80's Sword & Sorcery Retrospective, Part 1: Intro + 1980-81
Due to LJ's character limit, this will probably end up split into MANY different parts. Like I was hoping to do it in two or three, but it's likely it will be more like, I dunno, five. In any event, let's start at the beginning.
SINCE THE DAWN OF CINEMA, people have made movies in which characters kill one another, or sometimes hideous monsters, with handheld pieces of metal while magical stuff happens around them. Some of the early quasi-historical epics during the Silent Era began this tradition, and then there was the cycle of “sword and sandal” flicks, many of them in the Italian peplum subgenre, which began in the 1950s and often starred characters from Greco-Roman or Hebrew/Biblical mythology, such as Hercules or Samson. The movies involving Sinbad the Sailor from the 1001 Nights also deserve mention.
However, during the 1970s, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (the book) became more popular than ever and Dungeons & Dragons came into existence, plus Marvel’s Conan comics were a big hit, etc. Thus the stage was set for an explosion of sword and sorcery films in the 1980s, the best of which upped the standard for fantasy cinema at least until that Peter Jackson guy adapted the above-mentioned book(s) in the early 2000s. Let’s have a look at this decade and its many entertaining contributions…
We'll start with a definition of “Sword and Sorcery.” The phrase contains two words (plus “and”). Both of them must be present in order for a film to qualify; i.e. the heroes must use pre-modern weapons as a way of solving their problems (usually these are literal swords, but the occasional spear, axe, or bow is also acceptable), and there must be supernatural elements. This rules out kids’ films like The Dark Crystal and The Neverending Story (I like both of them, but they’re simply not VIOLENT enough for this list) as well as merely “historical” films that contain ample sword-death but no fantastical elements, such as Flesh + Blood (another good one, but not a work of fantasy). I did include a couple where the supernatural angle is… iffy, but at least the overall feel is relatively ahistorical and unrealistic, so close enough. Then again, the films should also take place, for at least part of their runtime, in a setting that isn’t the contemporary real world (which, sadly, rules out the amazing Big Trouble in Little China).
Also, I explicitly put “80’s” in the title, which means films from 1980 to 1989. No exceptions, even throwbacks that would feel right at home in that decade. (Oh, also, in many ways the Star Wars films are just “sword and sorcery and spaceship” but adding them into the mix would complicate things needlessly, so let’s not.) And we’re sticking mostly to the Western variety of S&S, since I’d have to include 40 wuxia films otherwise.
We can further divide these films into two subcategories, which are imperfect and not ironclad (a few have some overlap or don’t quite fit into either), but in general, sword & sorcery flicks tend to be either more “High Fantasy” or “Low Fantasy.”
High Fantasy = the vibe is closer to the High Middle Ages and generally has more of a romantic Arthurian-Legend or proto-Tolkien feel, with a greater focus on the supernatural and a more clear-cut distinction between Good and Evil (capitalized).
Low Fantasy = “barbarian films” with more of a Dark Age, Iron Age, or sometimes even Bronze or Stone Age vibe; everything is grittier, the good guys aren’t necessarily much better than the bad guys, and everyone, male and female, wears less clothing. If Tolkien is the godfather of High Fantasy, then Low Fantasy owes more to Robert E. Howard. (Many of these films also seem to have, confusingly, taken as much inspiration from the successful prehistoric epic Quest for Fire as they did from Conan et al.)
Note that this list does not include every such movie, but it does include a lot of them, and all the ones I have personally seen. One thing is consistent in all of them, though: If you see a large group of Men In Black Armor (MIBAs) riding towards your shitty peasant village, run.
~ 1980 ~
Most years ending in 0 are transitional and this one was no different, hence we only have one film to discuss before things really get rolling.
HAWK THE SLAYER
Dir. Terry Marcel
The one that started it all -- and because there was almost nothing quite like it at the time, all the geeks in the D&D subculture seem to have embraced it with a fierce, passionate love that bordered on the psychotic. Although one could argue that it’s basically Star Wars + any given Spaghetti Western, only with non-plasma swords, an elf, and some of those glowing toy bouncy-balls in the role of the sorceress chick’s “vortex of firebolts” spell.
