SPOILER ALERT: The pig can talk.

Oh my God, we watched the silliest movie ever last night. It was called Merlin's Apprentice, and I don't know if you ever watched the TV movie Merlin with Sam Neill, but anyway this is the sequel. And the thing about Merlin is that we used to watch that movie all the damn time. I think it may have been one of two movies owned by my middle school, the other being Amadeus, because every single time a teacher or a majority of the students in a given class were absent, we watched Merlin. (Or Amadeus, particularly a favorite in choir class.)

Well, except for that memorable time when we had a substitute for English class for several weeks in seventh grade, and she covered up the window in the door with a piece of black paper so nobody could see what we were watching, as it was films we twelve-year-olds weren't supposed to be watching, and first we watched Armageddon and Ben Affleck ate animal crackers off of Liv Tyler's stomach, and then we watched Scream, which scared me shitless even though I closed my eyes for the yucky parts. And I had trouble getting to sleep after that until my mother told me that the directors of horror movies didn't make movies about realistic things that really happened, they made movies about the scariest things they could think of so that their films would be scary, which was the whole point of horror movies. Also I did that thing my parents used to tell me to do when I was tiny, which was to imagine that Aslan was blowing all my bad dreams and scary thoughts away.

Confession: My parents have not told me to do this since I was tiny, but I have never stopped doing it. Every time I wake up all panicky with nightmares, I still picture Aslan blowing all my bad dreams away. (In case you're missing the reference here, he one time blew Jill and Eustace all the way to exceedingly far away, because Jill pushed Eustace off a cliff.)

Anyway, the Sam Neill Merlin was GREAT. It had Helena Bonham-Carter and Sam Neill and Miranda Richardson was Queen Mab and she made Helena Bonham-Carter all pretty, and there were growly beasts and Merlin was in love with Nimue, who was, interestingly, not the Lady of the Lake, because the Lady of the Lake was someone totally else. (By great, please understand that I mean awful.) And then the other day Anna discovered THE SEQUEL for a few dollars at the Mal-Wart, and yesterday my sisters and I had a joyous bonding experience, where we watched the sequel, Merlin's Apprentice. All four hours of it.

Words don't even begin to express the awfulness of this film. There was the part where Merlin inexplicably traveled 50 years into the future and was all like, What the hell? Where's Arthur? and so were we, and the part where the apprentice kid had a pig as his sidekick, and the part where the manly girl made out with the apprentice and then everyone was like, Oh, you must be a girl, because otherwise you would not be making out with another dude because THAT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE, and the part where the manly girl got knighted just like she wanted but then didn't exact her revenge which was the whole point of her getting knighted, and the part where the stalwart young blacksmith whose face looked exactly like a puggle's face and his beautiful blonde love interest got speared with the same spear and died and then came back to life but you never really saw what happened to the spear that was sticking out of their backs and pinning them to a tree. I guess he pulled out the spear and they were fine. They definitely lived to smooch another day.

And, our personal favorite, the part at the very end where THE PIG TALKS. It was so alarming. We'd been thinking, actually, that the pig had died, as it appeared to still be in Camelot while the bridge out of Camelot was collapsing (thus preventing anyone from escaping), and since we didn't see the pig at all throughout Part II of the epic film, we just figured the pig was a goner. But then it showed up at the very, very end of Part II and TALKED.

Yeah.

Not only could the pig talk, it knew the words for the apprentice to say that would permit him to visit the realms of the dead and have a chat with Merlin. No lie.