Beyond Sherwood Forest w/ Sanctuary's Robin Dunne + Ginger Snaps' Katharine Isabelle

[august]

This premiered on Syfy last night, and is a decent creature-feature spin on the traditional Robin Hood story.

Filmed in Maple Ridge, Aldergrove and North Vancouver, BC, it features a who's who of Canadian genre actors - Dunne plays Robin, Erica Durance (Smallville's Lois Lane) plays a very feisty and athletic Maid Marian, and Katharine Isabelle (Ginger in the Ginger Snaps movies, plus appearances in everything from Earthsea to Sanctuary, Smallville to Supernatural, Stargate to X-Files) plays a beautiful young woman with a secret...and is naked by the first 45 seconds of the film!

It's written by Chase Parker (Reign of the Gargoyles, Basilisk: The Serpent King, Path of Destruction, Boa vs. Python) and directed by Peter DeLuise - yep, Dagwood from Seaquest, and Dom's son, now a prolific tv director based in Vancouver and married to a Newfie actress who's been on every Vancouver-filmed genre show we've ever seen.

Like most of the Canadian-filmed Syfy originals, they limit the sfx to get bigger bang for their buck on what we do see. There are some convincing castles and town square/market and dungeon sets (probably left over from previous films) and exactly two creature effects: some dire-wolf-like creatures that look really good for the 30 seconds we see them, an a big dragonlike flying beastie that's the main menace (other than the Sheriff, played by Julians Sands.) I note that BloodRayne 2, Young Blades, In the Name of the King, and Merlin and he Book of Beats were also filmed in Maple Ridge, and all featured dungeons, castles, etc.

Katherine has an especially moving and tearful scene about 30 minutes into the film as she begs with the Sheriff, and just acts her luscious little heart out. There's another scene with her and Maid marian about an hour or so into the film, that's really well-written, where each is talking about the burden she bears, how alone she feels, but with two drastically different subtexts going on.

This is as good a film of this type as you're likely to see. It airs next on Sun. 12/27 at 2 PM. DVD details including the cover art are here.