Forbidden Kingdom

Sitting to watch this film I was ready for some crappy low class movie. And I have been really surprised. As a russian production it is really well made, with high quality CGI or stop motion recording (combined quite well). If it comes to story (spoilers ahead!). This movie really nicely shows how minds of simple people can be influenced by creating proper mistification, adding to that religion, that will justify things that happend, as a punishment for sins. Entire plot goes around mysterious murder of young girl and a girl loosing her mind while being attacked by same culprit.Our main hero is British explorer, cartographer that ventures into russian nowhere, to make a map with exact borders of each country in the world. There is not much depth to the characters, but that's not the main goal of the film (I wrote about that at the beggining). We see people dealing with fear, that the try to get rid of by praying to god, while still believing in ther old pagan stuff, we see brother dealing with greed and betreyal, and a priest that lost with his lust as well as his need for power. We see grief. All of that is mixed with some gag moments, with one of the side characters making sarcastic and ironic comments about what's going on.Entire plot is assisted with help of CGI and other forms of animation, that I mentioned at the beginning, and that helps build a fear, and believe in the same stuff that those fictional villagers believed in.Summar: I really enjoyed the movie, it is a good one for an evening with a snack, but definetly wouldn't go for that to a cinema.For some people it maybe a little bit annoying that entire movie was recorded in russian and then dubbed in english, but if you skip that small detail. Go and watch it. Definetly would recomend that.

Quality of picture good

A Russian production about 18th century English scientist Jonathan Green who travels through Europe and finds trouble in a small town, which seem to be plagued by evil spirits and strange creatures. Jonathan becomes involved and after being employed to create a map of the area finds he is in a position to solve the mysteries.This is a really unusual film - the story is fantasy/horror but with a foot firmly placed in comedy also, with production values a lot higher than I expected with good sets and some impressive digital effects. The story is a bit convoluted and I had some difficulty keeping up with everything going on but the filmmakers did manage to tie up most of the loose ends by the conclusion.In the actor department there are a couple of natural English speaking actors and these are supplemented with a large cast of Russian actors. The Russian actors seem to have been speaking in Russian then had their voices dubbed into English (not sure exactly what went on here...).I did think Jason Flemyng was an odd choice for a 'hero' as it really didn't work well although most of the cast seem to be having lots of fun and this seemed to drag him along with them.The picture quality is OK (for DVD) but I think this would have been a very nice film to watch on Blu-ray. The audio provided is Dolby Digital stereo and 5.1 - I used the 5.1 and it was pretty good with great voice clarity and some good use of the surround channels.

My genre of film, Jason Flemyng was good but the foreign support cast was pretty dire.

Good watch good story

Reviews stating its dubbed over from Russian are wrong, Film is all english actors with a couple of Russian actors.

not that bad, but not that good either. Rather odd plot, and too many ppl with long hair who looked the same got me confused. Rather an odd film in general, which I guess makes it better than it would otherwise be. Started off ok but got a bit boring half way through.

very guillermo del toro style monsters/special effects, maybe a touch of the tim burtons nightmare before xmas too...Isaac Newton goes on a map-making adventure and gets mixed up in a ghosts/witches/spirits/demons type lark. A bit confusing sometimes / a bit of a who-dunnit / who's the witchie-poo. Good fun