Gor (1987)

Gor is a 1987 American science fiction/fantasy adventure film from the Cannon Group. It was shot in South Africa. It is based on Tarnsman of Gor, the first of John Norman’s rather controversial Gor novels. Harry Alan Towers co-produced and co-wrote the script.

The initial setup follows the novel reasonably closely. It begins in the present day. Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) is an American college professor who is obsessed by a rather wild theory. He believes that a Counter-Earth exists. It’s a planet within our solar system but due to the particular nature of its orbit it has remained undiscovered. It is a very Earth-like planet and its inhabitants are human (in the novel it is explained that the people of Gor came originally from Earth). Tarl has a ring given to him by his father. He believes it is the secret to reaching Gor. And indeed Tarl does find himself on Gor.

It is a planet at roughly the cultural level of the Bronze Age. There is no modern technology. Warriors use swords and bows. There are countless tiny city-states. And there’s a megalomaniac who wants to absorb all the city-states and create an empire. This villain is Sarm (Oliver Reed).

Tarl joins up with a small group of rebels. One of his motivations is the fact that one of the rebels is a very attractive young woman warrior, Talena (Rebecca Ferratti). Sarm has sacked their city and stolen their home-stone (which has immense religious significance to them). Tarl has to learn how to become a warrior. The ultimate objective is to reach a forbidden mountain range where Sarm has his stronghold, destroy Sarm, retrieve the home-stone and free the city-states that he had conquered.

This small band has lots of misadventures along the way. There’s plenty of action, including a girl-fight between Talena and a slave-girl. It all builds to a reasonably OK action finale.

Not surprisingly Oliver Reed is by far the best thing in this movie. Oliver Reed as a sinister, cruel, power-crazed, sexually depraved super-villain - what’s not to love?

Urbano Barberini is an adequate but rather colourless hero. Rebecca Ferratti is OK and she certainly looks great in skimpy warrior-woman outfits.

Don’t get too excited about Jack Palance’s name in the credits. He gets about two minutes of screen time. His brief appearance is a teaser for the second movie (Gor 2: Outlaw of Gor) in which he plays a major role.

The first problem with this movie is that the low budget made it impossible to include one of the coolest features of the novel, the tarns. These are gigantic birds of prey which warriors ride into battle. Dropping them from the story was a wise idea - in 1987 you would have needed a fairly substantial budget to do them convincingly.

With his Gor novels John Norman was certainly trying to write popular entertaining adventure tales but he was trying to do a whole lot more than that. Norman is a philosopher by profession. He used the Gor novels to engage in all kinds of philosophical, political, social and cultural speculations. This meant that the world-building was a lot more important than the action-adventure plots. Norman created a fictional human society radically different from our own in all sorts of ways. The society of Gor is alien, shocking and totally fascinating. None of that makes it into the movie. The movie is a stock-standard barbarian warrior adventure tale.

A major problem is that this movie is ludicrously tame. There’s one mildly shocking scene (a slave-girl being branded) but overall the violence is very subdued. There’s zero sex. There’s zero nudity. There’s zero sexiness. Even the cat-fight between Talena and the slave-girl is very very tame. This is a movie based on a novel with BDSM overtones set in a society in which female slavery is a central component of that society and it’s clear that the producers were terrified of such subject matter and decided to ignore it.

In fact they ignored every single element that makes the novels fascinating and provocative. This movie has absolutely zero connection to the novels.

And unfortunately as a stock-standard barbarian warrior adventure tale it just doesn’t have enough sufficient pace and energy.

I admit I’ve only read the first three novels but they’re actually extremely interesting and deal with touchy subject matter in a complex and intelligent way. They’re provocative, but in a good way. Norman offers both titillation and food for thought. He’s challenging us to think about how societies work.

I can’t help thinking that this movie would have been a whole lot better with someone like Jess Franco directing, or even Joe D’Amato, or even perhaps Lucio Fulci.

Gor just doesn’t make the grade.

The German release offers both Gor movies on Blu-Ray and DVD, with both German and English language options.