In some kingdom that looks like the woods outside of Pinewood Studios in England, an important man (it’s never clear if he’s the king, a wizard, or a nobleman) has just received a visit from his elder son, who is named “Voltan the Dark One” (Jack Palance!) and wears black robes over black leather along with a large helmet that covers half of his face and he has a sword with a skull-shaped pommel. As it turns out, he is a bad guy. He murders his father for not giving him the family’s ancestral “ancient power” and leaves. Enter the younger brother, Hawk (John Terry, who was born THIRTY years later than Palance was IRL), to whom the old man does bequeath the ancient power, consisting of a green “Elven Mindstone” that embeds itself within the hand-shaped pommel of a cool sword nearby, allowing Hawk to telekinetically throw the sword around and have it return to his hand at will, etc. Hawk vows to kill his brother, especially since Voltan previously murdered his fiancee as well. Time passes, Hawk wanders heroically around, Voltan the Dark One amasses a dark army of bandits/MIBAs and periodically pays medical visits to a surprisingly scary, demigod-level wizard who lives on a dark mountain of darkness, etc. Anyway, the main plot kicks off when Voltan kidnaps the Mother Superior of a convent, and a one-handed guy in the nuns’ care recruits none other than Hawk to save her. So Hawk then recruits a bunch of his friends to help him, thus assembling the standard Magnificent Seven Samurai / D&D Adventuring Party roster of good guys. Then begins an epic quest across a relatively limited stretch of forest and only one or two interior sets during which many, many ruffians, scoundrels, rapscallions, and ne’er-do-wells die violently (albeit with very little blood).
They even included almost all of the "special effects."
By most people’s standards this isn’t exactly a “good” movie (it would have benefited from, say, five or six times the budget), but holy crap is it ever fun and I can see why 70’s-80’s kids love it. It has a sort of “heart” and energy to it (i.e. you get the impression that the people making it were trying hard and having fun), it moves at a nice clip, the musical score is surprisingly cool (albeit VERY 1980), and there’s a decent atmosphere even despite the low variety of locations. As for the performers, this is one of those movies where all the “good” acting comes from the supporting characters while the two leads (who are also the only two Americans) are fairly terrible, albeit in completely different ways. John Terry as Hawk has about 1.5 facial expressions and 1 tone of voice, whereas Palance as Voltan is so hammy as to be almost surreal, like in “I can’t believe I’m really seeing an actor do this” territory (making him a sort of forerunner of Frank Langella in Masters of the Universe, Raul Julia in Street Fighter: The Movie, and Jeremy Irons in Dungeons & Dragons, the last of which is less representative of D&D than Hawk is). Yet for all the borderline-hilarious antics, he makes for a deeply unpleasant antagonist, a man with vague delusions of grandeur but who is mostly just an anger-addicted sadistic thug who thinks the world owes him. There’s something almost refreshing about his straightforward nastiness. Fortunately, though, the elf and the handless guy with the automatic crossbow can shoot arrows/bolts so fast that the camera can’t capture them properly and has to just keep quick-cutting the same image of them firing over and over again followed by equally quick cuts to Voltan’s henchmen dying (since it would have cost too much to show them actually shooting arrows at stuntmen). It always helps when the good guys have that much going for them.
This film is semi-obscure now but you can probably find it somewhere, and if you’re serious about sword & sorcery it’s pretty much required viewing. Alcohol might help, but I honestly enjoyed it even while totally sober.
~ 1981 ~
When the genre truly took off -- two of its three best entries appeared in this year alone, and the other one appeared the very next year, so yeah.
EXCALIBUR
Dir. John Boorman
IMO the best-ever adaptation of Arthurian Legend (and first of the Three Best films in the 80's cycle) is this, Boorman’s hypnotic fever dream of sex, death, and unbelievably green vegetation (it was filmed in Ireland). Interestingly, they were originally going to adapt The Lord of the Rings, and the costumes and sets were designed with that in mind, but it didn’t quite work out, so they said “Fuck it, let’s just do King Arthur.” The result was a film that seems to be far on the High Fantasy end of the spectrum, yet is more melancholy, moody, morose, and occasionally even creepy than most of its kin.
We begin in Dark Ages England (although everyone is wearing armor more appropriate to the Late Medieval period, a good 900 years later) as various stupid, coarse, meat-headed warlords continuously make their underlings die in their endless power struggles. Unto this comes MERLIN (Nicol Williamson), the immortal wizard, who conjures up the sword EXCALIBUR as a symbol of divinity, order, justice, and so forth so that the land may be united and peasants won’t have these guys’ horses shitting down their wells every week. Unfortunately, Uther Pendragon is as much of a dumb jock as the rest of them and he quickly abuses his power just to fuck some other guy’s wife, ends up dead, and leaves Excalibur stuck in a goddamn stone.
