80's Sword & Sorcery Retrospective, Part 2: 1982-83ish
More tales of black-clad pricks and their endless crusade against thatched huts, and the protein-shake-swilling men who oppose them.
~ 1982 ~
If the first two years of the 80’s were when S&S found its legs, ‘82 was when it found its entire body, in no small part thanks to the, uh, body of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred in the single best and most influential picture of the entire subgenre -- the one that most of the rest were modeled on.
CONAN THE BARBARIAN
Dir. John Milius
Third and best of the Three Best is this, which is also probably my single favorite movie in general. I’ve written about it before, but a bit more is worth saying here.
First of all, the original pulp literature featuring Conan, by Robert E. Howard, was somewhat different; the character was more of a YOLO type hedonist whose myriad adventures occur simply because he felt like wandering around and doing adventure-stuff. There also tended to be more of an emphasis on the supernatural, with some of the tales overlapping a bit with the horror stories that H.P. Lovecraft was writing at about the same time. But, when Hollywood finally got around to adapting the character to the big screen, John Milius (working from a script by Oliver Stone, though Milius changed it substantially) went for more of a revenge-opera and ended up with some sort of cross between the Nibelungenlied and any given Sam Peckinpah film, in which Conan becomes a living metaphor for the individual human will. Combined with high production values and one of THE BEST musical scores in cinematic history, the result was a motion picture unlike any other, and which, though oft-imitated (as the rest of this essay will demonstrate), has never quite been equaled. Now let me tell you of the days of high adventure and so forth.
Click to view(This isn't how swords are made, but at least it looks awesome.)
The vaguely proto-Celtic Cimmerians live a relatively peaceful existence in the snowy mountains, where a blacksmith (biker-movie veteran William Smith, who has the word “smith” in his name) explains to his young son, CONAN, the “Riddle of Steel.” This is important to the film’s symbolism and stuff. Following the establishing scenes, we quickly get into the first example of that most iconic sequence, the part in which MIBAs ride in to burn down a scrubby little village and kill/rape/enslave everyone in it, thus providing us with a plot. As the narrator (the great Mako) redundantly points out, “his was a tale of sorrow.” The MIBAs are led by a mixed-race-looking fat guy (James Earl Jones) whose unsettling visage remains burned in Conan’s mind even after he is sold into slavery and spends fifteen years pushing a giant wheel (to grind grain, I think) which causes him to become Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then he spends a few more years as a gladiatorial pit-fighter, during which he is taught literacy, proper swordsmanship, and the pleasures of being “bred to the finest stock” of human females by his vaguely Yuan-Dynasty-like sponsors.
Eventually, his owner gets drunk and frees him for some reason, at which point he runs around and teams up with a couple of roguish thieves, Subotai (Gerry Lopez) and Valeria (Sandahl Bergman), who become his best friend and lover (respectively). He gets a really cool sword from an ancient Atlantean crypt, bangs a creepy/hot witch who reveals some prophecy stuff, punches a camel in the face while tripping on “black lotus,” etc., and he and Subotai male-bond by insulting one another’s religion. Conan also bangs Valeria, obviously, after they rob a Tower of the Serpent which just so happens to be run by the same fucking assholes who MIBA-slaughtered the Cimmerian peasant village at the beginning. Thus the local king (Max von Sydow!) hires the trio of scalawags to rescue his stupid daughter from the clutches of cult leader Thulsa Doom, who of course is the weird-looking overweight guy I mentioned above. We are treated briefly to some hijinks showing how weird the snake-cult is before, eventually, getting to the BLOODBATH of KILLING that is the third act, in which Conan, Valeria, and Subotai put on CORPSE-PAINT and perpetrate what is practically a MASS SHOOTING (only with swords). Then even more violence happens during which amounts of blood flow that are about at the maximum of what is allowed in Western cinema. (For larger amounts of blood than this, you must go to Japanese cinema, or possibly to Monty Python. The climax of The Wild Bunch is at about the same level, I’d say.)
Conan the Barbarian is a bit over two hours long and the lengthy middle act is kinda slow-paced, but it’s still a flick that contains plenty of crowd-pleasing material for those who aren’t interested in the more highbrow philosophical elements. As such, it was a box-office hit despite opening with a Nietzsche quote. Its genius is largely thanks to director Milius, who imposed a kind of unifying vision on everything and strategically worked around such minor stumbling blocks as the fact that his three main characters were all played by professional athletes who could barely act. Thus, instead of long, complex exchanges of dialogue, we get… short, simple exchanges of dialogue, with the epic, beautiful, awe-inspiring score (by Basil Poledouris) more than picking up the slack. Again, this is basically an opera. It’s also the single film I’m most likely to mention if someone asks me what my “favorite movie” is, though there is some competition on that front. Anyway, because it made money, lots of other people (especially Italians) kept trying to emulate it. The results could still be entertaining in their own right, but it seems safe to say that Milius and Schwarzenegger shall never be dethroned. (Especially not by the 2011 reboot, but let’s not get into that.)