I’ve reviewed the first three Gor novels and I recommend them - Tarnsman of Gor, Outlaw of Gor and Priest-Kings of Gor.

Excalibur (1981)

John Boorman’s Excalibur is a very ambitious retelling of the legend of King Arthur. Despite its ambitions it was apparently a rather modestly budgeted movie. Boorman claims to have inadvertently kicked off the sword-and-sorcery boom of the 80s. Given that Conan the Barbarian came out in 1982, a year after Excalibur, he may have a point.

Excalibur aims to retell the entire Arthurian legend, starting before the birth of Arthur.

Boorman’s idea was to show the three stages in the history of the land, coinciding with the three stages of Arthur’s life. The idea that the king and the land are one is central to the myth. If the king thrives, if he is strong and just, then the land thrives. If the king loses his way then the land suffers.

The first third of the movie is the first stage, an age of barbarism and chaos. It is Arthur’s destiny to unite and civilise the land. Boorman saw the story as also being a metaphor for the rise of Christianity and a more rational individualistic outlook displacing the older nature-centred concept of the land, the king and the people being mystically and magically linked. Which in some ways means that civilisation contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, since an individualistic rational conception of life is incompatible with the older truth that the king and the land are one. Boorman doesn’t try to tell us which of those outlooks we should prefer. We have to make up our own minds. This is a movie for grown-ups.

Britain is a chaotic divided land. The sorcerer Merlin (Nicol Williamson) aims to unite the land under Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne). He hopes that Uther will be the man capable of doing so, but Merlin has his doubts when Uther becomes obsessed with Igrayne (played by Boorman’s daughter Katrine Boorman), the beautiful young wife of the duke of Cornwall (Corin Redgrave). Uther persuades Merlin to use his magic to allow him to spend the night with Igrayne, with Igrayne thinking she is making love with her husband. This night of lust will have immense consequences. The child that results is Arthur, and the deal was that the child would be Merlin’s to raise as he sees fit. The other consequence is that Igrayne’s young daughter Morgana (Arthur’s half-sister) will have a life-long grudge against both Merlin and Arthur.

Merlin sees the boy Arthur as the man destined to bring a new world into being. Merlin however knows that there will be no place for him in this new world. He is in effect putting in train events that will destroy the world of magic and of the old gods, the world to which he belongs. Merlin accepts this as inevitable. Morgana will also come to realise that there is no place for her in this new world. She belongs to the world of the old gods, the world of mysticism and magic.

This first stage of the movie has a dark grungy look. This was not quite the first epic to go for this look. The excellent The War Lord, made back in 1965, had pioneered the gritty realistic approach to the epic but Excalibur puts this approach to a very different use.

The second stage begins when Arthur becomes king, ushering in an age of prosperity, peace and stability. The whole look and tone of the movie changes. Everything is bright and airy. Camelot is not quite a fairy tale world, but it is a world of light and of order.

This can however only continue as long as the king is strong and just. The problem is that Arthur is betrayed by his queen Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi) and his best friend and most trusted knight, Lancelot (Nicholas Clay).

The king has lost his faith in himself and in his destiny and he has lost his sense of his own destiny. The king sickens physically, morally and spiritually and the land sickens. There is famine and plague, and misery. Again the tone and look of the movie changes. We’re now in a dark and gloomy world.

Morgana has played a sinister role in promoting discord between the king and queen, but it is the betrayal by Guenevere and Lancelot that does the real damage.

Once again magic has been used to bring about a fateful sexual union, and the birth of a child which will have consequences. The child is Mordred, the son of Arthur and Morgana.

Merlin is determined to prevent the fatal consequences which will follow, and a battle of magic between Merlin and Morgana ensues.

The Arthurian legend is no cheerful fairy tale. It is a tragedy. The triumph of good over evil cannot be assumed. The triumph of the new world over the old cannot be assumed. In this third stage of the movie there is hope, perhaps the Quest for the Grail can restore both the king and the land, but it’s a precarious and desperate hope.

