It’s about damn time that LARPers get their day in the sun.
Their pasty skin could use some rays. For those of you unfamiliar with the
term, LARPing stands for Live Action Role Playing. Think “Dungeons &
Dragons”, but instead of gathering in a dank, dark basement, the players take
to parks and other public spaces in order to whack each other about the head
and torso with foam swords, and to throw tinfoil balls at each other in lieu of
lightning bolts and spells. This is the world explored by “Lloyd the Conqueror”.
The LARPing realm, once a bastion of fun, friendship, and
teamwork, has fallen under a long dark shadow. Derek the Unholy (Mike Smith,
Bubbles from “Trailer Park Boys”) has launched a dark crusade, spreading fear,
treachery, and you know, general badness across the land. He’s such a dickweed
that no one wants to play anymore. In order to ensure that there are enough
teams to stage a LARPing championship for him to win, Derek—a community college
literature professor—coerces three slacker students into joining the league for
a passing grade.
However, his own hubris may lead to his undoing. Lloyd (Evan
Williams), Patrick (Jesse Reid), and Oswald (Scott Patey) are about to fail
Derek’s class and lose their financial aid. In order to save their scholastic
hides, they have to best Derek’s evil “Hordes of Chaos”. To complete their epic
task, they enlist the help of hot Tae Kwon Do instructor, Cassandra (Tegan
Moss), and the legendary White Wizard, AKA Andy (Brian Posehn).
Epic nerd fight montages, “virgins painted green”, and great
lines like, “for the love of Odin’s sack”, and “I’m a level 80 wizard, I don’t
have to do anything”, combine to create one hell of an
entertaining movie. The costumes are awesomely shitty, like they are in real
life—some players put hours and hours into carefully crafted outfits, while
others just cobble something together out of whatever is close. And there’s
always one guy who takes thing too serious, and goes too far in the battles.
It’s great to see this ultra-niche subculture explored.
Derek lords over his realm like a tyrannical despot, and it consumes the entire
lives of others. For some, LARPing is all that really matters in life. But when
they come into contact with outsiders, who have no idea what the hell they’re
talking about, they seem weird and awkward. Those moments are hilarious. Lloyd
and crew start out as nonbelievers, but become entrenched in the LARP over the
course of the film, which itself is structured like a fantasy quest, where
newcomers much brave great peril in order to free the land from oppression and
cruelty.
A little long at times—the action drags some in the middle
as Lloyd chases Cassandra, the team comes to terms with how nerdy they truly
are, and the world of LARPing is explained in great detail—this is still a lot
of damn fun. The heroic trio of Lloyd, Patrick, and Oswald, have great
chemistry. Lloyd is a screw up with aims of being something more, while Patrick
and Oswald are perfectly content to do as little as humanly possible to coast
through their community-college-centric life. Though with little to no
prompting, Lloyd slides onto the couch next to his buddies for a videogame
marathon instead of working on a presentation that would have helped them avoid
their predicament.
“Lloyd the Conqueror” is cheap, juvenile, cheesy, and
utterly ridiculous, in all the best possible ways. The film played at this
year’s Maelstrom International Fantastic Film Festival, and if you’re fans of
other Canadian comedies like “Fubar” and “Trailer Park Boys”, then “Lloyd” is
something right up your alley.
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