THE BEASTMASTER
Dir. Don Coscarelli
Basically a Conan ripoff (expect to hear this a lot from now on) yet a damn entertaining cult classic in its own right is this, a film which played on American TV so often for a long time that people joked that TBS stood for “The Beastmaster Station” and HBO for “Hey, Beastmaster’s On.” So it’s one of those B-movies that lots of people have seen. Made on a low budget but not quite as low as some of the Corman flicks or Italian romps to follow, The Beastmaster has a nice pulpy, campy feel, but without being completely, laughably inept, either.
The plot concerns the evil priest Maax (pronounced “may-ax” and played by the great Rip Torn), who is banished by the king for being a douche, so he has his deformed witch minion magically remove the queen’s unborn son from her womb, killing the woman in the process, and transferring the baby into a COW. After this COW gives birth to a human boy, the witch prepares to kill it, but some random middle-aged farmer kills her first and adopts the child, whom he names Dar. Due to having two mothers, only one of which is human, Dar has the mysticall power to communicate telepathically with animals.
He also grows up to be played by Marc Singer, an old-school California beach-bum type guy who is either the best or the worst possible choice to wear a loincloth and wield a giant scimitar; I haven’t decided yet. Anyway, Maax now rules the kingdom, performs child sacrifices all the time, and is in league with the Juns, an evil army of barbarians in black armor (BIBA), who do the usual rape-pillage-burn routine on Dar’s village mere minutes after he grows up to be Marc Singer. Thus he sets out for revenge, et al.
Along the way he collects his animal henchmen, including a panther (who helps him kill people), a hawk (who scouts for him while he telepathically sees through its eyes), and two ferrets (who steal Tanya Roberts’ clothes while she bathes in a pond, for which there is much rejoicing). After also collecting Ms. Roberts herself, and then a large black guy and a small white kid, The Adventuring Party storms Maax’s evil pyramid of evil to confront his Hare-Krishna and BDSM-slave-like minions, before finally duking it out with the Jun Horde. (At one point, a guy who is on fire is jump-kicked into a moat filled with oil. Ideally, this should happen in every movie.)
Though not really a “good” film, this is at least lots of fun, which is impressive since at a full 2 hours it’s much longer than most Conan ripoffs, which sometimes have difficulty filling a measly 80 minutes with interesting stuff. So, it’s worth checking out.
SORCERESS
Dir. Jack Hill
The first of several crappy Conan ripoffs produced by Roger Corman, who must have had inside sources since this actually came out a bit before Conan did. Though it makes The Beastmaster look like an A-movie, it is reasonably entertaining if you’re into this kind of shit.
The plot is basically the same as the above, except minus the animal stuff and with twin sisters (Playboy models Leigh & Lynette Harris) instead of Marc Singer. Also, while Beastmaster’s setting has a vaguely Mesoamerican feel to it, Sorceress’s seems to be based on ancient India -- the bad guy’s MIBAs are referred to as “shatriyas” (presumably they figured that no one could pronounce “kshatriya,” so they just left off the “k”) and there are some references to Agni and one or two other Hindu gods, so that’s kind of cool. (There’s also an anatomically-correct satyr who first appears while watching the twins bathe, though, so that puts us back in Greece, maybe?)
All in all this is pretty inept stuff, but I like it anyway since the twins are pleasing to look upon, and there are some left-field but sort of cool scenes like the part where the male deuteragonist is almost executed by being greased up and forced to clutch a giant pole hovering above a spike (i.e. the idea being that he would slide down and rectally impale himself), and the bizarre bit at the end when the twins summon the Good Deity of Good (a blue winged lion thingy that breathes lightning) to do magical battle in the sky with the Evil Deity of Evil summoned by the villain (which looks like a really scary deformed woman’s face and shoots green lasers at people).
THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER
Dir. Albert Pyun
Despite its title being a nice statement of intent, I don’t like this movie all that much even though it’s moderately well-made and engaging, probably because it just seems like a cash-in by people who didn’t really understand or appreciate the genre. It has some cool stuff (such as the spooky opening scene) but mostly it’s just a bunch of Robin-Hood-esque urban heroics (granted, there aren’t very many S&S flicks that take place almost entirely within a city). And its main “gimmick” is the fact that the hero has a sword with three blades (parallel, not perpendicular) and he can press a couple buttons to shoot the two on the side like arrows, which is a bit silly even by fantasy standards.