Fast forward 15 or 20 years and Uther’s son, Arthur (Nigel Terry) improbably draws the sword from the stone, leading all the dumb-jock warlords to immediately begin fighting AGAIN over whether or not they’ll obey God and follow the True King. Long story short, Arthur wins them over by being a better man than his father, thus assembling his famous Knights, founding Camelot, and so forth. But of course his queen and his top knight can’t help the warm tingly feeling they get when they look at each other… And there is still the matter of Arthur’s half-sister, the sorceress Morgana LeFay (Helen Mirren), who seems to recall that Arthur is only the Alpha Male of the Group because of the manipulations of that Merlin guy, whom, she feels, betrayed her parents…
THUS is Civilization destroyed, as usual, by self-centered thots and bitter young men who were taught to hate the society into which they were born just because other people did bad things in the past. (Mordred, the young man in question, also has a good-sized army of MIBAs at his beck and call, which would never happen in real life since it’s not as though people actually put on scary black outfits when their goal is specifically to march forth and abuse/terrorize the populace.)
Though relatively slow-paced (despite plenty of gruesome violence at times), this is an entrancing film, with some truly stunning visuals and tons of allegorical-type subtext in almost every scene, as befits an adaptation of myth. The entire story is almost like a dramatization of Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire paintings, in fact. There is a “stagey” feel to it, combined with some old-fashioned theatrical acting that makes it seem far older than 1981, and yet it all fits the operatic tone perfectly.
CLASH OF THE TITANS
Dir. Desmond Davis
A deliberate and obvious throwback to the Greek-mythology flicks I mentioned in the intro (with Ray Harryhausen doing the animation for the monsters), and a pretty good one at that, following the exploits of Perseus (Harry Hamlin) as he attempts to use lawyer-loopholes to slay the various monsters that the gods are legalistically obliged to employ in terrorizing humanity.
I consider this to be more popcorn entertainment than Serious ArtTM so I won’t spend much time on it (plus I’ve only seen it like, twice, and the last time was probably a decade ago), suffice to say that the elaborate sets and stop-motion monsters all look really cool (especially the spooky swamp where Calibos lives, and of course Medusa) and that I’m confused as to why the mechanical owl is apparently named “Bobo” but everyone pronounces it like “Bubo,” with a “u” (or “oo”). Worse yet, I absolutely refuse to pronounce “Kraken” with a short-A sound or acknowledge anyone else’s doing so. Just, no. It should be “kray-ken”, not “cracking” minus the G.
One of the more lighthearted films on this list, though a bunch of unfortunate guys still die horribly -- mostly redshirts on the side of Good, since the antagonists in this one are an assortment of nonhuman abominations who show up as “boss fights,” mostly, rather than an army of human MIBAs as in most S&S pictures. Also it’s interesting that there isn’t really a Big Bad (though Calibos comes close) and that most of what Perseus does is, essentially, an iconoclastic rampage against stupid-ass mistakes the gods made in the past but have continued to hang around making everyone miserable in the present.
Incidentally, the remake from a few years ago isn’t too shabby, though I don’t understand why Hades is suddenly the main villain now. He was never that much of a dick in the original mythology, just kind of grumpy and Lawful Neutral-ish.
DRAGONSLAYER
Dir. Matthew Robbins
A live-action Disney production, but don’t let that deter you -- this is the second of the Three Best films I will be discussing. Mostly this is due to a surprisingly grim-and-gritty ambience (some scenes are borderline horror), a generally high degree of overall filmmaking competence, and some damn good special effects -- they were truly astounding at the time, and hold up quite well even today.
The setting seems to be a fictitious Dark Age kingdom in Europe somewhere, in which magic is on the decline, as evidenced by there being only one wizard left (which is too bad, since he seems like a nice guy) and one dragon. The dragon, coolly-named “Vermithrax Pejorative,” is possibly the best-ever cinematic representation of her species, though Smaug may have dethroned her (narrowly) in 2013. She doesn’t talk, but she doesn’t need to, especially since she’s scary as fuck. So scary that the arsehole king has instituted “the lottery” to appease the beast with sporadic sacrifices of virginal young women. (It’s heavily implied that Vermithrax would be content with eating anyone, so the choice of girls with cherries is just symbolic superstition on the humans’ part.) This is not very popular with the general populace, but they tolerate it as at least being better than having their villages burned down by a bat-winged monstrosity from hell. Sort of like how we put up with being bullied by cops, insurance companies, and intelligence agencies because at least they’re better than ISIS or a Mexican drug cartel, etc. (This film is very working-class, and that need not be a Marxist statement, especially given how poorly Marxists have done at winning working-class votes these last few years.)