Merlin and Morgana are by far the most interesting characters. They are outsiders. They belong to a different world. A pre-rational world of pagan gods, nature mysticism and magic. Arthur is ushering in a new world, a world in which there will be no place for Merlin and Morgana. While Morgana has other more personal reasons for opposing Arthur she would have to oppose him anyway because he represents this new world.

Merlin is aware that there will be no place for him in this new world. He believes it is destined to come anyway, and that he is destined to play a major part in bringing this about.

Perhaps Merlin knows that Arthur’s world will not last, and will end in a reversion to chaos and barbarism. Perhaps he sees human history as a cyclical thing, as in Norse mythology where the world will inevitably be destroyed, and then reborn. The idea of an eventual rebirth is certainly implicit in the Arthurian legend - one day a king will once again appear and will once again claim Excalibur from the lady in the lake.

This movie probably has more resonance today than it had in 1981, given that we now live in an age of gloom and pessimism.

There are some great action scenes and the movie can certainly can be enjoyed as a fantasy action movie, or even indeed as a sword-and-sorcery movie. There is however also plenty of thematic and emotional complexity.

Boorman relies mostly on fairly simple special effects. It’s another demonstration that talent and imagination (and intelligence) matter more than money and gee-whizz digital effects.

Excalibur looks superb on Blu-Ray and John Boorman’s audio commentary is what an audio commentary should be. He doesn’t tell us things that we can perfectly well see for ourselves. Instead he tells us how and why he made the movie and what he was trying to achieve.

Excalibur is very highly recommended.

Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989)

Sinbad of the Seven Seas is a 1989 Cannon Films adventure fantasy with an interesting history. It was originally a Luigi Cozzi project. Cannon then decided it would be cool to do a series instead. Cozzi dropped out and Enzo G. Castellari came in as director. Cannon took a look at the huge amount of footage that Castellari had shot and decided it was totally unreleasable. Cozzi was brought back to try to rescue something from the disaster.

With those things in mind you’d expect this movie to be a trainwreck. In fact it’s magnificent.

Cozzi’s first step was to add a prologue which tells us that this is a story told by a mother to her little girl. That’s perfectly appropriate for an Arabian Nights tale since the Thousand and One Nights had a similar framing story, the tales being stories told by Scheherazade to the king.

The plot is stock standard stuff. The city of Basra is a joyous place ruled over by a kind and wise caliph until an evil wizard named Jaffar (John Steiner) casts a spell that turns the city into a cauldron of evil and misery. Jaffar also intends to force the caliph’s beautiful daughter Princess Alina (Alessandra Martines) to marry him. Alina is currently engaged to a prince named Ali who is a member of Sinbad’s crew.

Sinbad is off adventuring when all this happens. He is shocked and dismayed when he returns to Basra.

Naturally he is determined to thwart Jaffar’s plans but the problem is that Jaffar has used his magic to scatter the sacred jewels of Basra to the four corners of the Earth. Only the sacred jewels can restore peace, sanity and happiness to Basra. Sinbad and his brave crew set off to retrieve the jewels. That’s all there is to the plot.

What follows is a series of crazed action set-pieces as Sinbad and his men battle assorted monsters, ghostly knights and wicked sexy amazons. The amazons are particularly dangerous - their main weapon is seduction.

This is obviously not an expensive movie but it looks wonderful. Jaffar’s lair looks more like a mad scientist’s laboratory from a 1930s movie serial than a wizard’s haunt but that just adds more fun and craziness.

The very imaginative production design looks strange and exotic, as it should. There’s no real attempt to maintain the Arabian Nights look. The movie is like a mashup of elements from multiple fairy tales and adventure stories from lots of different historical periods and settings with a few science fiction elements thrown in as well. Anything that seems like it might be fun gets thrown into the mix. Vikings are cool, so let’s have a Viking in the movie. Mediæval knights are cool so we’ll have some of those as well. Mad scientists are fun so let’s make the villain a combination of a mad scientist and a sorcerer.

Some of the effects are cheesy but mostly the effects are clever, inspired and pretty convincing. The monsters are varied and they look terrific. The scenes with the ghostly knights are superb. The knights are just empty suits of armour but they’re very creepy.

All the action scenes are done with style and imagination.

