80's Sword & Sorcery Retrospective, Part 5: 1987-89 + Conclusion
Ending with one of the almost-best, and THE WORST (in a good way, trust me), of a dynamically inconsistent genre.
~ 1987 ~
By now, the S&S cycle was winding down, and there were no true classics this year, though if you’re a fan of this stuff, there were still a couple things of moderate interest.
THE BARBARIANS
Dir. Ruggero Deodato
A straightforwardly-titled Cannon film directed by the guy who made Cannibal Holocaust and starring a pair of twin bodybuilders as a pair of twin barbarian guys. This sounds stupid and terrible, and it kinda is, but here we have a film that is, on the whole, surprisingly decent and entertaining.
In a stereotypical fantasy kingdom, there are some magical circus gypsies or something who are given free passage by everyone except the fiendish warlord Kadar (Richard Lynch, previously the Big Bad in The Sword and the Sorcerer, though here he gets to ham it up more and has a more outlandish hairstyle), who instead decides to attack them to take their stuff. The opening battle/chase scene in which this occurs is much, much better than the action sequences in most low-budget barbarian flicks. Well done, Mr. Deodato. Anyway of course the bad guys win at first and kidnap the gypsy queen, though in exchange for being Kadar’s sex slave she makes him promise not to kill two boys she adopted. He agrees and instead comes up with an ingenious plan to make them kill each other, though it takes 15 years or so to come to fruition. Truly, Kadar is a man with follow-through. Of course the plan backfires and soon the twin musclemen are romping around with a short-skirted chick (the spunky Eva LaRue) through haunted swamps trying to locate McGuffin weaponry and fighting MIBAs who wear the black armor left over from Red Sonja. (Kadar’s minions also include Michael Berryman of The Hills Have Eyes infamy, btw.)
The brothers are played by IRL twins Peter and David Paul, and they mostly act like a couple of buffoonish, snorting manchildren, which… isn’t my favorite aspect of the film, but most of the other stuff is good enough to forgive it. The villains are more memorable than usual and there are some pretty good sets and fights and stuff, plus a couple parts that are actually sort of funny, etc. So, this one really isn’t too shabby. It’s a “B+ Movie” rather than strictly B.
GOR
Dir. Fritz Kiersch
Based loosely on the weird BDSM “science fantasy” series of books and again produced by good old Cannon, this is… mediocre, but it has its merits. Also I think it’s technically supposed to be science fiction but the ring that transports the protagonist to the world of Gor SEEMS magical and everything else seems very Dark-Ages-in-the-desert otherwise so close enough. (Of course, the general lack of vegetation also recalls plenty of sci-fi films from throughout the decade, but let’s not talk about that.)
Professor Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) is left a ring by his father. Following some dull and silly soap-opera stuff in the Regular World, which I mostly skipped through, the ring randomly sends him to GOR, a wasteland planet that resembles a low fantasy setting. Much of the land is in the process of being violently conquered by the evil priest-king Sarm (Oliver Reed!) who wears a large and villainous-looking headdress-thingy and is trying to acquire some McGuffin stones housed in various towns for reasons I can’t specifically recall but which probably have something to do with taking over the world. Cabot flees the tyrant’s MIBAs and ends up joining the anti-Sarm rebels, who are the good guys, since they wear brown instead of black. In the books, apparently, Gor’s entire society is based around fetishistic female sex slavery, but there are only a few nods to that in the film, such as when the non-slave warrior chick on the side of Good (Rebecca Ferratti) has a kinky pit-fight against a blonde slave chick in the employ of some local goons at a shitty town they must stop at while trekking across the desert. And then again towards the end Cabot gets captured and is briefly given a tour of the harem by Sarm, who also pontificates a bit about the pleasures of inflicting pain on the people he owns. (He spends basically the whole film ordering people to be tortured with a kind of preening hiss, which makes this more of a “Cold Ham” villain performance than, say, the Hot Ham & Cheese typically found in the genre.)
