Dragonslayer is however one of those rare successes. (Although, as per fantasy’s reception in the visual media, the film was a box-office failure). The spirit of Star Wars (1977) stands unmistakably over Dragonslayer – the youthful hero off to confront destiny; and particularly in the character of Ralph Richardson’s wizard who is killed but lives on – however the issue is less one of imitation than two films attuned to similar mythic archetypes. The film offers a wonderful portrait of the Middle Ages – this is not the romanticised spectacle of sundry historical epics or Prince Valiant et al, but something dark and gritty. Dragonslayer was shot on location in Wales, which lends its unmistakable landscape of black rock and gloomily imposing mist-covered moors to magnificent effect. The photography is stunning, getting right down inside the primal rawness of the Middle Ages – Ulrich’s castle all lit in beautiful golden flames, the journey back to Urland across a bare but beautifully rich, verdant greensward. Alex North also contributes a wonderful brass score. The cast all give uniformly excellent performances – there is never a single performance that lets the film down. Peter MacNicol, the regular from Ally McBeal (1997-2002) in his screen debut, is convincingly brash and over-confident as Galen, although his anachronistic American accent intrudes. Ralph Richardson rises magnificently to the part as the wizard Ulrich with just the right balance of humour, crankiness and dignity.

Matthew Robbins spends nearly two-thirds of the film building towards the unveiling of the dragon and when finally seen it looks magnificent. There is a scene where Peter MacNicol goes into the cave to confront the dragon that is absolutely enthralling. The final climax with Ralph Richardson taking on the flying dragon is great, although the somewhat Star Wars-derived flying effects never quite equal the scarily mismatched scale of the earlier scene pitching of the vulnerable hero against the power of the dragon. (Indeed, it is a climax that never even gives a satisfactory opportunity for the hero of the piece to be the hero).

Industrial Light and Magic succeed in creating the finest screen dragon ever up to that point. They used a process they devised for the film known as Go-Motion, a variation on stop-motion animation wherein the animated model makes several moves within a frame lending to a more fluid movement, rather than in traditional stop-motion where a model only moves once, lending to the familiar jerky gait of stop-motion animated creatures. It was a move that forever put traditional stop-motion in its grave – something that was reinforced by Ray Harryhausen’s last film Clash of the Titans (1981) that was released two weeks earlier the same year, which, when seen up against Dragonslayer, looked disappointingly wooden.

The writing-directing team of Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood have made a number of other genre entries, including the zombie film Warning Sign (1985) and the cute UFO film Batteries Not Included (1987), while Robbins alone wrote the script for Mimic (1997) and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011). Hal Barwood now writes and directs Lucasfilm computer games.