The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984)

The Warrior and the Sorceress is a 1984 sword & sorcery flick and with Roger Corman as executive producer you more or less know what to expect. It’s generally regarded as a rip-off of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. I generally find these low-budget rip-offs to be a lot of fun.

It takes place on an Earth-like planet inhabited mostly by humans.

A Mysterious Stranger (played by David Carradine) rides into town, only he doesn’t ride. He walks. There don’t seem to be any horses on this planet. In fact there don’t seem to be any animals at all. Wagons are pulled by slaves. The Mysterious Stranger is named Kain (an obvious nod to Carradine’s famous 1970s TV series Kung Fu) but he is also referred to as the Dark One.

He’s a Holy Warrior but his religious order has collapsed and now he’s cynical and disillusioned. Now he fights for money.

The town is the scene of a struggle for power between two rival warlords, the sinister Zeg and the fat debauched Bal Caz. They’re the first two major bad guys to be introduced.

Much of the struggle concerns the town’s only well which is apparently the only water source for miles around.

Kain spends most of the movie playing the two rival warlords off against each other. He changes sides countless time and always seems to end up with a large bag of gold as a result.

When he arrives in town he meets a Wise Old Man known as the Prelate. The Prelate still believes in the Holy Warrior concept and seems to think that Kain will come around to his way of thinking.

Kain also encounters the sorceress of the story, Naja (María Socas). Zeg is holding her captive. He wants her to make him a magical sword. She doesn’t want to do this but Zeg is confident he can persuade her. His methods of persuasion are crude but they’re usually effective.

There’s a third major bad guy, Burgo the Slaver (Armando Capo). Burgo and his fellow slavers are some kind of reptile-men. The three chief villains are all quite happy to try to cut each other’s throats. Kain is happy to work for the bad guys, and to betray them.

We don’t really know at first what Kain’s agenda is. He seems to be as violet and immoral as any of the bad guys, although he does seem interested in the beautiful young sorceress.

There’s a great deal of action and the action scenes are handed quite well. Despite the countless killings I don’t recall seeing a single drop of blood in this movie. It’s entirely gore-free. The movie’s R rating obviously had nothing to do with violence. It was probably large due to the scene in which Zeg has a naked slave girl hurled into a kind of giant fish tank. The scene includes some fairly explicit frontal nudity.

Of course the R rating might have had something to do with the fact that María Socas is topless for the entire movie.

The acting is generally quite passable.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about David Carradine as an actor but he’s not too bad here. He gets across Kain’s moral ambiguity and cynicism and Kain is supposed to be a slightly mysterious guy so for me Carradine’s performance works.

Luke Askew as Zeg and Guillermo Marín as Bal Caz make fine villains. Anthony De Longis is good as Zeg’s chief henchman, a worthy opponent for Kain in a swordfight. María Socas is a fairly convincing sorceress.

It’s a Roger Corman production so it’s obviously made on a very low budget but that’s not a major problem. The monster effects are a bit cheesy, but a movie like this benefits from a bit of cheesiness.

The plot is quite serviceable and it more or less makes sense.

John C. Broderick proves to be a competent enough director.

This movie is included in Shout! Factory’s four-movie Roger Corman sword and sorcery set and the anamorphic transfer is fine.

The Warrior and the Sorceress isn’t as much fun as Deathstalker II (1987) or Barbarian Queen (1985) but it’s still rather enjoyable. Recommended.