Unto this cometh the aforementioned wizard (Ralph Richardson) and his apprentice, Galen (Peter MacNicol), who are recruited by the king’s douchey minions (led by a Man In Black Armor named Tyrian) to deal with the “dragon” problem. There’s a bunch of convoluted plot stuff that I don’t fully remember (it’s been a few years since I saw this one) involving the wizard allowing himself to be killed so that he can be magically resurrected later When The Time Is Right, etc., so in the meantime Galen has to figure things out on his own. This includes meeting a “boy” (played by the non-male Caitlin Clarke) whose father figured out a clever way of getting around the whole “lottery” business, not to mention getting involved in a subplot where the naive princess learns that her father has conveniently exculpated her from inclusion in the lottery (after lying to everyone in the kingdom about it).
MORE IMPORTANTLY, THOUGH, Galen also gets the blacksmith-father-guy to construct SICARIUS DRACORUM (a hint to what this means may be found in the title of the film), which has the distinction of being one of the only SPEARS in all of cinema to be a Really Cool Weapon used by The Hero. (Not that I have anything against swords -- far from it -- but it’s nice to see a spear once in awhile.) Plus he makes a shield out of dragon scales collected near Vermithrax’s cave, which is also a good idea. And there’s still the whole thing about the old wizard’s pending resurrection…
This is a great movie; though intended primarily as a showcase for Industrial Light & Magic’s SFX work (and you can see why), everything else is almost better than it needs to be, placing it in the same category of excellent genre films from this time period as Alien (1979) and The Road Warrior / Mad Max 2 (also 1981).
Oh, and Ian McDiarmid, in the brief, single-scene performance that seemingly won him the role of Emperor Palpatine a couple years later, plays a priest who attempts to use the power of Faith alone to defeat the dragon. Spoiler: it doesn’t work as well as the spear does.
TO BE CONTINUED
SINCE THE DAWN OF CINEMA, people have made movies in which characters kill one another, or sometimes hideous monsters, with handheld pieces of metal while magical stuff happens around them. Some of the early quasi-historical epics during the Silent Era began this tradition, and then there was the cycle of “sword and sandal” flicks, many of them in the Italian peplum subgenre, which began in the 1950s and often starred characters from Greco-Roman or Hebrew/Biblical mythology, such as Hercules or Samson. The movies involving Sinbad the Sailor from the 1001 Nights also deserve mention.
However, during the 1970s, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (the book) became more popular than ever and Dungeons & Dragons came into existence, plus Marvel’s Conan comics were a big hit, etc. Thus the stage was set for an explosion of sword and sorcery films in the 1980s, the best of which upped the standard for fantasy cinema at least until that Peter Jackson guy adapted the above-mentioned book(s) in the early 2000s. Let’s have a look at this decade and its many entertaining contributions…
We'll start with a definition of “Sword and Sorcery.” The phrase contains two words (plus “and”). Both of them must be present in order for a film to qualify; i.e. the heroes must use pre-modern weapons as a way of solving their problems (usually these are literal swords, but the occasional spear, axe, or bow is also acceptable), and there must be supernatural elements. This rules out kids’ films like The Dark Crystal and The Neverending Story (I like both of them, but they’re simply not VIOLENT enough for this list) as well as merely “historical” films that contain ample sword-death but no fantastical elements, such as Flesh + Blood (another good one, but not a work of fantasy). I did include a couple where the supernatural angle is… iffy, but at least the overall feel is relatively ahistorical and unrealistic, so close enough. Then again, the films should also take place, for at least part of their runtime, in a setting that isn’t the contemporary real world (which, sadly, rules out the amazing Big Trouble in Little China).
Also, I explicitly put “80’s” in the title, which means films from 1980 to 1989. No exceptions, even throwbacks that would feel right at home in that decade. (Oh, also, in many ways the Star Wars films are just “sword and sorcery and spaceship” but adding them into the mix would complicate things needlessly, so let’s not.) And we’re sticking mostly to the Western variety of S&S, since I’d have to include 40 wuxia films otherwise.