The pacing doesn’t let up. The plot is so simple that there’s no need to waste time with boring exposition. The movie rushes from one frenetic action sequence to another. We know that Ali and Alina are in love so there’s no need for endless romantic buildups. When Sinbad encounters a crazy good wizard with a beautiful daughter we know that she and Sinbad will fall for each other so there’s no need to slow things down while they figure that out.

Muscle-bound bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno had starred in Cozzi’s wild insane Hercules movies. He makes a more than adequate hero. John Steiner chews every piece of scenery he can get his hands on. The actors playing Sinbad’s crew (which includes a dwarf, a Viking and a samurai) put everything into their performances. Alessandra Martines doesn’t have to do much more than look beautiful and frightened which she manages to do quite successfully. The amazon queen is suitably seductive.

Jaffar is an amusing villain. He’s very evil but very cowardly.

The violence is all cartoonish without any gore. There’s no nudity, there are no sex scenes. This is a fairy tale told to a kid.

Sinbad of the Seven Seas makes very little sense but it’s crazy fun from start to finish. Highly recommended.

The 101 Films DVD has no extras apart from the trailer but the transfer is excellent.

I’ve also reviewed Cozzi’s Hercules (1983) and Starcrash (1978). They’re both fabulous movies.

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.

Hundra (1983)

Hundra isn’t quite a sword-and-sorcery movie. There’s no sorcery, but lots of swordplay. It is however an amazon warrior woman movie and the setting is what you’d expect in a sword-and-sorcery movie so it’s at least a first cousin to the sword-and-sorcery genre. It’s a 1983 Italian-Spanish-US co-production.

It’s very much a feminist movie and it certainly bludgeons the viewer with its message.

Hundra belongs to a tribe of amazons. The only contact they ever have with men is for the purpose of mating and they only keep the girl babies.

One day they get raided and wiped out by a tribe of bad men. Actually all the men in this movie are evil, except for one, and he’s totally ineffectual.

There is one survivor among the amazons. Hundra, the tribe’s greatest warrior, was out on a hunting expedition. Now she sets off for a cave in the hillside to ask the old wise woman for advice. The old woman informs Hundra that it’s her duty now to bear children. Hundra is horrified. That would mean, you know, doing it with a man. Hundra has always said that she’d rather have a horse between her legs than a man.

But Hundra cannot escape her duty and her destiny. She sets off to find a man with whom to mate.

She takes her dog with her. He’s a nice dog but he’s a male dog so he’s cowardly (all males being cowardly).

She doesn’t have much luck, owing to the fact that all men are rotten and evil. She journeys to the city of the bull-worshippers. In this city girl children are kidnapped by the high priest and sold into slavery for the pleasure of men. Hundra decides to start a feminist rebellion.

She also meets a nice guy. He’s entirely lacking in masculinity which makes him, as far as Hundra is concerned, the perfect man. He’s a healer (he’s a nurturing male). He’s also incredibly boring.

Along the way Hundra has lots of battles with bad men. Fortunately, being a woman, she can easily defeat a dozen or even two dozen strong armed men.

She makes a friend, one of the high priest’s slaves. Hundra instructs her in unarmed combat and sword-fighting.

Hundra succeeds in getting herself pregnant to the healer. I have no idea how, since there’s so little chemistry between them.

Eventually she’s going to have to do something about the wicked high priest.

Laurene Landon plays Hundra. For a movie such as this you need someone who looks like she might be an amazon warrior woman, with some screen presence and the ability to give a good war-cry. Acting ability is not crucial. Which is just as well, since Laurene Landon has no discernible acting ability whatsoever. She does kinda look like maybe she could be an amazon warrior woman and she gives a terrific battle-cry. Screen presence is however something else that she lacks.

Nobody else in the movie can act either but since the characters are cardboard cutouts (the women are all noble and virtuous and the men are all evil) it doesn’t matter. The best actor in the movie is Hundra’s faithful dog.

The movie suffers from having the most boring villain in screen history. Nepakin (John Ghaffari) is evil but we have no idea why he’s such a nasty fellow and he’s so terribly dull about his villainy that he simply makes no impact.

