80's Sword & Sorcery Retrospective, Part 3: 1983-84
A snapshot of a time in history (still in 1983 here) when the Italian film industry briefly stopped making zombie flicks to instead focus more on making dramatizations of Manowar album covers.
THIS PART ALSO INCLUDES THE LEGENDARY DEATHSTALKER. That needs to be mentioned.
ATOR, THE FIGHTING EAGLE
Dir. Joe D’Amato
One of the worst films I’m discussing (we’re getting into the Italian ones now, you see) so its appeal is mostly of the MST3K variety, but some people (including me) might take that as a recommendation.
The backstory is hilarious because we hear all of it via a VERY LONG voice-over narration right at the beginning, set to stock footage of snowy mountains, volcanoes erupting, and whatnot. It goes on for long enough that it started to remind me of the Ghost of Christmas Past From the Future (the “Thousands of years ago…” robot-thing from Aqua Teen). It’s the usual stuff about the “Spider King” and how the great warrior Torren failed to overthrow him/it but his son is prophesied to do so, etc., so of course the Spider King’s high priest (some guy named Dakkar; just Dakkar) sends out a bunch of MIBAs to slaughter all the babies born on that particular day. Needless to say, they succeed at killing all the infants except the one they’re looking for, who grows up incognito as ATOR (Miles O’Keeffe) and then eventually learns his destiny and seeks revenge after the MIBAs return to burn down his shitty peasant village and kidnap his bride (who is also his stepsister… and he didn’t know they weren’t blood-related at first…).
All of this is handled with the utmost incompetence, so I suppose it’s a testament to how much I like sword & sorcery films that I have seen this one all the way through. It does have a couple of moderately interesting sets, an amusing duel between Ator and some guy’s shadow on a wall, and the very attractive Sabrina Siani as the heroine (not the fiancee/sister; some other chick Ator meets along the way), who was in pretty much all the Italian barbarian films.
Sadly, there is basically no gore in this flick, even though it was directed by D’Amato of Anthropophagus and Absurd infamy. Presumably they blew the entire budget on wigs and cheap swords so there was none left over for guts and severed arms, alas.
HUNDRA
Dir. Matt Cimber
“If Conan was a girl,” though not too badly done, really. And the half-assed “feminist” angle at least works better here than in Red Sonja, below. That being said, they were serious about ripping off their main inspiration to the point that not only is the opening battle scene thematically very similar to Conan’s, but THEY EVEN FILMED IT ON THE EXACT SAME MOUNTAINSIDE IN SPAIN. That takes true commitment.
Hundra (Laurene Landon, who is really quite good here) is the best warrior amongst her tribe of Amazons, who live on the mountainside from the beginning of Conan to escape the fiendish Iron Age patriarchy. Needless to say, an especially patriarchal group of MIBAs ride in to burn their shitty peasant village to the ground, rape, murder, etc. while Hundra is out hunting. She sets out not only for revenge, but also to overcome her hatred of men for long enough to get preggers so that she can reform her tribe (which is admittedly an interesting angle for a story like this). Unfortunately, the guy whom she decides is most suitable for the insemination job happens to live in a city controlled by the obligatory evil high priest of the Bull Cult, to which many MIBAs pay tribute, including the leader of the douches who slaughtered her village.
Though not great, and though it drags a tad in the middle (most of the best fight scenes occur in the beginning -- Hundra’s initial rampage o’ vengeance is pretty damn excellent), this flick is a cut above most Conan ripoffs on most metrics, and includes a damn fine score by the vaunted Ennio Morricone. Also it technically doesn’t include any supernatural stuff that I can recall, but the setting is sufficiently ahistorical that I can barely justify including it. Plus, of course, they filmed the opening sequence on the exact same mountainside as the one in Conan.
CONQUEST
Dir. Lucio Fulci
The single weirdest film I will be discussing, which is saying something. And not one of the best ones (not only is it Italian, but it was directed by Fulci, the most overrated man in all of horror cinema), but neither the worst, and at least it’s… different. And has a few admittedly pretty fucking cool parts and aspects, such as a powerful sense of atmosphere, a nice soundtrack (by Claudio Simonetti of Goblin), and a nifty climax.
