| Dragon Fighter | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Phillip J. Roth |
| Produced by | Jeffery Beach, Dean Cain |
| Written by | Phillip J. Roth, Micheal Baldwin |
| Starring | Dean Cain Kristine Byers Robert Zachar |
| Distributed by | Artisan Entertainment |
| Release date(s) | 2003 |
| Running time | 85 min. |
| Language | English |
Dragon Fighter is a Sci Fi Pictures original film that premiered on January 4, 2003 and was directed by Phillip J. Roth. It stars Dean Cain and Kristine Byers.
Contents |
The movie begins in Southern England in the Middle Ages and then six knights are seen riding in horses towards a destroyed town. They see the remains of burned buildings and dead people until they come upon a mother and her dead baby. She quickly dies and then a rhino-sized dragon flies overhead, the knights follow right behind, vowing to kill the creature. The six knights arrive at the dragon's lair, where they see skeletons of horses and people (the dragon's past meals), suddenly the dragon surprises them by shooting fireballs at them. The knights divide up into loose groups, carrying with them barrels of gunpowder and hide, then two knights appear and fire flaming arrows at the dragon but they miss and the dragon torches one of the knights with its fire breath. The other knights then attack, but the dragon dodges their arrows and shoots a fireball at the gunpowder barrels, which causes them to explode. This causes a cave in that traps the dragon and the knights inside, with only one knight managing to escape, who then moves on.
1,000 years later in the nearby desert of California, Captain David Carver (Dean Cain) transports Dr. Ian Drakovitch, who is carrying a suitcase, to an ultra secret underground research facility, where the scientists in it specialize in cloning endangered or extinct animals. David asks if there are top secret items in the suitcase, which surprises Dr. Drakovitch, but he admits that David is correct. The helicopter, which the men are riding in, develops fuel problems but David safely manages to land the craft.
He is then lead into the facility, where he is assigned as the new security officer and is introduced by Capt Sergei Petrov (a Russian security officer) to all the other people including Dr. Meredith Winter, Dr. Greg Travis, Kevin Korisch and Bailey Kent. He is also introduced to Cookie (a deaf man and the cook of the facility) and then after finding his room, David heads into the meeting room where Dr. Ian discusses what he found in a cave in Southern England. He says that he collected the remains of a strange "winged dinosaur" and that they were found alongside human remains and also that they are over 1,000 years old. The other people don't believe this, saying that the remains are too young to be that of a dinosaur's, but David suggests that the remains are those of a dragon's. This agitates Dr. Drakovitch but the other guys laugh at the possibility of this. David heads outside to try to fix the helicopter but is coaxed by Dr. Winter to head inside to see the cloning process. Dr. Ian then orders the fossil samples to be cloned by two unnamed scientists in hazmat suits inside a cloning chamber and says that the whole animal should be reformed within 24 hours.
However, to everyone's surprise, the cloning process is completed within 3 hours, much shorter than originally planned. This worries David and he tells Greg to get him some weapons but there are only shotguns and pistols with both regular and tranquilizer shots. Dr. Ian sends the two scientists into the cloning chamber to retrieve the specimen but there is an explosion in it, which blows the whole room apart. David gets worried and tries to go in but is blocked by Dr. Ian, who tells him not to go in there so that he doesn't contaminate the specimen. David orders him to get out of the way and open the door or he will shoot the hell out of him. This works and when they go in, they found the whole room destroyed and that the creature blew a hole in the back of the room leading into an underground basement. Dr. Ian orders the creature to be only subdued not killed and both David and Greg head into the basement, directed by Dr. Winter from inside the lab. They later find the consumed bodies of the two scientists.
Suddenly Winter picks up something big heading towards the men on her radar but it is having interference with the radar, Greg and David get separated and now the thing in the radar heads for Greg. Suddenly Greg is ambushed and killed by the dragon, David heads for his rescue but is too late and instead finds the dragon eating Greg. David loads his shotgun with the regular shots and fires at the dragon but the dragon's skin is too tough and barely has any effect on it. This makes it only mad and the dragon breathes fire at David, who quickly dodges it and runs away with the winged reptile on hot pursuit. He heads back into the lab and is almost fried by the dragon, he then orders the others to open the door but Ian refuses. Capt Sergei orders the scientist to open the door or he will shoot him, he finally does and lets David in. Both he and Sergei then head into the hallways to reach the elevator so they can all escape but the back hallway explodes, killing Sergei.
