Billy Owens: The Poor Boy's Harry Potter

The wizard phenomenon in children's entertainment begs a lot of questions about what makes fiction most appealing to kids. Unlike most family books and films, the Harry Potter franchise deals with real-life subjects of death, justice and isolation while still maintaining a backdrop of mysticism and magic. The autonomy and power that children are given in these stories appeals to desires for independence and power of youth in all different cultures. Most family fiction attempts to placate childhood ignorance and emotion with empty platitudes like ghost dads and inconsequential evil figures, but Harry Potter is brave and bold enough to show the true forces of life through compelling fictional elements.

So what happens when movie studios attempt to cash in on Harry Potter's wildly successful wizard craze without accounting for the maturity and depth of what they're copying? Well, you get the Billy Owen's movies: The Mystical Adventures of Billy Owens, released in 2008, and Bill Owens and the Secret of the Runes, released in 2010. These straight-to-video abominations feature a tween boy and his two friends running through the backwoods of the local suburbs as they coldly react to cheap post-production effects. Imagine if Hogwarts was just a shed by the train tracks in Milwaukee, Professor Lupin was a homeless man named Thurgood who may or may not be use LSD to incite "magical" hallucinations and Voldemort was the floating head of a fat eighth grader; you end up with Billy Owens.

All of these faults could be forgiven if the Billy Owens universe had any depth or likable characters. Sadly, the story is as believable as the effects, and the characters couldn't be less interested in the plot developments. The following clip shows the climactic battle between Owen's crew and their jean-shorts enemy.

This 3-minute clip encapsulates many of the features that make the Billy Owen's movies special:

• Characters barely seem to care that their in a life-or-death situation
• Sound effect for girl sliding down rope sounds like a party horn
• Needlessly having characters dictate the action, "Billy you're flying."
• Kids saying jokes straight out of 1950s sitcoms and cartoons
• Missing dialogue when characters mouths are moving
• Incomprehensible fight choreography

Of course, you can't blame the kids for any of these faults. In fact, the actor who plays Billy Owens, Dalton Mugridge, certainly seems like he's putting a significant amount of effort into the part. Unfortunately, the filmmakers don't care about getting good performances out of these young actors. They likely expect to make easy money by capitalizing on the popularity of wizards (much like Disney and their show "Wizards of Waverly Place.") As a result, you end up with a pair of movies that completely lack the effort and depth that would make them even remotely watchable.