Waaaaay back in the fictionalized Stone-verging-on-Bronze Age, a tribe of vaguely Greek people have advanced to something resembling civilization. For no particular reason, they send a young warrior named Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti) out into the barbaric hinterlands to bring the light of goodness and justice to the backwards hicks. Fortunately, they also give him a nice bow and some arrows. (The bow furthermore has magical powers, though it takes awhile to figure them out.) He comes to a land ruled by the sorceress Ocron (Sabrina Siani again, who wears a gold mask through the entire film, but also does not wear a top, so there’s that) who has convinced the locals that she is personally responsible for causing the sun to rise each morning, and who sends forth her minions, consisting of some MIBAs but mostly dog-headed beast-men, to kill anyone who disagrees. (In one memorable sequence, the dog-men rip a girl in half lengthwise by pulling on her ankles really hard; since this is a Fulci film, it is shown in lots of detail.) Ilias teams up with some older, beefier, and much more competent guy named Mace (Jorge Rivero), who is world-weary and likes animals better than people, etc. Then together the two males set off to vanquish the only major female character since she’s also the bad guy, which isn’t something you don’t see very often. (Female villains aren’t that rare, but usually there’s a good chick in there somewhere, too.)
They get into a lot of side-quests as well, such as one where Ilias gets poisoned by an evil dart and starts to burst out graphically with horrid boils so Mace must battle water-zombies to retrieve a medicinal plant. In keeping with the director’s love of pornographic close-ups of the human body being destroyed, this is also possibly the only film ever made in which, during a character’s funeral pyre, we actually see the corpse disintegrating within the flames. The “best” part, though, is when Ilias momentarily forgets that he’s supposed to be here for the purpose of performing noble acts of GOOD and he just sort of chuckles in amusement when Mace borrows his bow and uses it to cold-bloodedly murder some random guy so they can steal his pig and eat it. (Despite his love of animals, Mace doesn’t have any compunctions about consuming the flesh of said pig, since it was already dead anyway.)
THIS IS A LUCIO FULCI PICTURE, THEREFORE PARTS OF IT ARE SLOW AND BORING, a typically Fulci-esque achievement in failure given that Conquest is only 85 minutes long and contains zombies, mutant bats, Stone Age nunchaku, goony cobweb-people, sexy cave-girls, magical bows shooting laser arrows, and large amounts of tits and gore. The man is a true artist when it comes to finding ways to make his films relatively dull regardless of what kind of insane shit is happening onscreen. Also everything is hazy-looking and often too damn dark to see what’s happening. Still, this one’s bizarritude makes it worth a cautious recommendation, and as usual Fulci does also produce some fairly awesome imagery. And Rivero is oddly compelling as the mopey badass, especially when he delivers a subtle yet ultra-cool Pre-Asskicking One-Liner at the end.
HEARTS AND ARMOUR
Dir. Giacomo Battiato
A moderately-interesting Italian adaptation of Orlando Furioso which I think was originally a TV miniseries or something, though it’s kind of gory. It slightly resembles Excalibur in being based on chivalric myth and having a sort of moody, gloomy, ethereal (yet violent) feel, though of course it’s not as good. On the plus side, it also has Tanya Roberts again (she doesn’t get naked, but she shows lots of PG-13 skin, at least).
During some back-and-forth wars in southern Europe between the knights of Christianity and the Islamic Moors, an attractive blonde named Bradamante (Barbara De Rossi) is attacked in a picturesque ravine by some scumbag bandits. Fortunately, an animated suit of armor gruesomely maims these guys and saves her, though on the condition that she put the armor on herself and become a mysterious avenger or something. Then she gets caught up in a soap-opera-like narrative involving constant duels, double-crosses, steamy flings, and more duels between the Christians and the Moors, which occasionally spill over into groves and ruins which are enchanted, haunted, and so forth. I only saw this all the way through once and I think it was in un-subtitled Italian, so I’m still a bit fuzzy on the actual plot (also I have not read Orlando Furioso, though at least I’ve heard of it, unlike most illiterate heathens). Still, it looks cool, and checks off the boxes for inclusion on this list, so it’s worth mentioning.
THE THRONE OF FIRE
Dir. Francesco Prosperi
Though made on about the same level of budget and technical competence as Ator, above (and also co-starring Sabrina Siani again), this one is actually kinda fun in a terrible way. It has a decent energy to it once it gets rolling and some cool parts, etc., though it’s cheap-looking and light on gore and Siani does not get naked in the film itself despite being topless on the poster. (Though she does wear an extremely revealing barbarian-chick type outfit even though her character is a princess.)