You also don’t get any real feeling that this world is a real place. There’s no texture to this imaginary world. It’s totally generic.

Visually this movie is not too bad at all. The opening extended battle scene is very effective. It makes use of some obvious clichés (such as slow-motion) but it’s exciting and atmospheric. Director Matt Cimber handles the action scenes extremely well. He was obviously going for goofy comic-book style violence and mostly it works.

Hundra suffers from the problem that afflicts all message movies. The message is delivered in such a clumsy heavy-handed way that it has no impact. Had Hundra been a slightly likeable character or slightly believable the movie might have been a bit more enjoyable. The spectacularly awful manner in which Laurene Landon delivers her lines doesn’t help. She doesn’t just sound like she’s delivering speeches, she sounds like she’s reading speeches from a cue card.

The action scenes however are genuinely excellent and clever. Hundra is not a complete washout but it is a disappointment.

My copy of this movie is a Spanish DVD which offers a lovely 16:9 enhanced transfer and both English and Spanish language options.

Deathstalker II (1987)

Deathstalker II is one of the many sword & sorcery epics churned out by Roger Corman in the 80s. This one is more deliberately cheesy and hammy than most but it’s good-natured fun.

It’s not a true sequel to Deathstalker, having little to do with the earlier film and being much more of a spoof of the whole sword & sorcery genre.

Thief and adventurer Deathstalker (John Terlesky) rubs afoul of a formidable lady named Sultana (Toni Naples) over a jewel he stole and she vows revenge. His problems really begin when he rescues Reena (Monique Gabrielle). In fact he has to rescue her a couple of times, much against his will and his better judgment. She insists that she is both a seer and a princess. He is sceptical.

In fact she is a princess but there are two princesses. The second is Princess Evie (also played by Monique Gabrielle. She is not only a fake princess, she’s not even human. She’s a clone created by evil sorcerer Jarek (John Lazar) in order to allow him to gain control of the kingdom. She’s also a sort of vampire (the screenplay throws in everything but the kitchen sink).

Reena wants Deathstalker to help her regain her throne. He has no desire to do this until she mentions that there will be a huge reward in it for him.

Reena and Deathstalker encounter zombies (it was the 80s and zombies were all the rage) and are captured by scantily-clad amazon warriors. Deathstalker has to fight their fiercest warrior Gorgo (played by lady wrestler Queen Kong) and she’s pretty terrifying.

The amazon queen (played by María Socas) isn’t such a bad sort after all. She does make him engage in a fight-to-the-death with Gorgo and then tries to force him into marriage (being an amazon tribe they’re short of men) but when her plans are foiled she doesn’t hold a grudge. The amazons turn out to be on the side of the good guys (even if Reena gets pretty jealous when she catches Deathstalker canoodling with the queen).

Jarek of course has despatched a team of terrifying thugs to track down and capture Princess Reena. He needs her alive because if she dies then the fake princess will die too).

We then get a succession of pretty enjoyable action sequences interspersed with lots of gags and pop culture references). They even find a way to add explosions to a sword & sorcery movie.

There’s plenty of sexual innuendo and a fair few topless scenes.

It’s all very silly but in a likeable way and director Jim Wynorski keeps the pacing breathless.

It was shot at a small studio in Argentina, using a lot of the sets built for the first Deathstalker movie. Most scenes were shot at night, making extensive use of fog machines, otherwise you’d have seen the freeway in the background.

The acting is very broad. John Terlesky and John Lazar ham it up unmercifully and the three main actresses have plenty of fun vamping it up. Monique Gabrielle handles her dual roles well, being sexy and evil as Evie and cute and adorable as Reena. María Socas takes things more seriously than the rest of the cast but she’s excellent as well.

This is a Roger Corman movie and Corman liked to save money. In this movie Deathstalker encounters hordes of miscellaneous thugs and henchmen but in fact they’re just three guys. Their faces are always masked so that the audience thinks Corman paid for lots of extras.

The end credits sequence is basically a blooper track.