While there isn’t much here to distinguish this flick from any other 80’s Cannon romp, really, it’s an okay thing to put on a screen while drinking alcohol, even if it could have used more sex and nudity. (Oh, also, Jack Palance, whom you may remember from such films as Hawk the Slayer, shows up for a few minutes at the end.)
~ 1988 ~
By now, fantasy was pretty much dead in the water, so one of the guys who helped start the whole craze attempted to to revive it and gave 80’s S&S one last big hurrah. But before that, let’s have another Deathstalker.
DEATHSTALKER III
Dir. Alfonso Corona
I know I skipped Deathstalker II but I haven’t seen everything and there are only so many hours in the day. This one is pretty shite but still good for a laugh or two and most of it is fairly watchable, etc, except for the parts where the balding, middle-aged male villain wears a tunic comparable to the nonexistent skirt of Doris in Vampire Hunter D, above. He also spends one entire scene running around technically naked but with a pink bedsheet held around his waist. And then in another scene, he is wrapped in a giant furry cape and wearing a lacy veil. I’m not making this up.
Deathstalker is now played by the somewhat less imposing but more charming John Allen Nelson, and we open with him at a Renaissance Festival trying to get chicks (so he hasn’t changed much, really) while some incognito princess and an old wizard guy discuss a McGuffin jewel-thing, et al. Then of course some MIBAs (led by a guy with BAT WINGS on his helmet) ride in to begin randomly massacring the shitty peasant Ren Faire, presumably in search of the McGuffin. (I saw this in English years ago, but when I rewatched it recently it was a Spanish dub, and my Spanish is pretty rusty.) This leads Deathstalker into the usual damsel-rescuing quest vs. the sorcerer/prince Troxartas (Thom Christopher), the aforementioned borderline transvestite, who has the ability to raise the dead as surprisingly affable and well-spoken zombie soldiers who never do anything evil or scary and turn against Troxartas shortly after he resuscitates them.
Click to view3:43 -- what the FUCK is he DOING?
We then get some sneaking-around-the-castle hijinks, chintzy torture chambers, a peasant rebellion that is not foreshadowed in any way, and all the stuff you’d expect, culminating in a swordfight in which both participants over and over again have the opportunity to kill each other but they instead continue to slowly shift positions and then prance gaily about, occasionally locking themselves into vaguely erotic/romantic positions, before flynning at each other’s blades again. There is a tragic sacrifice followed by a mostly-happy ending. I find this movie moderately enjoyable (largely thanks to Mr. Christopher’s bizarre antics and outfits) even though it sucks, and while it does have some nice breasts, it is sadly lacking in gore.
WILLOW
Dir. Ron Howard
Though not one of the Three Best, Willow is well-loved by most people who’ve seen it and was pretty much the closest thing we had to a live-action Lord of the Rings until, you know, the actual live-action Lord of the Rings, which gave it a certain amount of appeal during the 13-year interval in question. And it brought together almost all the tropes we’ve been discussing till now under one roof, essentially being the culmination of the cycle (courtesy of George Lucas, a noted harvester of preexisting tropes). And, incidentally, it was the first movie I ever saw in theaters, at the age of four.
ONCE AGAIN -- see if any of this sounds familiar -- we have an Evil Queen, the scarily-named Bavmorda (Jean Marsh, doing good work with a rather one-dimensional role) who is prophesied to be overthrown by a special child and who therefore sends her MIBAs out to massacre shitty peasant villages but of course the child gets away and is adopted by country folk -- though in this case, only adopted briefly, because the baby does not grow up to be the protagonist. Instead, her adopter, the titular Willow (Warwick Davis) is our hero. He is a Nelwyn, basically a Hobbit, and like all his people, is played by an actual little person. (Some might complain about this being politically incorrect or something, but at the time, Davis and the other little-person actors seem to have just been happy to be in the spotlight of a major film, kinda like the East Asian actors in Big Trouble in Little China.) Along the way he encounters an arbitrary female spirit like the one from Red Sonja (who gives him a magic wand) and teams up with a wandering swordsman like the one from most every other movie on this list, named Madmartigan (Val Kilmer) and gains a mentor, the sorceress Fin Raziel, who spends most of the film in various animal forms. But Patricia Hayes (as her voice, and, eventually, her human form) pretty much steals the show anyway. She’s frickin’ great in this as the ultimate Cool Old Lady, and her magical duel with Bavmorda at the end is probably the best part (and IMO the best Wizard Duel ever put to film, even if not as heavy on pyrotechnics as some others).
