Vermithrax Pejorative – Dragonslayer
First off, are we allowed to talk about how fucking metal the name of this 1981 movie is? I feel like when you say the name of this movie, you have to scream it in a heavy metal voice: DRAGONNNNSLAYEEEERRRRRRRRR!!!!
On a more serious note, we may look at the above picture and see what is clearly a giant puppet, but you need to understand that Dragonslayer‘s effects were mind-blowing for their time. This was 1981, and no movie dragon had ever been this, well, dragonish. Up to this point, we had mostly only seen stop motion dragons that were clearly made out of clay (no disrespect to any of Ray Harryhausens’ amazing work, by the way.) But, Vermithrax Pejorative changed all that.
It should also be noted that this movie was clearly drooling all over Star Wars, but it had something that George Lucas’ films didn’t: a fucking fire-breathing dragon. Wait, did the shitty Star Wars prequels have a fire-breathing dragon? Probably.
Again, young ones may see this movie and scoff, but they need to give props to the films that did dragons first and did them right.