Shout! Factory include this movie in their excellent four-movie Roger Corman Sword & Sorcery DVD boxed set. Deathstalker II gets a very good transfer and there’s an audio commentary featuring director Jim Wynorski and stars John Terlesky and Toni Naples. It’s obvious that they had a ball making this movie.

Deathstalker II is definitely not an attempt at a serious sword & sorcery movie. It’s silly and goofy but it’s fast-moving, exciting and amusing. If you’re in the mood for a real beer and popcorn movie this one should fit the bill. Very highly recommended.

Sorceress (1982)

After following an interesting if up-and-down trajectory Jack Hill’s career was all but over by 1975 but he did make one last film for Roger Corman in 1982 - the sword & sorcery flick Sorceress, shot in Mexico. Corman had seen Conan the Barbarian and concluded (correctly) that this was a bandwagon worth jumping on.

An extremely nasty wizard named Traigon (Roberto Ballesteros) wants to sacrifice his first-born child to his evil goddess but he has a problem - his woman had twins and she won’t tell him which one was the first-born. If he guesses right he will gain immense power but if he guesses wrong he will suffer horrific consequences. Just as he’s trying to find as solution to his problem a white magician named Krona shows up, kills Traigon, and spirits the twins away.

To protect their lives the twins are raised as boys.

Twenty years later Traigon has been reincarnated (his goddess has gifted him with three lives) and he is determined to find the twins. His followers find the farmhouse in which they were brought up and butchery ensues, leaving the whole of the girls’ adopted family dead. The twins, who have been off skinny-dipping in the river, turn up too late to save their family but they do manage to slaughter the bad guys. You see Krona endowed the twins with awesome warrior prowess as well as sorcerous powers.

The girls hook up with a grizzled but friendly wandering warrior named Baldar. Baldar thinks they’re boys, which tends to indicate that he’s led a very sheltered life and has never seen an actual girl. Baldar has a sidekick, an amiable centaur. Baldar and the twins then hook up with barbarian adventurer Erlick (Roberto Nelson). When the twins undress in front of them it finally dawns on Baldar and Erlick that they’re girls. But the twists is, the twins don’t know that they’re girls. They always just assumed they were boys.

Traigon’s goons are trying to hunt down the twins for Traigon’s blood sacrifice while the twins are trying to hunt him down to kill him. There are lots of narrow escapes, Erlick almost gets impaled and one of the twins discovers that if you’re a girl you can have a lot of fun with a guy. This part is handled with wit and style - while one twin is losing her virginity the other twin gets to experience all the same pleasures.

There are epic fights. There are special effects that are mostly very good by low-budget 1982 standards. There are cool costumes (the beaked helmets on Traigon’s goons are a nice touch). The ape makeup effects on Traigon’s mistress’s man-ape pet are remarkably good, and the centaur is done pretty convincingly as well. The risen dead fights are excellent and creepy. There are lots of babes and lots of nudity. Even the special effects that wouldn’t quite pass muster today are at least clever and well thought out. The sets are good and the whole thing looks much more expensive than it was.

It’s what you expect from a Jack Hill movie - it’s done with a bit more cleverness and a bit more style than you expect in a movie of this type. And a bit more wit.

The twins are played by real-life twins Leigh and Lynette Harris, former Playboy models who made two films in the early 80s and that was the extent of their film careers. They’re not exactly great actresses but they’re not called on to demonstrate anything demanding of real acting skills, just take their clothes off and wave swords around (both of which they do quite satisfactorily). In fact they acquit themselves pretty well. In fact the performances of the entire cast are more than adequate.

Jack Hill’s directing credits including the brilliant, fascinating but strange girl gang movie Switchblade Sisters, the excellent blaxploitation classic Coffy, the entertaining women-in-prison film The Big Doll House and the indescribably bizarre Spider Baby.

Unfortunately Hill and Corman disagreed strongly over the editing of the movie and Hill cut his ties with New World Pictures, and even more unfortunately that had the effect of ending his career - the market was changing and the opportunities that he hoped would open up for him failed to eventuate. The tragedy of it is that Sorceress was a major hit and Hill could have gone on to make lots more movies for Corman.