We can further divide these films into two subcategories, which are imperfect and not ironclad (a few have some overlap or don’t quite fit into either), but in general, sword & sorcery flicks tend to be either more “High Fantasy” or “Low Fantasy.”
High Fantasy = the vibe is closer to the High Middle Ages and generally has more of a romantic Arthurian-Legend or proto-Tolkien feel, with a greater focus on the supernatural and a more clear-cut distinction between Good and Evil (capitalized).
Low Fantasy = “barbarian films” with more of a Dark Age, Iron Age, or sometimes even Bronze or Stone Age vibe; everything is grittier, the good guys aren’t necessarily much better than the bad guys, and everyone, male and female, wears less clothing. If Tolkien is the godfather of High Fantasy, then Low Fantasy owes more to Robert E. Howard. (Many of these films also seem to have, confusingly, taken as much inspiration from the successful prehistoric epic Quest for Fire as they did from Conan et al.)
Note that this list does not include every such movie, but it does include a lot of them, and all the ones I have personally seen. One thing is consistent in all of them, though: If you see a large group of Men In Black Armor (MIBAs) riding towards your shitty peasant village, run.
~ 1980 ~
Most years ending in 0 are transitional and this one was no different, hence we only have one film to discuss before things really get rolling.
HAWK THE SLAYER
Dir. Terry Marcel
The one that started it all -- and because there was almost nothing quite like it at the time, all the geeks in the D&D subculture seem to have embraced it with a fierce, passionate love that bordered on the psychotic. Although one could argue that it’s basically Star Wars + any given Spaghetti Western, only with non-plasma swords, an elf, and some of those glowing toy bouncy-balls in the role of the sorceress chick’s “vortex of firebolts” spell.
In some kingdom that looks like the woods outside of Pinewood Studios in England, an important man (it’s never clear if he’s the king, a wizard, or a nobleman) has just received a visit from his elder son, who is named “Voltan the Dark One” (Jack Palance!) and wears black robes over black leather along with a large helmet that covers half of his face and he has a sword with a skull-shaped pommel. As it turns out, he is a bad guy. He murders his father for not giving him the family’s ancestral “ancient power” and leaves. Enter the younger brother, Hawk (John Terry, who was born THIRTY years later than Palance was IRL), to whom the old man does bequeath the ancient power, consisting of a green “Elven Mindstone” that embeds itself within the hand-shaped pommel of a cool sword nearby, allowing Hawk to telekinetically throw the sword around and have it return to his hand at will, etc. Hawk vows to kill his brother, especially since Voltan previously murdered his fiancee as well. Time passes, Hawk wanders heroically around, Voltan the Dark One amasses a dark army of bandits/MIBAs and periodically pays medical visits to a surprisingly scary, demigod-level wizard who lives on a dark mountain of darkness, etc. Anyway, the main plot kicks off when Voltan kidnaps the Mother Superior of a convent, and a one-handed guy in the nuns’ care recruits none other than Hawk to save her. So Hawk then recruits a bunch of his friends to help him, thus assembling the standard Magnificent Seven Samurai / D&D Adventuring Party roster of good guys. Then begins an epic quest across a relatively limited stretch of forest and only one or two interior sets during which many, many ruffians, scoundrels, rapscallions, and ne’er-do-wells die violently (albeit with very little blood).
Click to viewThey even included almost all of the "special effects."
By most people’s standards this isn’t exactly a “good” movie (it would have benefited from, say, five or six times the budget), but holy crap is it ever fun and I can see why 70’s-80’s kids love it. It has a sort of “heart” and energy to it (i.e. you get the impression that the people making it were trying hard and having fun), it moves at a nice clip, the musical score is surprisingly cool (albeit VERY 1980), and there’s a decent atmosphere even despite the low variety of locations. As for the performers, this is one of those movies where all the “good” acting comes from the supporting characters while the two leads (who are also the only two Americans) are fairly terrible, albeit in completely different ways. John Terry as Hawk has about 1.5 facial expressions and 1 tone of voice, whereas Palance as Voltan is so hammy as to be almost surreal, like in “I can’t believe I’m really seeing an actor do this” territory (making him a sort of forerunner of Frank Langella in Masters of the Universe, Raul Julia in Street Fighter: The Movie, and Jeremy Irons in Dungeons & Dragons, the last of which is less representative of D&D than Hawk is). Yet for all the borderline-hilarious antics, he makes for a deeply unpleasant antagonist, a man with vague delusions of grandeur but who is mostly just an anger-addicted sadistic thug who thinks the world owes him. There’s something almost refreshing about his straightforward nastiness. Fortunately, though, the elf and the handless guy with the automatic crossbow can shoot arrows/bolts so fast that the camera can’t capture them properly and has to just keep quick-cutting the same image of them firing over and over again followed by equally quick cuts to Voltan’s henchmen dying (since it would have cost too much to show them actually shooting arrows at stuntmen). It always helps when the good guys have that much going for them.
