Merlin: The Return (1999)

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General		Extras
Category	Family	Credits
Rating
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	87:46
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	Paul Matthews
Studio Distributor	Peakviewing Trans. MRA Entertainment	Starring	Rik Mayall Tia Carrere Patrick Bergin Adrian Paul Craig Sheffer Julie Hartley Leigh Greyvenstein Grethe Fox Byron Taylor Jennifer Steyn Anthony Bishop Lynne White Jocelyn Broderick
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	Rental	Music	Mark Thomas

    This is definitely a bad 'Z' grade telemovie, one for the children on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Paul Matthews will not win any awards for his direction of this piece.

     The plot is basically that King Arthur and his knights were in a battle against Mordred and his army which culminated in a stand-off at Stonehenge. Merlin tries to hold Mordred at bay using his magic but Mordred has in his possession the fabled sword known as Excalibur which renders Merlin's magic useless. Just when all seems lost Lancelot grabs Excalibur from Mordred's hand and thrusts it into one of the stones at Stonehenge which banishes Mordred and his army along with Lancelot and Queen Guinevere into another dimension where they remain for the next 1500 years. This same act also places King Arthur and his knights in a state of suspended animation until Mordred and his army find a way back to the real world.

     The story then picks up in the present where a young boy arrives with his mother to live in a small English village with his grandmother. He soon strikes up a friendship with a young girl whose mother is a medium. The girl's mother is being used by a scientist to make contact with Mordred and to develop a plan to bring Mordred and his army back from the other dimension to take over the world. Somehow through all of this Merlin has managed to live in the real world for the past 1500 years and is now living in the same village as the two children. The children find out about the plan to bring back Mordred and they team up with Merlin to prevent it from happening.

     In all, the idea behind this movie is not too bad but the acting is terrible, the special effects are cheesy, and the whole movie is poorly structured. This looked more like a first attempt at producing a movie by a high school media class than a serious production.

Video

    This was obviously taken from video stock and there were some resultant  transfer problems as I have noted below.

    The movie is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.29:1 and is thus not 16x9 enhanced.

    The video can be soft in some scenes and shadow detail is definitely lacking. There was no graininess present in the movie.

    Colours were vibrant and generally quite good. I did not notice any colour bleeding.

    The video suffers greatly from MPEG compression artefacts throughout the entire movie. There are also analogue tracking errors which can be seen as a warbling effect along the top edge of the video and noticeably at 54:39 where the video briefly displays a band of distortion.

    There were no subtitles available for viewing with this movie.

    This was a single layered transfer hence there is no layer change.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    We are presented with only one choice for the audio track here and that is an English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) track. It is surround encoded.

    The dialogue is reasonably clear. However in some scenes, notably those that portray Mordred being channelled through the medium, the audio can be a little difficult to understand. I did not experience any lip sync issues.

    The music score for the movie can be a little unbalanced at times. A few times there I reached for the remote to turn down the volume as the music became quite loud and instead of enhancing the video it made itself the dominant feature. Mark Thomas has composed a number of music scores for other movies, and is probably more noted for his score for the movie Dog Soldiers and for the music score to the series Raging Planet. He has a classical background and the music score in this movie tends to show this as it is predominantly orchestral.

    The surrounds were used primarily to play the music score.

    The subwoofer was used but not as effectively as you would expect from this kind of audio track.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Credits

    I am not sure that I would consider the closing credits as an extra. Personally, I found this to be rather bizarre. I guess if for some reason you want to play just the closing credits of this movie then you have that option.

    From what I have been able to read about the R1 version of this movie the R4 version misses out on two extras, a filmography and a trailer. Although the R1 version does have a couple of additional extras of doubtful worth I think the R4 version will win in the video transfer area due to it being in PAL rather than NTSC.

    A strange twist on the King Arthur theme, primarily aimed at children. However, I am not sure that today's children will find enough in the movie to keep their interest. Overall a mediocre offering with the video and audio transfers.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall