I cannot begin to describe how awful this movie is. I watched the first Neverending Story when I was 7 or 8 or so, it came out in 1984, the year I was born, and I was absolutely fascinated with it. A few years later I had the pleasure of watching the second one, and although not as good as the first one, I have to say it is one of the better movie sequels I have seen (the people who comment on it give it too harsh criticism) It was still as imaginative and beautiful as the first one, and kept all the main characters. I saw the third one in the movie rental part of our grocery store when I was 14, and I got exited. I immediately rented it and brought it home and popped it in our VCR (you remember VCR's don't you?). It was not much longer after that that I was popping it out again. NES3, for lack of a better term,... sucks. The storyline was as unimaginative and vapid as you could hope for, it takes place in the real world, and not(as the title would have you believe)in Fantasia, and I get the feeling that it is because creating a fantasy world was a little out of their budget. This movie has "low budget" written all over it. The childlike empress isn't even blond! they get some brunette chick who looks nothing like her to play the role. After the fart jokes and potty humor commenced, I just couldn't take it any longer. My advice is don't wast your time and ruin your childhood memories with this piece of refuse.

Who knew, that Jack Black was in this? Well I reckon those who had watched it and remember of course. Now we get new actors again - in the same roles/characters. But the father seems to move and so is the audience. Well we are supposed to. This is quite the mess - and while small children may find redeemable comedy in it, overall this never achieves any heights the second movie had, never mind the first one.

So if you can get behind a story that is so simple and characters doing terrible things for no apparent reason and cliches abound ... well do I need to tell more? Still the flavor of the Never Ending Story does a bit of magic (no pun intended) and the puppet work still works ...