There is also an unconvincing and unnecessary subplot about Bavmorda’s daughter / right-hand woman Sorsha (Joanne Whaley) falling in love with Madmartigan because a couple of miniature pixies accidentally made him spout gushy poetry at her, and then in another scene she seems sexually aroused by his ability to kill her co-workers. So, after kissing him once she immediately betrays her own mother. Then again, I could sort of see a woman doing something like that, though to make it more realistic, Madmartigan would have to be a drug dealer. Instead he’s just a guy who dresses in drag to get away with adultery (and is good with a sword).
Anyway, Willow and the baby and the rest of The Party walk around New Zealand a lot (like I said, this was the “proto-LOTR”) and see cool scenery and get into high-speed carriage chases and slay MIBAs (and a two-headed dragon, which is actually done quite well) before ultimately assaulting Bavmorda’s scary fortress of Nockmaar along with an army of good guys who’d been tagging along on the periphery of the film for awhile. (These guys wear brown-and-gold armor, signifying their goodness. Interestingly, Bavmorda’s troops all have completely different outfits from one another, aside from the the Nockmaar dress code specifying that everything must, MUST be black.) Then, in a scene that traumatized me as a child, Bavmorda turns the entire Good Army into pigs. (That doesn’t sound traumatic, but it’s portrayed really creepily and disturbingly in the film, trust me. Oh and a bit earlier there’s a shockingly gruesome bit involving a troll getting its skin ripped off.) But Willow and Raziel have one or two tricks left up their sleeve.
Willow suffers SLIGHTLY from blatant Hollywood Blockbuster syndrome (the script includes lots of obligatory “stuff that the people want to see” along with things intended for merchandising, and there are many stunt-heavy scenes that are more “generic action-adventure” than fantasy), but all things considered it’s pretty damn good, really. (The rousing musical score by James Horner is also rather praiseworthy.) As such it served as an example that Hollywood was capable of doing epic fantasy / S&S well when they put their minds (and pocketbooks) to it, and it was easily the last really good such film until the next time small people and large people banded together to walk around New Zealand and oppose those who wear black outfits.
~ 1989 (SUPER-SECRET BONUS YEAR) ~
I could have -- should have -- left this last film off. It would have been the morally and ethically right thing to do, ending with Willow. But no… no. There is one more film that we will discuss. Sorry.
THE LORDS OF MAGICK
Dir. David Marsh
Well, this is it. The absolute worst movie of them all. I used to rent it from the video store as a kid quite frequently, then I forgot about it for a quarter-century or so until, in the run-up to writing this retrospective, I stumbled onto it and was all like, “Holy shit, it’s that piece of crap! I remember that… thing.” What’s most important to know about The Lords of Magick is that it’s an attempt at an epic high-fantasy film (albeit much of it takes place in contemporary Los Angeles via some magical time-portal nonsense) made as a tiny-budgeted indie film (the Internet suspects that writer-director Marsh owned an electronics store as his day job, since the climax is shot in an electronics store named after someone named “Marsh”) and SHOT ON VIDEO.
The plot concerns two brothers, Michael (Jarrett Parker) and Ulric (Mark Gauthier) in 11th Century England who are sorcerers of the mostly-good variety but, facing persecution as warlocks, only have their asses saved because there is another wizard called Salatin (Brendan Dillon Jr.) who is actually, legitimately evil and just kidnapped the Princess and fled. So they’re sent after Salatin to reclaim both the damsel and their own reputations. Of course they soon end up in L.A. where they wander around wearing swords openly at their sides while gawking at the apartment complexes and saying dumb shit like “Look at all these castles! Are all these people kings?” Oh, also, the princess can only be identified by a birthmark on her chest, so our heroes try to find her by grabbing random women and lifting up their shirts. Deathstalker would approve. They befriend a nerdy local guy, pick up hookers, and eventually confront Salatin for a duel of magic in the aforementioned back room of an electronics store that may or may not be owned by the director, etc.
