MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*
Before watching REAPER-- a passion project for writer/director/star Tara Cardinal-- I glanced at some of the IMDB reviews and saw a lot of "worse movie I ever saw" type of responses. Well, REAPER's far from being the worst movie even in the ranks of low-budget fantasy-films. It's not exactly good, but even if I judged it as "bad," it would be the badness of stuffing the script with too much stuff rather than too little. I always prefer the bad films that make a real effort over the ones that make little or none.
To be sure, it's tough to fit together all the puzzle-pieces in the life of Cardinal's character Aella. She dwells in a fantasy-world where humans and demons intermingle on a regular basis, and of course given the budget, the demons just look like humans in makeup. She's the seed of a human mother never given a proper name and a demon-lord named Ganesh (a peculiar reference to a Hindu elephant-god). The mother apparently has exclusive custody to Aella at the point where Mom marries a human lord named Adonis. Then the mother trades young Aella to her father in exchange for a vial of demon-blood, with which the human mother can stay young forever, or at least a really long time. Ganesh treats his daughter cruelly, though we only see one flashback of him whipping her (teen?) self. Aella is rescued by the Reapers, a cadre of warriors who were also the spawn of humans and demons, and who, despite a few demonic features (Aella has scales on her back), pledge their loyalty to the human world.
In the film's real-time, Aella has apparently served her lordly father Adonis for a while. Most of the film's early action, however, is confined to Aella having practice bouts with other Reapers and with humans. Her contact with human lords has caused her to form a romantic dalliance with Prince Eris, but various factions want Eris to marry a human noble, Princess Indira. Adonis is really the only one who nags Aella to step aside; the few others who know about the affair seem okay with it.
After about half an hour of this melodrama-- including a side-plot about the possibility that Aella's inherited the prophetic powers of the mother she despises-- something finally happens to get the plot rolling. Aella is ambushed by a gang of humans, who riddle her with arrows, though this only incapacitates her. They take her to a hut and drain off her half-demon blood, planning to kill her thereafter. But Aella is rescued by her wayward mother, now billed as "The Teller Witch," who transports Aella to another hut, where the Witch lives with her other daughter, who for all the importance she has in the story might as well not exist.
If Aella or any viewer hoped for the mother to justify her past actions, there's not much of that. The Witch simply informs her prodigal daughter that the humans serve Ganesh, and that they intend to use her blood to strengthen an army to attack the semi-human Reapers and Aella's foster father Adonis. The broad implication is that doing so will bring about Ganesh's rulership of the mortal world, but political strategy is not a big concern here.
From then on, the rest of the film is mostly lots of running around and sword-slinging. Before Aella can return to the keep of Adonis, Bad Father Ganesh duels Good Father Adonis and kills the latter. Aella does find a half-dead Eris on the battlefield and feeds him her blood to revive him. I *think* she runs off because she thinks he's died, but Eris does revive and joins the Reapers in trying to fight the demons and their human allies. I can't say that any of the combat, armed or unarmed, is anything special, but I have seen much worse. Strangely, despite all the tactics used to build to a fatal confrontation between good daughter and evil father, the two of them fight for a few minutes, but Eris gets to strike the fatal blow. This, on top of Aella stepping aside to allow Eris to make his political marriage, seems like a curious attempt to downplay the main character in order to make her story seem "tragic."
Still, Cardinal does better than many actresses have in playing a tough swordswoman, and since the movie does at least have a muddled take on the concept of human-demon interactions in a fantasy-universe, I'll give REAPER a fair mythicity rating.
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