Scorpion Releasing have put this movie out on both DVD and Blu-Ray, with very nice transfers and quite a few extras - there are interviews with Corman (who is quite proud of the movie), writer Jim Wynorski, post production supervisor Clark Henderson and makeup artist John Carl Buechler (whose work in this movie is outstanding).

Sorceress was the movie that launched New World’s successful cycle of sword & sorcery films, most of which (such as Barbarian Queen) are thoroughly enjoyable.

Sorceress is stylish and it’s enormous fun. Highly recommended.

Barbarian Queen (1985)

After seeing Conan the Barbarian Roger Corman decided that the sword & sorcery genre was just the sort of thing he was looking for. It could offer the right blend of action, exoticism, sleaze and bodacious babes. Barbarian Queen, released in 1985, is one of the results. And it has all the necessary ingredients.

Amethea (Lana Clarkson) is some kind of barbarian princess and it’s her wedding day but the wedding is not to be. The soldiers of the wicked king Arrakur (Armando Capo) raid her village, rape her kid sister Taramis (Dawn Dunlap) and kill or enslave everyone. Everyone except Amethea and two other young women, Estril (Katt Shea) and Tiniara (Susana Traverso). The girls decide they’re going to get their revenge. Now you might wonder how three young women could possibly hope to take on the might of the army of the evil king but these are warrior gals! Girlpower!

First they find a party of the raiders and wipe them out. At the raiders’ camp they find two more survivors from their village, Amethea’s sister Taramis and another girl who dies as a result of being raped and tortured.

Taramis has dealt with her nightmare experience by retreating into her own private world. She cannot admit that her village no longer exists and that all her friends are dead.

Amethea and her friends get into Arrakur’s city and make contact with the rebels (naturally there have to be rebels). The girls keep getting captured, and generally get raped as a result. But they’re resourceful and usually escape. Their plan now is for a coördinated rising with the city rebels and the gladiators. If they can just avoid being captured and raped again for a day or so they might have a chance.

One of the problems with girl hero movies is that they can be too obviously unrealistic. If the women too easily defeat men who are clearly bigger and stronger than they are it’s not going to be believable. This film avoids stretching credibility too far. The girls lose a lot of their fights. They do OK in one-on-one fights but if they’re outnumbered they always lose. When they win it’s often because they have the advantage of surprise. In their initial fight at the raiders’ camp the raiders are taken completely by surprise and the girls are smart enough to even up the odds by picking off most of the bad guys one by one. It’s not that Amethea and her friends are not good warriors. They are. But they are not super-women. This also has the advantage of making the movie more exciting - the audience really feels that these women have the odds stacked against them and wonders how they’re going to finally prevail.

The plot doesn’t have a great deal in the way of originality or complexity. It’s pretty much a standard western revenge plot with elements of the rape revenge genre. In fact the plot is mostly just an excuse for lots of sword fights and lots of scenes of half-naked young women. Which for a sword & sorcery movie is really all you need. Although in this case it’s  mostly swords and no actual sorcery. And no monsters. But plenty of T&A and a bit of  frontal nudity.

This movie was filmed in Argentina, with Argentinian director Héctor Olivera at the helm. It manages to look quite lavish with some fairy impressive sets although being a Roger Corman production you can bet the budget was actually very very tight indeed. But whatever it cost to make the money is all up there on the screen.

Lana Clarkson makes a pretty good warrior queen. Her performance might not qualify as great acting but it’s spirited and lively, she manages to look reasonably convincing in her many action scenes and she looks terrific. She’s also likeable, which helps. Amethea is fairly obviously one of the templates on which Xena: Warrior Princess was based (although Xena also owes a huge amount to the excellent 1993 Hong Kong action flick The Bride with White Hair).

The other cast members are quite adequate for a movie of this sort. Arrakur is suitable malevolent and there’s a crazy sex-crazed torturer. Argan (Frank Zagarino) is the closest thing the film has to a male hero but he’s dull and colourless. But most it’s the actresses who carry this movie. Fortunately Lana Clarkson and Katt Shea as the ditzy but formidable Estril are up to the job.

