Anybody watched em? They’re on YouTube with subs. The hobbit is cute, it’s endearingly bad, somewhere between funny bad but also genuinely cute and enjoyable. Would watch it again before I watch PJ’s version lol. Gandalf is a particular highlight, he looks and acts like he is high the entire movie. And Frodo looks like this guy 
The lord of the rings, not so much. It’s only fellowship (apparently this came out in the dying days of the USSR, maybe that’s why they never finished the trilogy…). It starts off with seemingly an impressively higher budget than the hobbit (there are even exterior shots!), and watching the four hobbits ride around in the snow is pretty funny. The barrow downs are like a bad acid trip (but at least unlike PJ these guys had the cojones to adapt Tom bombadil). Also Aragorn is great, for some reason his voice sounds like it was dubbed in by an anime VA, it’s like kiryu suddenly showed up in middle earth.
It goes downhill sometime around the hobbits getting to Rivendell. Moria and especially lothlorien are extremely surreal and then the movie basically just ends lol. It gets so surreal it felt appropriate watching it on the day David Lynch died. Legolas is played by a woman and because of that they couldn’t let it be a speaking role because it would give the game away lol. He also doesn’t even carry a bow, so for the second half of the movie there’s just a mute blonde woman following the fellowship around. Oh and Gimli is just a guy crouching down (seriously lol).
Both movies also have the trope of “4th wall breaking narrator that is cut to when we need to skip scenes from the book that were too expensive to film”. Hilariously, sometimes in lotr the film cuts to the narrator just smoking his pipe for a couple of seconds and then cuts back to the story without him even saying anything.
I definitely recommend the hobbit, it’s only an hour long as well. Lotr on the other hand… is barely even so bad it’s good tbh, although we did laugh a lot. There’s so much weird shit that happens especially in lotr I could make a much longer post listing them all, maybe it’s worth a watch just on that basis lol.
Wow, you weren’t kidding. I watched a highlight reel of the LotR one and damn was that a trip and a half. Almost everything looked so surreal and the narrator popping up for a few seconds every so often for no apparent reason made things even more confusing.
Btw, who is the woman with the
make-up and the bald cap? Is she supposed to be a barrow-wight?Yes that is the barrow wight
Amazing.
The USSR tolerated LotR nerds???
Haven’t watched the Hobbit, but I guess I should have. My friends and I have been doing a bad movie night weekly for almost five years and the Soviet Lord of the Rings made that. There’s major theater kid energy in that film, if you can call it that. Just really relying on the audience to go along with it as the production quality just dips and dips and dips. By the time Gandalf is “on” the eagle, you just have to laugh at what they’re passing off as special effects.
I would not recommend LotR unless you just gotta see something bad. Like you, I agree that it really isn’t in the so bad it’s good category. But maybe we should watch The Hobbit some time, sounds more charming.
Gandalf riding gwahir was fucking incredible. The Saruman scene in general was a standout moment tbh.
The hobbit definitely has some charm. They lifted some of the songs from the books and have some… generously going to call them “choreographed dance scenes” as well. Plus the creatures are very cute, the Smaug and Mirkwood spider scenes are great.
