“Purge of Kingdoms” announces itself as “a pointless parody” of “Game of Thrones,” which reminds me of a truism: Admitting you’re terrible doesn’t make you less terrible. Directed incompetently by Ara Paiaya from a dismal, randy script by J.J. McDowell and Damian Romay (who had not written anything before, possibly not even their names), this staggeringly cheap debacle has medieval King Barbo (Angus Macfadyen) inviting the other kingdoms to his place for something he’s calling “Purgefest 3000,” at which he’ll kill them all. The level of reality is that of a live comedy sketch, including bad wigs and almost no special effects. They get some mileage out of the cheapness — the dragon is just a guy in a Halloween costume (and apparently a comedian/magician who performs as this character) — but mostly they focus on “GOT”-specific tomfoolery, with broad, dirty, unfunny parody characters like Cursey (Anna Hutchison), Lady Stork (Sara Jones), John Doe (Armando Gutierrez), Denise Mother of Dragons (Madison McKinley), Prince Jizzy (Tim Preston), etc. Some gags are dependent on one’s familiarity with the show, but most are bad in a general interest way.
In keeping with spoof tradition, there are also a number of celebrity characters: Lord Trumpet of Orange (John Di Domenico, whose impersonation of Mango Mussolini is the current gold standard); vapid model Clueless Kardushian (Eliana Ghen), with actual balloons for breasts, and her husband, Kocky of the West (Prince Fielder); and a highly questionable Caitlyn Jenner parody named Trans Jenner who’s played by a man (Chris Garner). It’s a testament to Paiaya’s ineptness that, for example, Ghen is doing a legitimate parody of Kim Kardashian while Fielder makes no effort to look or sound like Kanye. It’s like when someone on “SNL” has to play a famous person in a sketch just because they’re the only cast member who’s the right race and body type. The performances in general here are amateurish, and the few actors who seem capable can’t overcome the dumbness of the first-draft screenplay.
I freely admit to making a few chuckle-like noises over the course of the film’s eternal 85 minutes — the odd bit of slapstick, that sort of thing. Those laughter-adjacent sounds did not emanate, however, during either of the two scenes that are always in bad spoof films: the scene where someone get a bucket of poop dumped on their head (ha ha it’s POOP, get it??), and the scene where characters who normally don’t smoke joints smoke a joint (ha ha can you imagine??). That kind of easy, obvious lameness typifies the movie — which, incidentally, also has some of the worst sound recording I’ve ever heard in a professionally released film. They’ll put anything on VOD and in a couple of theaters these days, no matter how pointless.
D- (1 hr., 25 min.; )
