Prosnorkulus: Bloated with Gas and Anger Issues
Okay, so if you watched "Mike's Date" by MiddleFingerRings (this review will be waiting for you when you get back), we're on the same page. Now that you know some filaments of the guy's style, let's begin. Prosnorkulus is a mock-up of a very, very bad period piece with fantasy stereotypes and excessive gore. The plot does not need to make sense and it is a given that the audience suspends its disbelief. Yet, not everybody can do so, not to such an unrealistic extreme, anyway.
Enter Prosnorkulus, a Dwarf who never speaks, has an ambitious brown beard, and does nothing but ax anyone who disagrees with his ridiculous mission or just pisses him off in general. His eyes glow red when this happens, yet he is some kind of wonderful when it comes to personal heroism. He literally has sex with all the maidens in the region inside his war tent, and they are all piled together that the thing bursts at the seams. Anyway, uh, I didn't quite get the plot. Either that's a failing on part of the author or I just missed something. Anyway, he's doing something yet has to contend with a wiry, anachronistic sniper using a high-precision rifle, a thick contrast to Prosnorkulus' Warcraft-tinged medieval blunderbuss.
If this cartoon succeeds at one thing, it is the cartoony art design. Every character is unique and expressive, with all the class of a Chick Tract and the intellectual quotient of a mule hoof. The explicit gore is noteworthy as everything is rendered in slow motion tweens that are so over-the-top that you just bat your head from side to side in disbelief. It's hard to keep THAT suspension up, let me clue you. Ryan Maddox peppers in anachronisms such as drill sergeants, homosexual noblemen, squinty-eyed losers, and people you just know are going to die. All their faces fit.
What it fails to do is use any impressive animation. It relies upon slow-motion death sequences so much that you start to yawn with the escargot excrement that is the action sequences. The pace drags and little traditional methods exist outside of lip-synchronization for voice-overs. Oh, and a movie like this requires more than two or three voice-over talents, because even though they did a good job, they did a poor job at masking their identities between characters. I could tell Josh Tomar played the king, for instance, alongside several other characters. It's a struggle for any voice-over talent to obscure their regular voice with accents and delivery, but here, it seemed like they didn't bother trying. This movie should have had far more voice talents involved, in other words.
Other failings of Prosnorkulus include reliance upon dead air background noise and an ear-grinding dubstep soundtrack--PURE DUBSTEP--which hammers in the fact that if Hans Zimmer ain't scoring your action movie, kiss your box office earnings goodbye. The appropriateness of the soundtrack--in terms of offending every last bystander--succeeds, but it wasn't necessary since the movie already is. Instead, Prosnorkulus needs background ambience, it needs a bloated soundtrack like Skyrim: a heroic Scandinavian choir and overplayed brass segments. That way the sniper can clip this jackass in the knee and it'd be topical, though Skyrim jokes are already old.
In summary: it's badly written, badly paced, badly overdone and badly executed. The effects are cheap, laughable, the voice talents are overworked, and the jokes, while they got me to laugh with their gratuity, fail to stand up against other works, including "Mike's Date", which excels by keeping its scope in check. It's a flash that takes forever so you see once and never look back, a forgettable period comedy with obvious juvenile inspiration and irritating execution. It's meant to piss you off, but unlike Fisthead and other gratuitous gags, it wears its welcome out too soon.
If Ryan Maddox is considering a Prosnorkulus sequel or even a series, I recommend narrowing the speaking parts and overall scope down to a trickle because the only thing I remember now of Prosnorkulus is his ridiculous ponderous gait.
