Stan Lee's Harpies: It ain't no Army Of Darkness

Ah, Stan Lee. You have a sense of humor, I'll give you that much. I'm pretty sure that's the reason you put your name to this almost painfully bad, oddly endearing movie called The Harpy, a.k.a. "Stan Lee's Harpies".

It stars Stephen Baldwin desperately wishing he were as cool as Bruce Campbell in Army Of Darkness. After all, he plays pretty much the same character, where he's sucked back in time, wields a shotgun to impress the medieval natives, romances a medieval wench who's full of fire and initial hatred for him, and is proclaimed "The Chosen One" who will save the land from the evil that infests it.

This isn't an Army Of Darkness ripoff, but there are enough similarities that I couldn't help but hold it up in comparison. That's just not fair, because Army Of Darkness is easily one of my favorite movies of all time, in fact one of the best worst movies ever made, and all else is going to come up frightfully short standing next to it. That being said, The Harpy has a certain charm that comes from a B movie that is really more of a B minus movie. It tries really hard to be funny in the right places, melodramatic in the right places, and action packed in the right places. It is very funny, often intentionally, so it wins points with me there. The action is mild, the violence very toned down, and the harpies are just too-skinny wanna-be models with too much eye makeup who run around in long white slips and horribly fake wings and laugh out loud hilarious fangs. The special effects are "special", alright, but more in that short bus kind of way. This just adds to the giggle factor, especially when we're expected to believe the harpies are taking flight, but they're clearly just standing up straight really fast and having the camera flash to something else quickly while people scramble to get a blue screen in place.

I like to make fun of Stephen Baldwin, but he at least seems to enjoy himself in this movie more than he does in other ventures. He's not as tedious as a result, and uses at least three expressions to convey his character's emotional state instead of the one he showed for everything in Earth Storm. Keep up the good work, Stephen, and you may get up to an even half dozen facial expressions in your acting repertoire!

The actor I really watched this movie (twice) for is Scott Valentine. This is a man who knows how to run with a cheesy script and play it to the hilt. He's a bad guy, and gets to be a wizard bad guy, to boot. He walks around in cloaks, consorts with the Queen Harpy, and generally makes sure every word out of his mouth gets some kind of overtone of smarmy bad-guy-ness. He even gets to play two versions of his evil character, one in present times who seeks to open the portal to the past, and then of course the medieval wizard seeking to open the portal to the future. So we get double the fun and double the Scott Valentine, who is the real star of the film in my opinion.

There's a formulaic romance in the story which is at least entertaining. There's also the stereotypical band of men who follow The Chosen One around so they can help defeat the bad guys, and provide additional comic relief, and the occasional emotional barometer for the audience. The storyline in general is nothing original, but the script has so much cheese and giggle factor that it doesn't matter. Really I just watched it to see how bad it could get before it ended. And it got really, really bad, but in a good way! (Just not as good as Army Of Darkness...)