Thor: The Hammer of the Gods   Starring: Ty Bryan, Mac Brandt and Alexis Peters Koch Media RRP: £19.99 KSM002UKDR Certificate: 15 Available 16 April 2012

Thor and his companions travel to a strange island, seeking fame and fortune. Thor is beset with strange dreams and visions which involve a mighty legendary hammer. Encouraged by his friends, Thor and companions travel deeper into the unknown Island in search of answers, all the time under the watchful eyes of hostile creatures...

Thor: The Hammer of the Gods (2009 - 1 hr, 22 min, 39 sec) is a made for television movie, directed by Todor Chapkanov from a Steve Bevilacqua screenplay.

There is a tradition amongst some Japanese ninja movie makers to dress your actors up in rented costumes and have them act in a forest. This brings production costs right down, as you don’t have to pay for sets. The makers of Thor appear to have taken the same line as, apart for the occasional shot, I’m trying to ignore the dodgy CGI, most of the shots are very naturalistic.

The movie stars Zachery Ty Bryan as Thor and seems to have gone against the tradition of depicting Thor as a muscularly chiselled man and gone straight for his inner Thor by portraying him as a bit of a plain chubby fellow, who can barely grow a convincing beard. Even with a premise of Norse gods verses werewolves, which sounds like a bit of fun, the film seems designed to annoy just about everybody.

The script shows a monumental lack of knowledge regarding Norse mythology, with the characters seemingly picked out of a hat, because their names were cool, or slightly recognisable, regardless of the character traits of the originals. The dialogue is pretty poor and delivered in a very strange way by the actors, who presumably thought that it would bring a level of Viking authenticity.

I have tried to ignore the CGI, the werewolves were not so bad, but the big bad boss looked like one of those animated boards which are created to give you an idea what the finished shot will look like.

The finished picture isn’t all bad, as would be expected from a fairly recent TV movie. The disc was a screener so there were no extras to view and no indication from the PR blurb that the final disc will arrive with any.

If the final result had been grittier or just plain camp it may have been more enjoyable. Thor tries to play it straight and, unfortunately fails to deliver.

4

Charles Packer