There is also some vague Christianity. SATAN decides to send his mortal avatar to impregnate a chick so that his son can rule the world. An old wizard guy stands around and boringly delivers exposition about this and how the Son of Evil will try to sit upon the Throne of Fire, etc. After the demon-child is born it cuts to a large army of MIBAs preparing to ravage the countryside on behalf of the now-grown Morak (Harrison Muller). Apparently Satan had a bunch of men in black armor just waiting for his son in a trust fund as soon as he grew up. (These sequences are mostly copy-and-pasted from footage previously used in Sword of the Barbarians a.k.a. Sangraal, above.) They massacre shitty peasant villages and try to capture the princess, because The Prophecy states that Morak can only be the true King if he sits on the Throne of Fire during an eclipse, but to do that he must marry the princess, blah blah blah. (There is a hilarious scene in which Morak demonstrates the importance of the “legitimacy” thing to a loudmouthed minion by also demonstrating why the Throne of Fire is called “the Throne of Fire,” and then casually walks into the next room, where he has another, non-fiery throne set up for himself.)
Anyway, a mighty hero called Siegfried (Pietro Torrisi again) randomly shows up to save the princess though he keeps getting captured and tossed into the Well of Madness (which includes a legitimately creepy floating head) and they run around beating up MIBAs (the fight scenes are better than usual for Z-grade Italian S&S) until the climax. It’s not too terrible as these things go (though of course the actual movie is nowhere near as good as the cover art). Also I like the chintzy electronic attempt at epic music that plays during the MIBAs-massacring-peasants scenes.
DEATHSTALKER
Dir. James Sbardellati
I’ve saved the best of the year for last, which means that it’s actually produced by Corman and shot in Argentina, rather than being Italian.
Oh, how I love Deathstalker. It is one of the movies that defines the concept of “So Bad, It’s Good.” Mainly because everything about it is just so damn sleazily entertaining and amusingly shitty (but not too shitty). The “sleazy” part is largely because the first portion of the film consists of about three or four consecutive attempted-rape scenes, and it only gets, uh, “better” from there. You can imagine how the Internet Culture Police feel about this flick.
First of all, the sociopathic, unheroic hero (the Waffen-SS-like Rick Hill) is actually named “Deathstalker.” That’s his name. He goes around killing grungy savages so he can attempt to seduce the women they were just trying to rape, and also casually murders other guys who get in the way and then takes their food, etc. He’s a great person. As such, a wise sorceress and a good king recruit him to heroically go the castle where the evil wizard Munkar (that, too, is an actual character name) is holed up. Munkar is holding a fighting tournament and promises to name the winner as his heir, but of course he’s going to renege on that and reveal that the idea was to get all but one of the strongest warriors in the land to kill each other so they can’t oppose him. Anyway, Deathstalker briefly goes into a magic cave to get a magic sword but otherwise he mostly hangs around Munkar’s castle drinking, getting into fights, and attempting to get laid, because he is a noble hero and has the word “death” in his name. He meets a hot warrior chick (the sadly departed Lana Clarkson) but I can’t remember if he has sex with her before she dies or not. Eventually Munkar also dies, in unnecessarily cruel fashion to boot, but then again he has face tattoos. And through all of this, Deathstalker just looks sort of bored and vaguely contemptuous of the proceedings, a classic indicator of Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Click to view"Journey to an age of great kingdoms" -> CUT to drunken schmucks crashing into each other
Also, at one point Munkar transforms one of his henchmen into the likeness of Playboy model Barbi Benton to make it easier to kill our hero, but of course Deathstalker just tries to seduce him/her. And during one of the tournament fights, a huge guy with a huge hammer pounds a little guy to death and they show his hammer hitting nothing but the little guy’s clothes in a large pool of blood, to demonstrate that he has been hammered into pure liquid.
There’s not much more to say, really. This film is a CLASSIC.
~ 1984 ~
By now the Conan-ripoff cycle was winding down a bit before the fantasy genre was briefly revitalized by a couple of films which took a different approach the next year. As such we have only a pair of sequels to discuss, plus a remake of another film in a different genre.
CONAN THE DESTROYER
Dir. Richard Fleischer
The sequel to the other Conan. This one was a definite step down though it’s still pretty good, all things considered. They lightened the overall tone with some silly and mostly lame comedy, removed all the nudity (though Ahnold, Grace Jones, and Sarah Douglas are only “clothed” in the loosest sense of the word), and somewhat reduced the violence, though this film’s “PG” would be a hard PG-13 or soft R nowadays so it’s still pretty bloody. Also we’ve reverted somewhat to a standard Hawk-like D&D party-quest format which differs noticeably from the sprawling, operatic (if slightly slow) approach of the original.