This film is semi-obscure now but you can probably find it somewhere, and if you’re serious about sword & sorcery it’s pretty much required viewing. Alcohol might help, but I honestly enjoyed it even while totally sober.
~ 1981 ~
When the genre truly took off -- two of its three best entries appeared in this year alone, and the other one appeared the very next year, so yeah.
EXCALIBUR
Dir. John Boorman
IMO the best-ever adaptation of Arthurian Legend (and first of the Three Best films in the 80's cycle) is this, Boorman’s hypnotic fever dream of sex, death, and unbelievably green vegetation (it was filmed in Ireland). Interestingly, they were originally going to adapt The Lord of the Rings, and the costumes and sets were designed with that in mind, but it didn’t quite work out, so they said “Fuck it, let’s just do King Arthur.” The result was a film that seems to be far on the High Fantasy end of the spectrum, yet is more melancholy, moody, morose, and occasionally even creepy than most of its kin.
We begin in Dark Ages England (although everyone is wearing armor more appropriate to the Late Medieval period, a good 900 years later) as various stupid, coarse, meat-headed warlords continuously make their underlings die in their endless power struggles. Unto this comes MERLIN (Nicol Williamson), the immortal wizard, who conjures up the sword EXCALIBUR as a symbol of divinity, order, justice, and so forth so that the land may be united and peasants won’t have these guys’ horses shitting down their wells every week. Unfortunately, Uther Pendragon is as much of a dumb jock as the rest of them and he quickly abuses his power just to fuck some other guy’s wife, ends up dead, and leaves Excalibur stuck in a goddamn stone.
Fast forward 15 or 20 years and Uther’s son, Arthur (Nigel Terry) improbably draws the sword from the stone, leading all the dumb-jock warlords to immediately begin fighting AGAIN over whether or not they’ll obey God and follow the True King. Long story short, Arthur wins them over by being a better man than his father, thus assembling his famous Knights, founding Camelot, and so forth. But of course his queen and his top knight can’t help the warm tingly feeling they get when they look at each other… And there is still the matter of Arthur’s half-sister, the sorceress Morgana LeFay (Helen Mirren), who seems to recall that Arthur is only the Alpha Male of the Group because of the manipulations of that Merlin guy, whom, she feels, betrayed her parents…
THUS is Civilization destroyed, as usual, by self-centered thots and bitter young men who were taught to hate the society into which they were born just because other people did bad things in the past. (Mordred, the young man in question, also has a good-sized army of MIBAs at his beck and call, which would never happen in real life since it’s not as though people actually put on scary black outfits when their goal is specifically to march forth and abuse/terrorize the populace.)
Though relatively slow-paced (despite plenty of gruesome violence at times), this is an entrancing film, with some truly stunning visuals and tons of allegorical-type subtext in almost every scene, as befits an adaptation of myth. The entire story is almost like a dramatization of Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire paintings, in fact. There is a “stagey” feel to it, combined with some old-fashioned theatrical acting that makes it seem far older than 1981, and yet it all fits the operatic tone perfectly.
CLASH OF THE TITANS
Dir. Desmond Davis
A deliberate and obvious throwback to the Greek-mythology flicks I mentioned in the intro (with Ray Harryhausen doing the animation for the monsters), and a pretty good one at that, following the exploits of Perseus (Harry Hamlin) as he attempts to use lawyer-loopholes to slay the various monsters that the gods are legalistically obliged to employ in terrorizing humanity.
