The Dragon Chronicles: Fire and Ice (2009)

I'm not sure if you've heard of Pitof. He was originally a very successful French visual effects designer, working on The City of Lost Children, Joan of Arc, Delicatessen and Alien Resurrection. He then made the leap to directing his own films, beginning with the wonderfully stylish Vidocq (aka Dark Portals in Australia). Based on that film Warner Bros hired him to direct Catwoman, starring Halle Berry.

I always liked Roger Ebert's review of Catwoman, in which he noted "it's not enough that careers are ruined, somebody should be slapped". I always figured it was Pitof who got slapped, probably unfairly - with a script that bad no one would have managed to make anything too watchable. After all, post-Catwoman he seemed to vanish entirely from the filmmaking world.

But no! He came back with his third film, The Dragon Chronicles: Fire and Ice. It's a bit of a plummet down in stature from Catwoman, which was a massively expensive Warner Bros summer tentpole. The Dragon Chronicles is a Romanian-produced film, bankrolled in part by the Sci-Fi Channel to add to their continuing line of really quite awful monster and fantasy movies. It's apparently the most expensive Romanian film of all time, because they spent US$3,000,000 on it.