This low-budget but reasonably competent swords and sorcery yarn is the sixth instalment ina series of Mythica films that goes back to 2014. It seems they were first bankrolled partly by crowdfunding, and then presumably kept going by the production’s low overheads and straight-to-retail distribution to an audience that clearly grooves to quasi-Tolkienian, Dungeons and Dragons-style quests featuring a motley band (there is usually an elf or dwarf). If you like your necromancy tales spiked with huge chunks of nattering as the characters endeavour to bulk out the running time with lots of banter and exposition, this may be just the ticket. Don’t worry too much about not having seen the other five films because this is reasonably watchable, especially as so much time is devoted to filling newbies in on the backstory via dialogue and voiceover.
In any case, this is a bit of reboot with the meagre plot unfolding about 15 years after events in the last film. The ensemble is made of up all-new characters who allude to such figures as Marek the slave girl-cum-magician who led the franchise earlier. This go-round, our protagonist is The Stranger (Will Kemp), known just as Stranger to his friends; he is an apothecary/bounty hunter (clearly in this medieval economy everyone has two or three jobs) travelling with a mysterious cargo in his wagon. Stranger finds Erid (Nate Morley), an injured young man, on the road and brings him to an inn run by Irish-accented dwarf Giblock (Joe Abraham). The inn just happens to be where Erid had been living as a one of Giblock’s slaves along with comely Arlin (Ryann Bailey), but Erid recently got caught up in a catastrophe when the local witch, who goes by the delightful moniker Mahitable Crow (Barta Heiner), murdered everyone in the nearby village, making Erid the sole survivor.
As a terrible storm is raging outside, other travellers keep fetching up at the inn, including a loudmouth local marshal and his elven sidekick, a hulking hunter, a mysterious vampy woman, and so on. It’s like The Hateful Eight but with slightly less ponderous dialogue and crisper editing. The nocturnal time-frame means the darkness can disguise the shonkiness of the visual effects during the sequence when a human character turns into a CGI bear. In the final scenes – in daytime – the purple smoke and CGI lightning looks even cheaper and shonkier, which is in its way sort of endearing. But credit is due to the cast and director Jake Stormoen (who played a character in the earlier films) for serving this up with a surprisingly persuasive gravity and straight faces. You can tell it comes from a place of respect for the franchise’s audience.
Mythica: Stormbound is on digital platforms from 16 June