the audience applauded

Really Surprised!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

SLEEPING BEAUTY is a B-movie version of the story, shot in Bulgaria by actor Casper Van Dien, who seems to have cast most of his family in supporting roles. It bears little relation to the actual fairy tale and is more like a typical movie by The Asylum. A bullish prince and his companions go on a mission to rescue a beautiful princess from an evil queen, and along the way they encounter lots of terrible CGI dragons and random zombie-like foes. The budget is really low here, which means that none of it is remotely convincing, and Van Dien's direction is flat. The hero of the piece is Finn Jones, of GAME OF THRONES fame, and he gives a singularly wooden performance. The highlight is Olivia d'Abo, hamming up in pantomime style, as the villain of the hour.

The 2014 Sleeping Beauty is mediocre at best in pretty much every capacity, but at least I got a few laughs out of it. It's no 'The Room', but there's a chuckle or two in there.This is just your average, run of the mill fairytale. Only with zombies and badly rendered CGI monsters. The prince is kind of a jerk this time and the princess is in the movie even less than in the original.So the queen and king of Magicfantasyland have a baby daughter and hold a ceremony in the courtyard. The three good fairies are busy blessing her with vague, useless gifts like "truth" instead of chainsaw arms when an evil fairy (now Tambria rather than Maleficent) bursts in and curses the child to be pricked by a spindle before her 16th birthday. Years later, instead of hiding her way on her 16th, her parents take her to a party and let her run off with some dude. And hey, he just happens to have a spindle. As you may guess, trouble ensues.Somewhere close by, a bratty prince and his goons are picking on his whipping boy (the prince is like 24 by the way). The whipping boy has been receiving poetry from Sleeping Beauty and has fallen in love with her. The brat prince discovers her kingdom's plight and runs off to face the evil Tamera and her gang of monster zombies-- goons and whipping boy in tow.The Bad:The writing is bland and amateurish. Half the time, I wasn't sure whether to blame the actors or the script for a particularly terrible line. There's only so much you can do to make junk sound passable. And the exposition... Oh, the exposition.The plot. The story is pretty simple, but there are so many unanswered questions. Like, where is the prince's kingdom? Why do we never see it? Why does the prince have a whipping boy? Does everyone in this land get spankings at his age? What do you need another kingdom for? Don't you already have one? And as for the princess, why would you want to touch the tip a spindle-- curse or no? How did you write those letters while sleep? Why did the characters shed established personality traits and prejudices like a change of clothes? Why weren't the plot devices wearing their disguises? (I'm looking at you conveniently omnipresent commoner girl)-The acting. I often wondered if some of these actors were reading from a teleprompter. I've never heard people fail so hard at expressing emotion. Though I suppose I'd be a hollow shell of a person if I were cast in this too. The Maleficent stand in (Olivia d'Abo) is flat which is a shame considering the potential in a role like that. The prince (Edward Lewis French) is given terrible material at best and extremely annoying at his worst. I believe Sleeping Beauty's mother may take the cake in the bad acting department. I almost wished she had more screen time.The sheer lack of damns given was remarkable.The filmography. The filming was clumsy and sometimes confusing. I'm no filming expert and I typically don't notice bad camera work. If I noticed it this time, there's definitely a problem.The Good:Okay, I'm really scraping the bottom here...The musical score. I didn't really notice it. So it couldn't have been that bad, right?The good fairies. The good fairies were no where near as annoying as the fairies in 'Maleficent'. And just to make sure of that, one of them was taken care of during the opening sequence and the other two were hardly seen again. Definitely an improvement. Barrow (Finn Jones) didn't annoy me as the lead and actually did a decent job of playing the annoyed whipping boy the whole time. Though I had a hard time telling if this was actually good acting or if he was actually annoyed the whole time. I mean what with being involved in this mess and being tricked into sating the director's weird whipping boy fetish, who knows?The ending. Everyone loves a good twist. But mostly, I was just happy that it was over.

I do not believe in copy-right thingy, but this is one thing I agree with the copy-right, patent-right or whatever they call it. Trying to use the same movie title to gain entry into the mind of the viewers is acceptable, but when you make a lousy movie out of a good title, then it is a different case all together.I just borrowed this movie from my friend who bought it. Unfortunately he did not warn me about the movie. I thought it was something similar to the old Hollywoody movie, but was I wrong big time. I hope this is not considered as spoilers. The prince is played by a character that is so disgusting. I could not imagine where in the world they found this kind of prince, specially when you make a fantasy movie. He could be a leader of biker gang for all I care, because the way his followers behaving. Of course to add insult to the injury, you have to create a cowardly prince to lead a group of people to fight the denizens of the magical realm which was created by the evil wizard (or is it evil queen ???)The CGI is very lousy. It looks like the work of grade 2 & 3 students during their art class. The whole idea of scary is completely different and really confusing. If you are afraid of the unknown, the most logical place to sleep would be as far away as possible from the source that scares you. But not here, the gang sleep next to the source but in a place where all the source of danger lay, not a single monsters come out during the night. The monster only come out during the day...., how convenient... If I as an ordinary (no movie star) person can see all these disgusting flaws, how is it that the director, the script writer and most importantly the financier can not see how bad this movie is ? Is it that they are so desperate to do something so that anything is better than nothing ? Is there no other way to invest the money other than this shitty movie ? My recommendation is get as far away as possible from this C grade movie (B grade is too good for this one....)

I was keenly interested to see what I expected to be a modern retelling of an old fairy tale, enhanced with fine acting and superb special effects. The story was interesting, and the characters and settings were well presented and costuming was pretty good, and the quality of the filming was acceptable. Unfortunately, my expectations regarding acting and effects were far from met. Even the inclusion of zombies failed to lift this movie from it's lack of brilliance or vitality. The acting was poor all around, and the obvious attempt to embed some credibility by having the narration done by Michael York proved too little. Special effects would have been spectacular 40 years ago, but obviously by modern standards they fell dreadfully short of the mark. Amazed that I saw it through, I would not recommend this movie as a must see - more as a must avoid.