The evil Titus Cromwell (Richard Lynch, who played bad guys in lots of 80’s B-movies due to the fact that he had platinum blond hair AND real burn-scars on his face) tries to raise the titular sorcerer Zusia Black but then changes his mind right away, so the titular sorcerer doesn’t show up again until the very end as a post-final boss. Then Cromwell tries to take over the city or something via conventional means and I think the generically cocky hero, Talon (Lee Horsley) is supposed to secretly be the son of the legitimate ruler but I can’t really recall, blah blah blah. Lots of people somersault over balconies and swing on chandeliers and that sort of thing, and at one point a MIBA gets his face graphically chopped in half. None of it is exactly boring but mostly it’s just kind of a generic “swashbuckling adventure” film with a couple fantasy elements thrown in so that they could make money off of the same people who went to Conan and Excalibur previously, which they did (though not enough to make a sequel).
SWORD OF THE BARBARIANS (a.k.a. SANGRAAL)
Dir. Michele Massimo Tarantini
One of the earlier of the shitty Italian Conan ripoffs and a moderately decent one in some regards, I guess, though it’s neither “good” nor as batshit-crazy as some of the “bad” ones. But it has a few things going for it, such as actual gore shots when people get hacked to death (many of the Italian flicks could not afford blood) and not one, but two topless female deities.
Sangraal (Pietro Torrisi) has become the leader of some random people after their shitty peasant village was burned down by assholes who have nothing to do with the rest of the plot. They trek across the wilds seeking a new home, save some other people from vicious pricks trying to kidnap them as human sacrifices, and end up combining their tribe with the one they just helped. Sadly, the hammy warlord of the human-sacrificers hears that Sangraal interfered with his business, at which point his evil, topless fire-goddess demands retribution. Thus MIBAs ride forth and massacre the shitty peasant village for the second time in about 20 minutes. (Also, the wicked goddess personally shows up mid-battle to murder Sangraal’s wife. What a cunt.)
Our hero must therefore gather the single, attractive, female survivor as well as a badass but politically-incorrect Asian sidekick who appears out of nowhere, and then seek counter-retribution. This involves braving a “sandstorm” in an Italian gravel pit as well as confronting the other topless goddess (Sabrina Siani, who will be showing up again, trust me) so he can acquire the magical weapon of ultimate justice, which is a mundane crossbow so large it almost looks like a wooden cross of the sort the Romans used to execute that one guy back in A.D. 33. Everything is very low-rent and fairly amateurish, but at least this film isn’t totally lifeless and boring as a few are. And, like I said, there are a couple parts where we see spilling intestines after someone gets gut-slashed. So that’s always good.
~ 1983 ~
The single most prolific year for S&S films, since by now Italy had really gotten in on the fun, and no one in the 70’s and 80’s mass-produced low-budget ripoffs with the same gusto as the Italians. The Japanese lent a hand, too. Sadly, the Germans didn’t show up for a full reunion. (We’ll start with the “good” movies and then move on to the “Italian” ones.)
FIRE AND ICE
Dir. Ralph Bakshi and Tom Tataranowicz
Actually one of the better films of its type despite being a cartoon, probably because it was helmed by Bakshi, who previously gave us Wizards (1977) and The First Half of The Lord of the Rings (1978), both of which you should watch even though they’re in the wrong decade to be discussed here. I also have a soft spot for animation to the point that, as I write this, I’m considering if I should prowl around for some 80’s fantasy anime that I might be able to squeeze in. We’ll see.
In a world modeled on the artwork of Frank Frazetta (who was involved with the production), which is basically the Neolithic Age but with steel weapons, the fiendish sorceress Juliana and her son, Nekron the Ice Lord (after whom the frontman of Menstrual Cunnilingus may or may not have been named) are attempting to violently conquer the world with their giant moving glacier-fortress and their army of ape-men, who are actually referred to as “Subhumans” despite the fact that a Jewish guy made this movie. Thus a mostly-naked dude named Larn and even-more-mostly-naked chick named Teegra must fight back by running through a lot of jungles and letting the local monsters eat the ape-men for them, though they also kill some themselves, especially after a really cool guy with a large axe named DARKWOLF gets involved.
