Christmas DVD Review – ‘The Princess Bride’

Hello everyone! 🙂

Welcome to ‘Bradley’s Basement’ blog and I’m Tim Bradley!

I’ve seen the movie ‘The Princess Bride’ on DVD! My best mate Stephen gave this to me for Christmas this year! I vaguely heard about the movie beforehand and believe I saw a little bit of it on TV once. Now I’ve seen it in full and had a really good time with it. It’s a good fairy tale comedy film!

The film, believe it or not, is based on the 1973 book ‘The Princess Bride’ by author William Goldman. Apparently, the book was in the process of being adapted into a film for many years. Thankfully it got made in 1987. Produced and directed by Rob Reiner, the film was a pleasing result!

The film was warmly received by critics despite being a moderate box office success. Nowadays, the film is considered to be a cult classic like ‘Flash Gordon’ is now a cult classic. The story features a lot of action, adventure and romance. It’s a fairy tale kind of adventure yet done in a really unique way.

It starts off with a young boy played by Fred Savage (who I’ve seen in ‘The Boy Who Could Fly’) being told the story of ‘The Princess Bride’ by ‘Columbo’s Peter Falk as his grandfather. Why is seeing Peter Falk the most surreal thing ever? 😀 Throughout the movie, Peter Falk provides the story’s narrative.

The actual story of ‘The Princess Bride’ is about a beautiful princess named Buttercup (So, wait! Buttercup? How can I take that name seriously?) and a farmhand named Wesley who fall in love with each other. Very soon, Wesley is sent away and Buttercup is forced to marry this odious prince.

Eventually Wesley returns…as Zorro…okay…and is soon helped by two unlikely companions to save the princess. ‘The Princess Bride’ is quite a hilarious adventure that’s almost akin to ‘Shrek’. In fact, I wonder if ‘Shrek’ got its ideas from ‘The Princess Bride’. That is pretty likely to be the case, isn’t it? 🙂

The film stars Cary Elwes as Wesley and Robin Wright as Buttercup the Princess Bride. There’s also Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya and André the Giant (Seriously?) as Fezzik, who eventually help Wesley to save Buttercup. There’s also Wallace Shawn (who voices Rex in ‘Toy Story’ and Grand Nagus Zek in ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’) as Vizzini with his famous catchphrase – “Inconcievable!”

There’s also Chris Sarandon as Prince Humperdinck (Yikes, that’s a mouthful) and Christopher Guest as Count Tyrone Rugen. Both of them are villains in the movie. There’s also Billy Crystal (who voiced Mike in ‘Monsters Inc’) as Miracle Max and Carol Kane as Valerie, Max’s wife. And there’s Peter Cook as the Impressive (yeah, right) Clergyman during the forced wedding and Mel Smith as the Albino. 🙂

There is plenty of action to be found in terms of sword-fighting and such. Wesley and Inigo even have a polite conversation with each other when they’re duelling with swords. Yikes imagine how Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader’s lightsaber duel would’ve turned out if they were just polite-talking and reminiscing over old times in ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’. That would be really surreal indeed here.

Inigo even allows Wesley time to climb up the rocky cliff to get to the top and even allows him to rest before fighting him in a sword duel. You don’t get that very often with heroes and villains nowadays. The film also tries to make out that Wesley gets killed during brutal torture by Prince Humperdinck. Yeah. Like that was going to happen! Though he took a while to stand on his feet! 😀

There’s also plenty of kissing featured between Wesley and Buttercup in the movie. I was annoyed when the grandson kept interrupting the grandfather when he was reading the story featuring the kissing scenes. I would like to have enjoyed the kissing scenes without the grandson interrupting! 😀

‘The Princess Bride’ has been a pretty enjoyable film to watch. There are some quite scary and zany moments featured throughout, but it’s a pretty decent romantic, action-packed comedy film. I’m glad I’ve seen it at last. My parents enjoyed the movie too as we watched it as a threesome on DVD.

Thanks Stephen for ‘The Princess Bride’ DVD

And thanks everyone for reading!

Bye for now!

Tim. 🙂