Movies That Suck That Rule - Mio In The Land of Faraway

Mio In The Land Of Faraway is one of those super-obscure movies that left bits and pieces upon my memories. It is primarily a movie for kids, but like most things created in the 80s it turned out to be creepy and confusing.

This film starts out foreshadowing the life of a typical English child: it rains 6 days a week, one parent is dead and the other abandoned you because you suck, your fostering Auntie and Uncle cant stand the sight of you, the kids at school pick on you and steal your hat for no reason, all the adults around you are full of hate (and probably shitty food) and you basically have only one friend... who will grow up to become Batman. That's right, the co-main character is a 7 year old Christian Bale (the one on the RIGHT)

After taking a big verbal beating from his grumpy guardians, Mio (who is names Bosse in the real world), runs away from home. He stops into a shop containing the only living person in England who doesnt treat him like a doormat; a nice woman who gives him an apple and asks him to drop a letter into the nearby mailbox. The English boy does, on his trip to the mailbox, what we American's like to call a 'Federal Offense' and gives the nice woman's personal mail a look-see. Nosey little bastard! After dropping the mail off, his apple somehow turns to gold... apparently one of the UK's secrets to Dental greatness is feeding children things plated in solid metal. Mio... er, Bosse I mean, then stumbles across a lamp containing a genie (i guess...).

The next scene serves as a teacher for a very important lesson to children about how to deal with potential pedophiles: If a strange man appears out of thin air and tells you to '"grab onto his beard and let him take you for a ride," you say YES!

The genie is just a giant head, who tells the boy that the king is expecting him in the Land of Faraway. Thus ensues the beard-ride to the magical, yet creepy place. As it turns out, the boy's father is actually the king (not such a loser after all?) who tell him that his name is Mio. His old pal, now called Yum-Yum (or Jum-Jum), turns out to be living in TLOF(The Land of Faraway) as well. Mio meets his dad, who tells him that he is destined to travel to 'The Land Outside' and slay the evil wizard-knight Kato.

Before undertaking their great task, Mio and Yum-Yum decide it necessary to travel by horseback to the countryside and spend a pointless sequence learning how to play Panflutes. The fellow children tell Mio that many of the children in TLOF are being kidnapped by Kato's servants. Mio is taken to a magical Well that basically just re-iterates what Mio has to do: Kill Kato.

Kato was part of some Knightly order and has lived for thousands of years. His heart is made out of impenetrable stone and his left arm is replaced by a sweet metal claw-hand. He captures young children and generally does 1 of 3 unkind things to them:

1. Rip out their hearts and bound them to his eternal service working as a spy or a guard to his castle
2. Turn any children who refuse choice #1 into birds, who are forced to fly in circles around his castle for eternity
3. Throw them into the dungeon, in which it only takes ONE full night to starve.

Christopher Lee, as usual, makes this movie worth watching entirely. Kato scared the shit out of me as a kid, the few times I saw this in the late 80s. I won't speak at length of Lee's greatness (not this time anyway).

After Mio and his pal are done jaggin' around the countryside, they meet a nice lady who turns Mio's normal cloak into one that can turn him invisible when worn inside-out. Christian Bale doesn't get one... what a bitch!

Next on the list of weird fuckin' people they meet is a crazy old guy who tells to 'the darkest hole in the darkest mountain' and locate his friend, called 'the Forger of Swords.' At this point in the film, I know what you're asking yourself - I wonder what that character is going to do? Think hard.

The Forger of Swords makes Mio... A SWORD! WOW! M.N. Shaymalan-a-ding-DONG!
He gives Mio a magical sword and just to be fair, gives Yum-Yum a normal, shitty sword. What a one-sided friendship, English people are weird.

 

"I LIKE COOL TOYS TOO, FUCKING JERKS!"

Mio's sword is the only sword in existence capable of piercing the stone heart of Kato. This sword is so classic due to the fact that it can slice an entire blacksmith's anvil in half when wielded by a 6 or 7 year old kid, but a pair of seagulls are able to pick it up by the blade with their feet and not get a cut.

Mio and Yum-Yum are forced to leg-it to Kato's big scary castle, seeing as though Kato's spies captured Miramus, Mio's horse. It just goes to reinforce one of the most redundant things taught to young English children since the dawn of horseback-riding - If you go into a sketchy, imaginary low-income neighborhood late at night, you'd better lock all four doors on your horse. And just like the horse, they too get captured and imprisoned in the castle. Kato's mood apparently was one of laziness, as he elected to let them starve so he could "look upon a little pile of white bones." Kato takes Mio's blade, which he says is the most dangerous weapon he had ever held, and throws it out his castle window. And that should just about wrap up a victory for Kato... unless there is some sort of multitude of flying animals flapping about somewhere nearby. Hah! Not very likely...

So then there's two of the birds flapping about (mind you, these are actually children morphed into birds) picking up Mio's sword from the bank of the water near Kato's castle. What a dumbass. You mean to tell me Kato can turn people in birds and live for centuries but can't throw a fucking sword successfully into a lake directly outside his window? Makes sense to me. The birds fly the weapon into the holding cell of Mio. Mio takes the sword, escapes from his prison, sneaks past 'seven times seven' guards using his invisible cloak... and confronts Kato!

After breaking half own his shit in the room, shattering two swords and failing to kill a second-grader with giant Wind spells and a crudely animated ball of floating fire, Kato surrenders. And by surrenders I mean he gets impaled through his torso. It's Kato's most unlucky day ever. First he gets killed by a child after spending thousands of years in comfortable tyranny... then his castle quakes, gets electrocuted and set on fire (??) before finally crumbling to ruin.

Mio frees Yum-Yum, Miramus and return all the recently-kidnapped-children-turned-birds to their weird English forms. And all is happy, apparently by this picture.

Mio returns to see his father and decides that he will stay within the Land of Faraway and not England. The End.