The Ash Lad: In the Hall of the Mountain King (2017)

Princess Kristin (Eili Harboe) was nearing her 18th birthday and her parents insisted that she get married lest the troll king carry her off.  As the saying went, a princess who did not marry by 18 would be abducted by a troll who would marry her.  Kristin thought that was nonsense.  Besides, she did not want to marry the odious Prins Fredrik (Allan Hyde).  Thus, she ran away.

Espen (Vebjorn Enger) was the youngest of three brothers who lived with their father.  He was not a practical young man, usually distracted by unimportant things.  In fact, given the task of getting food for the family, he lost most of it during a chance encounter with a strange girl (i.e., Princess Kristin) who ate much of the food as she was famished.  Left to guard the house while his father and brothers went hunting, he managed to burn the house down.

Meanwhile, Kristin discovered, to her great surprise, that the tale was true.  The mountain king awoke from his slumber, stomped through the forest, snatched her from the woods, and returned her to his mountain cave.

Determined to reclaim his bride, Prins Fredrik and his entourage happened upon the burned ruins and asked about Princess Kristin.  There was a reward.  The three brothers were soon trekking into the woods to find the princess.  Strangely enough, the sober and hard-working brothers were more often foiled in their efforts while Espen had a knack for solving each trouble they faced.  He would collect junk along the trail, junk that would later prove invaluable in overcoming the latest obstacle.

Can Espen and his brothers rescue Princess Kristin before the Mountain King marries her?  Can they get there before Prins Fredrik?  Can they get the reward that would allow for the rebuilding of the house?

Light and fun.  Recommended.

Red Sonja (2025)

In a quaint Hyrkanian town filled with peaceful, well-dressed and productive people, an ethnically diverse collection of children play.  One child, a red-headed girl, has a wooden horse.  Then, the barbarians arrived, bursting through the pathetic gate - entirely by surprise in the middle of the day - and slaughtering or enslaving the inhabitants.  The red-headed girl - let's call her Sonja - escaped into the woods.  Unspecified years later, Sonja (Matilda Lutz) traveled through the forest on her beloved horse, Veehud.  Her goal: to locate the survivors of her people.  On this particular day, she encountered a band of poachers, who killed some forest beasts for the horns on their heads.  This shall not stand.  Sonja hunted them to a burned and denuded section of the forest where a wooden fort now stood.

Draygan (Robert Sheehan) had been a slave, but has since risen to become a conquering emperor.  The secret of his success is a peculiar book, though he only possessed half of it.  Draygan has the standard army of black-clad knights, a baboon-looking General Karlak (Marty Ford), a former gladiator/mistress Annisia (Wallis Day), and scientist/alchemist Maester Crudelis (Trevor Eve).  Draygan has managed to conquer territory with his machines, one of which looks like a tank.  He also has mind-control disks and a power generator that reminds one of Ironman's arc reactor.  Yes, exactly what one expects in Robert E Howard's Hyborean Age.

Into this fortress Sonja ventured to kill the poachers and to free the forest animals that had been captured.  Though the poachers were killed, Annisia subdued her in battle.  Sonja was enslaved and sent to the arena, where she was sent to her first battle in a chainmail bikini and with a wooden sword; it was for humiliation, not protection.  Reduced to this sad state, can Sonja escape enslavement and rescue the forest from the depredations of Emperor Draygan?

The origin story of Red Sonja has been abandoned.  In the comic, Sonja's family is murdered, while she is raped and left for dead.  A war goddess bequeathed her unmatched fighting skills so that she could exact vengeance.  But there was a condition: she could never lie with a man who had not beaten her in a fair fight.  None of that appears here.  Instead, she has been a hermit in the forest for untold years where she just naturally picked up tremendous martial talents.  A goddess does eventually intervene to save her - or perhaps resurrect her - but the requirement was that she save the forest.  Yeah, it's some nature goddess who is concerned about how humans are mistreating the environment.  No message there.

The book proved to be a holy scripture of the nature goddess.  Really?  For some reason, the first half provided brilliant technical insights that allowed Draygan to rise from slavery.  Imagine what he could do with the whole book!  Well, the second half of the book was entirely about healing.  The whole point of preventing him from getting the book was nonsense.  What was that prophecy again?  Ugh.

Why is Sonja such a great fighter?  How does a 5 1/2 foot tall woman with no armor easily defeat four 6' tall soldiers in heavy armor.  That was her first fight in the arena.  Did she go to some warrior training school during her time in the forest?

Matilda Lutz is miscast.  The whole point of Sonja is the chainmail bikini.  The comic was about having a hot chick in martial combat while wearing almost nothing.  The character is meant to appeal to a male audience.  Lutz is an attractive woman but she does not fill out the bikini.  She is a slender woman where someone with more of an hourglass figure was needed.  Worse still, the script did her no favors with flat dialogue and no character arc.  Bland.

Rhona Mitra, who plays a fellow slave and arena fighter, had a small role.  She is most noted for serving as a model for Lara Croft in the 1990s and being the lead in Doomsday (2008).  It's an Obi-Won Kenobi like role, where she imparts some wisdom before being killed off.

The movie had been in developmental hell for 20 years and this was the script and cast that they decided to move forward?  Astonishing.  Skip.