Words cannot adequately convey how terrible this flick is, but it’s not boring. You have to give it that. My mom apparently was deeply concerned about all the sexual references (it’s a PG-13 film, but still fairly raunchy) but that stuff went over my head as a child anyway and I was just interested in the LASER-THROWING. Also we must commend Brendan Dillon Jr. as the fiendish Salatin. This guy was never in any other movies in his entire life, and yet he managed to turn in a performance that was both similar to, and of nearly identical quality as, that given by Jack Palance (who has apparently been in several other films) as Voltan in Hawk.
This is real. This is actually happening. You're really seeing this.
In a way, this is really the best place to end our retrospective, after all, since The Lords of Magick was truly the bridge to the 90’s insofar as it predated both Time Barbarians and Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time, both of which came out in 1991 and which also involved sword-and-sorcery guys stumbling around present-day L.A. and getting in trouble. This in turn sorta mirrors how Hawk was the logical extension of the proto-S&S influences of the late 70’s, as exemplified by Bakshi’s films and the surprise success of Star Wars. Thus, the circle is complete.
LESSONS WE CAN LEARN FROM 80’s S&S:
> Anyone who wears brown is good, or at least tolerable. Anyone who wears black is evil and exists solely to rape and murder peasants and burn down their shitty thatched huts.
> Slave labor and/or a starvation-level existence as a wandering swordsman will produce well-defined beefy musculature that secretes its own glistening oil (which also naturally dissolves body hair).
> People living in the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages had steel swords, but made everything else out of wood, leather, bone, etc.
> If a group of men in black armor is dispatched to kill one specific person, they will kill everyone in the area except that individual.
> Prophecies are always true and right, no matter how obscure or nonsensical.
> Most barbaric fantasy kingdoms look like national-park type areas in Italy, Spain, Mexico, or Argentina.
> The more ridiculous and elaborate someone’s headwear is, the less trustworthy they are.
> Spears and bows are generally not employed in medieval combat. Everyone just fights at very close range with swords, or occasionally axes. A single sword-slash to the torso is also sufficient to kill a man wearing leather or even metal body armor.
> If a warrior chick and a princess are present at the same time, the warrior chick is doomed to perish (unless she is also the main character).
> Dragons are very bad, and people who worship snakes are also just terrible.
> Again, MIBAs. If they show up, leave.
IF YOU CAN ONLY WATCH SEVEN OF THESE FILMS,
WATCH THESE, IN THIS APPROXIMATE ORDER OF PRIORITY:
1. Conan the Barbarian
2. Excalibur
3. Dragonslayer
4. Legend
5. Hawk the Slayer
6. Willow
7. DEATHSTALKER
* * *
After The Fellowship of the Ring came out in 2002, everything changed. S&S was suddenly popular with normal people (granted, by then lots more people also played video games). And Jackson’s trilogy is still probably the best cinematic example of the genre, despite its relatively minor flaws. AND YET, something was lost. A certain grittiness, a “cult” quality, a mixture of edginess and camp that could only have been spawned in the 80’s, when heroes went around mostly naked and killed people (albeit people in evil black armor who usually work for despotic sorcerers who perform human sacrifice) because effects-budget constraints made it hard to create convincing armies of conveniently non-human creatures. Personal revenge came to be supplanted by abstract and altruistic ideals. Female frontal nudity became less common. Speechifying about issues of moral complexity became widespread even when the bad guys were now just a bunch of fucking monsters. Instead of Italians trying to make money by pandering to the American market, the American market tried to make money by pandering to Chinese government censors. It just isn’t the same anymore.
But, thanks to the very technology that supplanted the olde-tyme video store, almost all of these movies have been preserved in digital format, where they shall live forever (even though many of them kind of sucked). And, especially in the case of the best ones (and Deathstalker), that represents a true victory for culture and civilization over barbarism.
THE END