Review

'Albion: The Enchanted Stallion' leaves the viewer with more questions than answers

We all knew that girl in high school who had an obsession with horses. You know, the girl who seems kind of normal until you get to her house and see shelves and shelves of plastic horses staring down at you with their beady eyes. They use mane and tail shampoo for both their head and their horse and there are photos of the girl and her horse in matching hairstyles.

We have a few horse lovers on campus, maybe not to that extent but there’s an emphasis dedicated to them.

I am not a horse person, but I invite you to stomp your hooves and shake your tails as I review a movie made solely for them;

Give it up for "Albion: The Enchanted Stallion."

At that title, you may be thinking, “Whoa! What a magical and amazing title! Is this movie available on Netflix and other streaming services?”

It is.

Anyway, this horse-loving girl takes care of her father who has been recently handicapped and immediately hops into the plot for all of us; she had a dream about this totally gorgeous stallion.

And her dad’s like, you know what? Sure. Cool. Reminds me of something.

Have you heard about Kelpies? They’re super pretty and awesome but they murder people left and right. They just entrance young horse lovers and invite them into their satan realm. When you dream about really pretty horses you are probably dreaming about satan horses who wish only to murder you.

Evie, who is about 12, works at a horse barn and just sort of hangs with horses. No one around her really understands her deep emotional bond with horses or her crippling debt. She is like one of the sole providers of her family, by that I mean the sole provider.

Evie constantly feels sad because rich kids get more horses and poor girls can’t even own horses. They can only follow the light of the almighty Jesus, take care of their parents and pray for a horse to be bestowed upon them.

And pray she does, not understanding the economic difficulties of having a horse or why she cannot spend every waking hour with a horse.

Neigh, says Evie, I deserve a horse for Christmas.

I didn’t even realize that horse Jesus fantasy movies were a niche that you could sell to people.

But there are some serious grooves going on in this movie, the soundtrack is bumping and I got a little horse trot dancey dance going on as I waited the eleven minutes required for magic, beautiful horse time.

The horse is nice looking, I think? For a horse. I’m not really a horse expert but ten horses out of ten? It was a very black horse with a cool horse mane.

Satan horse (the black horse) was like “get on me Evie, you said you wanted a free horse unbounded from economic difficulties and here we are." Evie kind of  resisted but then totally ignored everything her father had told her about the world and decided to go ride with Satan.

And Satan basically threw her into a magical world because Satan does not care about your handicapped father, job or economic difficulties. Welcome to a medieval hellscape where people trade cheese for healthcare.

Satan takes her to this glowing devil rock and starts grunting pretty heavily at her to go in there and the rock turns out to be this cave with a professionally made stone staircase. And there are hieroglyphics that talk and a scepter of truth. But like, really poorly made.

None of this matters because it turns out that the horse is a man? A werehorse? Awesome. But she’s only 12, so not awesome. The horse guy is about forty and took this young precious child into another world and we’re supposed to be all cool with this old forty-year-old man kidnapping her.

Evie is reasonably mad about this and the badly animated hieroglyphics laugh at Evie like she’s an idiot.

Albion is a land and not a horse. If you guessed that the fantasy world is set in western medieval society despite this girl being from Vermont, you are correct.

Why?

Because fantasy.

Anyway, the whole point of this is to defeat these evil guys who have taken the Satan horse’s homies' crib. Where this movie falters, though, is that the evil guys are pretty cool and make the other guys look like they just suck, and turn into horses to kidnap children. All the evil guys want to do is to stay in the sunlight where there is food, fresh air and sunlight.

And the mane point of the horse homies is to lock these other dudes underneath the earth for being the occasional jerks. You know, back into the hellscape where they starve and never see the sun again. This way they can frolic with their horses and abduct as many children as they want.

There's also a redheaded Merida rip-off and her friend who looks like Newt Scamander? He’s not the guy who plays him though, he just looks like him.

They’re on the side of goodness and put up with the hick child.

Really the sad part is that all of the side characters in this movie are far better than the main character. The main character’s only real traits seem to be being American and enjoying horses. She is down to earth for these two reasons and does not need to do anything else.

The main part that dis-settled me about this movie was that it had this weird, absurd humor with no explanations and things just sort of randomly happened all the time. It tried to act like it was Nanny McPhee and be all, “This happened because of magic.” But instead it just turned out like this weird train wreck of a movie that tried to rip off Narnia by adding a horse.

I watched it twice and I honestly cannot tell you what happened because I cannot make sense of anything except that this chick was all about horses.

Some stars out of five? Maybe one? Maybe five? I have no idea what happened aside from horse kidnapping.