Conan has been Walking the Earth for awhile, most recently with a less-muscular thief named Malek (Tracey Walter, a decent enough character actor but who’s really phoning it in here and displays almost none of the charisma the role requires) when he is attacked by MIBAs in the employ of Queen Taramis (Douglas). I’m not sure why she attacks him since she just wanted to ask for his help, but it allows Conan to kill some guys right at the start of the film, which I guess is important. Knowing how the great warrior mourns for a certain character from the first film who didn’t make it to the sequel, Taramis offers to bring this individual back to life if Conan will undertake a highly convoluted and D&D-like errand in which he must fetch a magical horn and a jewel that can be used to revive the evil god Dagoth whom the also-evil queen reveres, etc. Only her niece, the Princess Jehnna (Olivia d’Abo) can touch it and the Princess must remain a virgin, so the Queen logically puts her in the care of Wilt Chamberlain, her mace-wielding right-hand man, in addition to the Governator. Also along for the ride are Mako from the first film and Grace Jones as a pointy-stick-wielding warrior chick named Zula. Jones gives a highly energetic and completely unhinged performance that almost single-handedly carries the film through its duller sections, proving that she was still cool even outside of her musical career. We love you, Grace.
Anyway, as with Krull, we end up with a lot of cool sets, effects, and set-pieces (storming the ice-castle of the wizard who guards the jewel, a battle in an ancient tomb, a nice bloodbath at the end as they rush to stop the dark god from being revived) but a movie that is only “above-average” overall due to the lack of any kind of unifying “vision” from the filmmakers, as was the case with the Three Best. Schwarzenegger was growing into his cinematic persona and is displaying a bit more acting chops and general charm/humor here so that’s good, and the body count is actually pretty enormous (not only Taramis’s soldiers, but the warriors of a cult who guard the horn ALL wear black armor and therefore get sworded into oblivion every five or ten minutes), so it’s a pretty good S&S flick, yeah. But, sadly, Conan the Destroyer is no Conan the Barbarian.
THE WARRIOR AND THE SORCERESS
Dir. John C. Broderick
Another remake of Yojimbo / A Fistful of Dollars, though this time in a vaguely post-apocalyptic (?) but otherwise typical low-fantasy setting. The Toshiro Mifune / Clint Eastwood role in this case is played by David Carradine and is named “Kain” to make him cool. And the titular sorceress, in the tradition of Sabrina Siani, is topless throughout the film.
A guy wanders into a village controlled by two feuding factions and pits them against each other (again); you know how it goes. Thus, discussing the film is mostly a function of the details. For example, Carradine’s character wears a weird black robe thingy with slits that allow his legs to breathe, which is a good idea since it looks hot in that village. The two evil factions consist of a Lawful Evil one led by a thin guy named Zeg and a Chaotic Evil one led by a fat guy named Bal-Caz. There is a pit with a blob monster, I think. It’s been awhile since I saw this so I can’t really say much more except that I sort of enjoyed it. Not least due to the presence of the very underrated Carradine, whose relative scrawniness, lank greying hair, and generally skeevy demeanor are probably a much more accurate representation than usual of the sort of person who wanders around killing people (and destroying entire towns with his lies and deceit) for a living. In other words, what tabletop gaming refers to as a “murder hobo.”
THE BLADE MASTER (ATOR 2)
Dir. Joe D’Amato
Better-known than its predecessor due to having been on MST3K, which is, of course, its true and ideal home, this is arguably a better film simply because it includes more weird and silly aspects which make its overall cheapness and incompetence more palatable.
This time around, the plot centers on a guy named Zor who is supposed to be this Genghis Khan sort of badass (though he is played by a white guy named David Brandon who looks about 19 under his huge mustache and who comes across as very cultured and polite) who attacks the holy castle where an old wise man (and his hot daughter) live so he can force the old man to give up the secret of the McGuffin that will allow him to take over the world and stuff. The daughter gets away and goes to recruit ATOR (Miles O’Keeffe still/again), who isn’t so much of a barbarian anymore as a kind of reclusive Iron Age Indiana Jones, since he knows all kinds of weird knowledge and skills like how to make a hang glider and use it to drop bombs on Zor’s MIBAs. (His wife Sunya, whom he spent the whole first film rescuing, apparently -- SPOILER -- died, so he must have learned this stuff to take his mind off that.) He also has a mute East Asian sidekick named “Thong.” Oh, and there is a scene where an atom bomb goes off (I think this was the McGuffin that Zor wanted, but it’s hard to remember.) There’s also an attack by invisible warriors (easy on the budget, that) and an encounter with a nasty snake cult, etc.
Eventually, the good guys win, though there is much ridiculousness. You’re probably better off watching this through the MST3K filter, though I watched it “raw” and still sort of enjoyed it. But that’s just me.
TO BE CONTINUED