I consider this to be more popcorn entertainment than Serious ArtTM so I won’t spend much time on it (plus I’ve only seen it like, twice, and the last time was probably a decade ago), suffice to say that the elaborate sets and stop-motion monsters all look really cool (especially the spooky swamp where Calibos lives, and of course Medusa) and that I’m confused as to why the mechanical owl is apparently named “Bobo” but everyone pronounces it like “Bubo,” with a “u” (or “oo”). Worse yet, I absolutely refuse to pronounce “Kraken” with a short-A sound or acknowledge anyone else’s doing so. Just, no. It should be “kray-ken”, not “cracking” minus the G.
One of the more lighthearted films on this list, though a bunch of unfortunate guys still die horribly -- mostly redshirts on the side of Good, since the antagonists in this one are an assortment of nonhuman abominations who show up as “boss fights,” mostly, rather than an army of human MIBAs as in most S&S pictures. Also it’s interesting that there isn’t really a Big Bad (though Calibos comes close) and that most of what Perseus does is, essentially, an iconoclastic rampage against stupid-ass mistakes the gods made in the past but have continued to hang around making everyone miserable in the present.
Incidentally, the remake from a few years ago isn’t too shabby, though I don’t understand why Hades is suddenly the main villain now. He was never that much of a dick in the original mythology, just kind of grumpy and Lawful Neutral-ish.
DRAGONSLAYER
Dir. Matthew Robbins
A live-action Disney production, but don’t let that deter you -- this is the second of the Three Best films I will be discussing. Mostly this is due to a surprisingly grim-and-gritty ambience (some scenes are borderline horror), a generally high degree of overall filmmaking competence, and some damn good special effects -- they were truly astounding at the time, and hold up quite well even today.
The setting seems to be a fictitious Dark Age kingdom in Europe somewhere, in which magic is on the decline, as evidenced by there being only one wizard left (which is too bad, since he seems like a nice guy) and one dragon. The dragon, coolly-named “Vermithrax Pejorative,” is possibly the best-ever cinematic representation of her species, though Smaug may have dethroned her (narrowly) in 2013. She doesn’t talk, but she doesn’t need to, especially since she’s scary as fuck. So scary that the arsehole king has instituted “the lottery” to appease the beast with sporadic sacrifices of virginal young women. (It’s heavily implied that Vermithrax would be content with eating anyone, so the choice of girls with cherries is just symbolic superstition on the humans’ part.) This is not very popular with the general populace, but they tolerate it as at least being better than having their villages burned down by a bat-winged monstrosity from hell. Sort of like how we put up with being bullied by cops, insurance companies, and intelligence agencies because at least they’re better than ISIS or a Mexican drug cartel, etc. (This film is very working-class, and that need not be a Marxist statement, especially given how poorly Marxists have done at winning working-class votes these last few years.)
Unto this cometh the aforementioned wizard (Ralph Richardson) and his apprentice, Galen (Peter MacNicol), who are recruited by the king’s douchey minions (led by a Man In Black Armor named Tyrian) to deal with the “dragon” problem. There’s a bunch of convoluted plot stuff that I don’t fully remember (it’s been a few years since I saw this one) involving the wizard allowing himself to be killed so that he can be magically resurrected later When The Time Is Right, etc., so in the meantime Galen has to figure things out on his own. This includes meeting a “boy” (played by the non-male Caitlin Clarke) whose father figured out a clever way of getting around the whole “lottery” business, not to mention getting involved in a subplot where the naive princess learns that her father has conveniently exculpated her from inclusion in the lottery (after lying to everyone in the kingdom about it).
MORE IMPORTANTLY, THOUGH, Galen also gets the blacksmith-father-guy to construct SICARIUS DRACORUM (a hint to what this means may be found in the title of the film), which has the distinction of being one of the only SPEARS in all of cinema to be a Really Cool Weapon used by The Hero. (Not that I have anything against swords -- far from it -- but it’s nice to see a spear once in awhile.) Plus he makes a shield out of dragon scales collected near Vermithrax’s cave, which is also a good idea. And there’s still the whole thing about the old wizard’s pending resurrection…
This is a great movie; though intended primarily as a showcase for Industrial Light & Magic’s SFX work (and you can see why), everything else is almost better than it needs to be, placing it in the same category of excellent genre films from this time period as Alien (1979) and The Road Warrior / Mad Max 2 (also 1981).
Oh, and Ian McDiarmid, in the brief, single-scene performance that seemingly won him the role of Emperor Palpatine a couple years later, plays a priest who attempts to use the power of Faith alone to defeat the dragon. Spoiler: it doesn’t work as well as the spear does.
TO BE CONTINUED