If, like me, you’re fortunate enough to have a friend group or belong to a small gaming community, you likely have your ‘inside’ jokes. They might be too vulgar or profane to share on an article like this, but thankfully my personal group’s inside joke is not. Born from being terrible at describing things and dumbing it down to everything being like or near a ‘dragon on the hill’, my friend group was very surprised and quite amused to find a movie by a very similar name. And in fact, it was made just this year (2024)! If that isn’t evidence that our stupid little self-servicing meme influenced its own movie, I don’t know what is.

Lavender Finger Productions’ “Dragons On the Hill” operated off a puny $50,000 budget. Such a budget suggests that paying the actors by itself was a troubling task, much less buying equipment or renting settings to shoot the movie in. Due to that, it should be plain to see this movie was never going to win any awards. As such, this review aims to take a gentler approach, giving it some leeway for being thrown together with about the same resources as a high school play.

Nevertheless, we at InReview will remain objective and, even considering its limited resources, this movie could have been a lot better. But it also could’ve been worse. Let’s talk about what it did well first.

DK Reinemer

The acting in this movie was mostly very amateurish, but DK Reinemer was the exception. In particular, his scene spent fleeing from his hometown screaming “Dragon!” in Italian was incredibly funny and very well choreographed.

Budget Efficiency

Once again, this movie had a $50,000 budget. There are individual actors in this world, many of them, who get paid more than that alone for a single appearance. This movie had several actors, a director and a producer. Even if they got the setting and equipment completely for free (they most likely weren’t!), that’s still a pittance to make an entire movie. Considering this movie was even made in 2024 on such a budget, the feat itself is commendable. This could and should be shown to aspiring film makers worldwide, as a display of someone getting their foot in the door.

Charm

It becomes quickly apparent that we aren’t watching an award winner. Off of the limited expectations which ensue this realization, the movie’s many shortcomings are quite charming. A nonsensical script, bizarre characters, downright outlandish scenarios, these things are bad but in an amusing way. As per the title of this movie, it becomes a frankly pretty terrible showing, but in a way that can be enjoyable to experience.

Sadly, “Dragons On The Hill” has many apparent flaws. Let’s discuss some of them… through the lens of naturally reduced expectations, to a degree.

Script

There is no semblance of an organized, structured fantasy adventure. This script uniquely faced the challenge of creating a story based in the Bubonic Plague era, while balancing it alongside the presence of lords, medieval courtrooms and, of course, dragons. It went about as well as you’d expect for a movie on a tiny budget like this one. There is more chaos and confusion than there is cohesiveness in this story. While the set pieces and graphical quality being watered down was understandable given the movie’s limited resources, it costs $0 to write a good story. This movie is relatively charming, but it has absolutely zero substance to it courtesy of a half-baked script. Amateur writers such as myself could’ve done a better job in about half the time it took to develop this movie.

Lack of context in acting

As a comedy video, suspense of disbelief is something that can be compromised. Still, it has to be done in clever, clearly funny ways that make it worth breaking. Here, the two main characters are approached by a robber in what eventually turns into a long, boring skit that has the viewer asking: “why did the mugger just walk away for no real reason?”. This is hardly the only time nonsensical dialogue ends up taking over an entire scene, causing the movie to feel like its relatively middling playtime consists of a lot of fluff as is.

Additionally, this movie has somewhat of an identity crisis. It’s to the point where it’s worth asking why it was even based during the Bubonic Plague era, as the movie does next to nothing of substance with it in any meaningful way. For as much as the title is personally extremely endearing, the actual ‘dragons on the hill’ are mostly just one guy scribbling a couple pictures on a piece of paper for about thirty seconds. The movie would’ve done well to either completely tap out of the black plague setting, or to have had a different name entirely.

As has been said, it’s difficult to really give this movie too much of a scathing run down. No, this movie is not what a modern, casual audience would consider “good.” The overall quality of this movie is eerily similar to a home movie-esque film, such as one of a small handful I made when I was in college. Its budget can be used as an excuse to some extent, but it costs $0 to flesh out a good script without plot holes. It costs $0 to do a little bit better than a crappy pencil drawing for what’s supposed to be the main theme of the movie. “Dragons on the Hill” is probably worth a watch for an aspiring film maker or someone of that ilk, not someone looking to kill time doing something enjoyable. Let’s give it a D and try to put this hour and a half long mushroom induced trip behind us.