Though it lacks the sheer weirdness/coolness of Bakshi’s earlier fantasy work, Fire and Ice is still recommended for lots of nice art and animation and a general creativity that makes it look and feel different from most other examples of the genre. (Also, being animated allows for more fantastical elements than would have been the case in live-action, since this was before the days when live-action films were half-animated themselves.)
KRULL
Dir. Peter Yates
A very strange film that technically overlaps with science fiction but mostly feels like classic High Fantasy, Krull seems to be one of the more divisive S&S flicks; it’s certainly flawed, but it has a lot going for it, so let’s not be too harsh in our judgments here. (It’s actually kinda similar to Hawk the Slayer, only with a much larger budget and some scary aliens instead of Jack Palance.)
On the planet Krull, which conveniently resembles an idealized Middle Ages in Europe on the planet Earth (though without any real commercial infrastructure, because they didn’t have the budget for that despite still having a lot more money than the Hawk people), a prince and princess are about to be wed in a glorious union that will be good for everyone, I guess. Then an extraterrestrial overlord known only as The Beast descends from the sky in his floating castle and his MIBAs (actually fellow aliens, and known coolly as “slayers”) attack the castle, kill everyone, and kidnap the princess, obviously. Prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall) survives and convenes an Adventuring Party of miscellaneous interesting characters to claim a magical throwing-star-type thing (erroneously called a “glaive,” which actually means something like a naginata or fauchard) and rescue his bride-to-be. Meanwhile, Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony) engages in an ongoing psychological battle with her captor, who of course is never fully seen until the end.
This is one of those movies where the whole is less than the sum of the parts; it doesn’t always make sense or come together into a “great film,” but holy crap does it ever have some nice set-pieces. The initial attack on the Good-Guy Castle is awesome. The climactic counterattack on the Bad-Guy Castle (which is one of the weirdest, eeriest sets of the decade) is awesome. The stuff in between, like the cave where the Glaive is, and the desolate swamp, and the emerald thingy, is awesome. Not to mention the haunted cave where the obligatory old wizard guy’s long-lost love is forced to sit in a hanging compartment over a pit which is only accessible via a few strands of mysteriously oversized cobweb, and guarded by… I dunno, see if you can figure it out.
Therefore I’m not sure why the film as a whole is merely “above average”; probably because it was made as a series of cool set-pieces rather than with a “whole” in mind. Still, at least they’re good set-pieces. The subplot with the cyclops is kind of poignant, as well. (Also, Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane have small roles.) Check it out and see for yourself.
LEGEND OF [THE] EIGHT SAMURAI
Dir. Kinji Fukasaku
Technically there could be more East Asian films on this list, but I’m focusing on this one because it comes closest to the Western sword & sorcery model (and seems to have been made with Star Wars and Conan in mind), though without losing its Japanese-ness, especially since it’s based on a novel which in turn is based on an old Japanese legend. Also, I like it. When recommending it to people, I usually describe it as “the Japanese Willow” (see below), though it predates that film by five years.
A hundred years ago or something, the evil Hikita Clan were overthrown and destroyed by another clan whose name I forget via some convoluted plot stuff involving a curse and a prophecy, the details of which I also forget. Sorry! Anyway, the Hikita have literally returned from the dead for vengeance and to be assholes in general. Under the direction of Tamazusa (pop singer Mari Natsuki), who is extremely hot but also terrifying and unpleasant, and her drag-queen-like son Motofuji (Yuki Meguro) these pricks then proceed to massacre the entire Other Clan but as usual the most important person they were trying to kill gets away. In this case, Princess Shizu (Hiroko Yakushimaru). Fortunately, she has the power to perceive the glowing magical stones embedded in the hands of the Eight Samurai who represent the Confucian Virtues and are destined to help her defeat the bad guys. Among the eight we have Hiroyuki Sanada and Sonny Chiba, who are both known for kicking tons of ass, so ultimately Tamazusa and her undead MIBAs are fucked.
Though over 2 hours, this film adapts a very long novel (Japanese literature in general tends to be in Wheel of Time territory) and has to therefore compress a lot of stuff into a small space, so there’s a lot going on and some of the subplots don’t really get much development, but at least most of the narrative makes sense. Also while there is a generally big, epic feel to the whole production, some of the special effects are noticeably dodgy (particularly the giant worm-thing), but kind of cool anyway, and the corny, melodramatic presentation of… everything… is appropriate to the material. (Especially the snake-chick and her anguished desire to find love with her Evil Counterpart among the Hikita; the two may or may not end up killing each other before they can resolve this little conundrum.) Also some nice costumes, good fight choreography, and the Bad-Guy Castle is really cool.
TO BE CONTINUED