movie that could." It's "the little movie that thought it could, but couldn't." Something about that, however, makes the film lovable in its own way.

In any event, I sincerely envy these filmmakers. Their power to view the glass as "half full" must be nearly inhuman. They must be pretty happy people, generally speaking.