Mediocre Movie Month 2016: Some Thoughts on "Maradonia: the Shadow Empire"

Buckle your seatbelts.

Maradonia: The Shadow Empire (2016)

Directed by Dr. G. Gerry Tesch
Produced by Dr. G. Gerry Tesch (presumably) and 31 backers on indigogo.com
Written by Gloria Tesch

Starring Gloria Tesch, Mike Rodriguez, Gustavo Perez

Budget: $Divorce, $home foreclosure (yes, really)

Hoo boy, this one requires a bit of backstory.

Gloria Tesch is a self-published author who calls herself the world's youngest novelist. At the age of 13 she (her parents) self-published a series of doorstopper fantasy heartbreakers called the Maradonia Saga. When reception turned out to be less-than-lukewarm she took to the internet with her sockpuppet accounts to post fake positive reviews on Amazon, and to generally turtle-shell her way into denying the fact that she needed to work on her prose.

Not content to insulate herself from criticism, there were plans at one point for a film series and Maradonia theme park. I'm just scratching the surface here, because to highlight the entirety of this madness would require an entire series of posts and I do not care enough to do that.

Instead, I just thought I'd watch the movie, which was crowd-funded through indiegogo and resulted in a divorce and the foreclosure of at least one house.

76 seconds in.

We start with some fly-over shots of landscapes, narration, and some stock battle footage. Oh, and it turns out there's a prophecy about September 11. Yeah, it turns out "when the two silver birds attack the twin brothers" two children will show up in Maradonia and end the reign of the Shadow Empire.

There's a shot of a clip-art CGI dragon flying over a castle, some people riding horses, and some extras in plastic armor. Then there's more backstory overlaid across shots of what I think are medieval reenactors with a loop of "armyshouts.mp3" playing before we get a scene of a kid coming across his dead parents. He looks up to find three women laughing. Then we get some credits, more landscape shots, and more narration by a guy with a standard British accent.

Cut to Maya and Joey, and the first line out of Maya (Tesch) is her complaining about how tired she is. There's some bad ADR chewing sounds as Joey eats an apple. Maya asks whether he thinks things happen for a reason, there's some reference to creatures in a cave with swords, and...you know? I'm just going to cut to the chase.

"This is Professor Epstein.
He's going to be taking over because
I'm going to be
 leaving in a few minutes.

This is a rip-off of Narnia, with two kids going to a fantasy world by the Light King, fighting the Evil Empire, and saving the world.

Here's a link to the full video on youtube, watermark and all.

Art 1001: Remedial Art &
the Nature of Evil?

We get about 5 minutes with the main characters before the movie cuts to a white-haired man and an art teacher talking about oil paintings. One of his students is in the back crying over a painting of a demon in the smoke of the Twin Towers (yes, really) and she demands someone give her answers about where evil comes from. The art professor peaces out, and Professor Epstein decides to read from his "ancient history book" he brought which talks about a war in heaven.

It's your basic creation story about the "Kingdom of Light" and a fallen light-carrier, but instead of Lucifer it's Apollyon, and instead of God it's the Light King, and we're not even 15 minutes in. There's some high-minded narration over stock footage of galaxies and various nebulae, plastic costumes, and plenty of people looking directly at the camera. We see King Apollyon tells his sons to go kill these children, then we cut to Maya and Joey having breakfast before their first day at school.

I'm going to stop taking screenshots now, because I'll end up posting the entire movie.

"The failure to prepare is the
preparation to fail."

Anyway, Maya and Joey go to Maradonia, solve their problems, become leaders, and save the day.

Oh nooooooooo.

What else needs to be said? The acting is absurd, the special effects are worthy of Microsoft Movie Maker, and the costumes look like they've been assembled from discarded High School Theatre props. Here's a score underlining every single scene (it never stops) and when people actually fight the swords make the exact same sound effect with every strike.

On some level I guess there's some admiration for simply putting in the effort, but at what point do you stop and realize that it's not worth your marriage and your house to indulge your daughter? There was sincere talk at one point about opening a Maradonia theme park.

Okay, here's one more image:

Verdict:
If you like watching a train wreck develop over the course of 110 minutes, grab your favorite mind-altering substance and load up this video before it's taken down. There was so much here that went uncovered. I didn't talk about the part where the greenscreen glitched out so it's just a guy in a morphsuit carrying a sword by the crossguard. I didn't cover the fire effects plastered overtop the screen. I didn't talk about the zombies doing the touch-your-fingers-together-then-untwist-your-hands trick.

I might have bitten off a bit more than I can chew with this.