The dragon blasts its way out from the basement and David runs back into the lab, Dr. Winter then tells that the dragon has blasted the entire system, causing an automatic lockdown and trapping them. Bailey tells everybody that the dragon is getting hungry and that it will wander around to search for food and a nest, it is also warm-blooded (much like the dinosaurs) and that it needs to keep itself cool, so the scientists have to revert the cooling system to a different spot in the facility to lure the dragon away from the elevator. To do this, they need a laptop, which is in Kevin's room, so David orders Kevin to come with him because he is the only one who can open it, at first he refuses to go but after being threatened by David, he agrees to go with him. They finally make it into his room but Kevin then insists that he wants to stay, David leaves him (calling him a stupid-ass idiot), grabs the laptop and heads out. Kevin plays some music, which attracts the dragon towards David, who shoots at it and barely escapes back through a vent. The dragon then slams the side of Kevin's room; he gets angry and opens the door, but sees nothing. He then hears something outside again and hits the door switch with a baseball bat. He finds the dragon there, which quickly kills and eats him.
David heads back into the lab with the laptop but it is slightly damaged, they download the information needed to gain access to the elevator into the main computer but Dr. Ian goes mad and starts shooting the mainframe, causing it to get screwed up even more. Also the damaged mainframe activates a self-destruct system, which will cause the entire facility to explode in minutes. David then has to head back into the vent to reach a storage box so he can reboot the elevator's system manually (he also finds out that Cookie isn't really deaf but pretended to be so he could get a job) but the dragon comes back and attacks him with its fire breath. David manages to escape and heads for the storage box and successfully manages to reboot the system but is then ambushed again by the dragon, David fires a couple of shots at the dragon and heads into Dr. Ian's room where he discovers evidence that the doctor had known that the fossil was a dragon all this time and he finds pictures and books of dragons and a sword. David heads back to the lab and gets the remaining people to head for the elevator before the entire base explodes.
They head into the elevator but the dragon heads back and fries the elevator's wires with its fire breath, preventing it from moving up. Now the survivors have to climb out from inside the elevator but the dragon rams itself into the door, trying to get inside. David throws Bailey a pistol, which she then uses to attack the dragon but has no effect on the creature. Bailey runs out of bullets and asks David for some more but the elevator's door opens up and the dragon quickly breathes fire into the elevator, killing both Bailey and Cookie. Dr. Ian, David and Dr. Winter and her pet cloned dog head outside and start up the helicopter, just before the whole facility explodes. However the dragon manages to escape by squeezing through the elevator vent, climbing outside and flies after the helicopter. The dragon then attacks the helicopter by slamming into it and breathing fire at it, David tries to shake off the dragon but it keeps coming. He calls for backup at a nearby military base and Dr. Ian opens the side door of the helicopter to take some pictures of the dragon but it comes near and knocks him out of the helicopter, causing him to fall to his death.
Finally five F/A-18 Hornets come to the rescue but it is found out that they can't lock on the dragon because it is too cold for their heat-seeking missiles so instead they try to repeatedly ram into it. The dragon gets mad, turns around and fires a fireball at one jetplane, blowing it apart and causing it to slam into another jetplane, destroying them both. The dragon keeps following the helicopter at hot pursuit and the craft is about to malfunction, thanks to the earlier problems with it, David figures that it is heading for the nearby city and that they got to keep it away from there. He orders the F/A-18's to fire a missile anyway but it misses the dragon, he then has an idea and tells Dr. Winter to take control of the helicopter. He opens up the fuel hatch and dumps half the fuel on the dragon, he then fires a flare gun at it, causing it to burst into flames. With a target hot enough to fire upon, the jets fire a missile at the dragon, which kills it, David's helicopter begins to fall down to the ground and after a rough landing, David, Winter and the cloned dog make it out alright, the two have a cheesy moment and plan on going out for dinner. Back at the destroyed facility, two soldiers head in to investigate and retrieve anything from the explosion, they discover a second lab under the first one and a cloning chamber housing a dragon embryo, which quickly grows in size, breaks out of the chamber and kills the two soldiers.
While there is no official name some fans refer to the monster as Bio Dragon; another name occasionally used to refer the creature is the "Genetic Dragon". The monster was roughly 30 feet (about half that was its long counterbalancing tail) long, 6 feet tall when moving at speed, and nearly double that when fully erect as if to breathe fire or otherwise. It moved in a traditional theropodian stance with its long, dexterous arms folded and held near, but not to, its chest; the wings stayed tight to its back when not in use. The dragon had the typical horns and spines of dragonkind, but weren't too elaborate in design or size. The dragon was a stony grey-black color. It was obviously carnivorous and, as stated in the film, warm-blooded. Its endothermic nature combined with breathing out fire was its only serious fault because it needed to stay in cooler areas to keep from suffering from heat stroke or exhaustion, so it kept near the air conditioning vents in the facility. This would also explain why the reptile was living in England in the Middle Ages, a relatively cold place. Like any other dragon, it can breathe a napalm-like stream of fire, fly/glide and condense the flames into somewhat explosive fireballs with the added addition of having tightly interlocked armored scales that is sturdy enough to withstand many bullet shots, even a shotgun couldn't breach the scaly skin of the flying reptile. It could, however, be destroyed by ordinary missiles from fighter jets like any real animal. Sound effects included some unique hisses and snarls, along with the generic monster effects used in many films of the genre.