Lana Clarkson was of course tragically murdered by Phil Spector in 2003.

Shout! Factory’s DVD release offers an extremely good anamorphic transfer. Barbarian Queen was released along with The Warrior and the Sorceress as a two-movie pack and both movies are included in the Roger Corman Sword & Sorcery four-movie set (which represents great value for money if you love such movies). The only extras are some deleted scenes including a much more explicit version of one of the film’s many rape scenes.

And yes, there is a lot of rape in this movie. But then given the society that’s being depicted that’s almost certainly entirely accurate even if those scenes are obviously there to amp up the sleaze and exploitation factors.

Barbarian Queen ticks all the right boxes for its genre. It’s trashy but it’s energetic and very entertaining trash. In other words, it’s the Roger Corman formula that worked for him over and over again. If trashy exploitation is your thing then Barbarian Queen is highly recommended.

Krull (1983)

The 1983 British-US co-production Krull seems on the surface to be an attempt to jump on the sword-and-sorcery bandwagon that was kicked off by Conan the Barbarian a year earlier. In fact it’s more a sword-and-planet than a sword-and-sorcery film and has more in common with Star Wars. As we shall see, it has a very great deal in common with Star Wars.

Krull is the latest planet to fall victim to the Slayers, led by the mysterious Beast. The Slayers are from some unknown planet (we know this because at the beginning of the movie we see the arrival of their reasonably impressive-looking spaceship that doubles as their castle). Two kings of Krull have decided, not without misgivings, to unite their kingdoms under the joint rule of their children, Colwyn (Ken Marshall) and Lyssa (Lysette Anthony). The wedding between Colwyn and Lyssa will seal the deal but the ceremony is brutally interrupted by an attack from the Slayers. The Slayers not only leave nothing but devastation behind, they also kidnap Lyssa.

Colwyn survives but is sunk in despair. It is up to an Old Wise Man, Ynyr (Freddie Jones), to try to convince him that he must Fulfill His Destiny (yes this movie has a Prophecy) and that he can overcome the Slayers. Or at least, he has a better chance of doing that than anyone else. To do all this he will need a potent weapon that will serve as an equally potent symbol - the semi-legendary Glaive.

Colwyn will need to recruit an army. Since the Slayers are supposedly an almost invincible military force you’d think he’d need a real army but he decides a dozen thieves and cut-throats will be enough. In fact the Slayers prove to be typical movie bad guys (a bit like the Imperial Stormtroopers in Star Wars) - while they can easily overcome a disciplined army defending  a strong fortfification they turn out to be utterly useless when pitted against a disorganised rabble in the open - even when they’ve managed to ambush that rabble!

The big challenge for Colwyn will be to find the Black Fortress so he can destroy the Beast. The Black Fortress doesn’t stay in the one spot for more than a day. Only the blind seer can tell where it will be and first they have to find him. The usual adventures and complications ensue.

Director Peter Yates had an interesting if uneven career. His filmography includes the action classic Bullitt (1968) so his ability to direct exciting action sequences was never in doubt.

With Derek Meddings in charge of the visual effects you’d expect this movie to impress in this area, and generally speaking those expectations are fulfilled. Meddings had done the special effects for most of the 1960s Gerry Anderson television shows as well as for the Bond films of the 70s. 

The miniatures are excellent, the sets look splendidly weird and most of the special effects stand up pretty well today.

Ken Marshall is a pretty decent action hero. Lyssette Anthony looks kind of ethereal and kind of sensual and mischievous all at the same time. She’s not required to do much acting but she’s fine. Alun Armstrong does well as Torquil, erstwhile leader of Colwyn’s bandit army. David Battley isn’t too irritating as the comic relief in competent magician. Bernard Bresslaw’s height (he was 6 ft 7 in) landed him the role of the Cyclops. Freddie Jones however got the plum role and does a very competent job, being careful not to make Ynyr too loveable or too gratingly wise.

If it sounds like Krull is just a collection of fantasy clichés strung together that’s because that’s exactly what it is. We have a Prophecy, a Hero With a Destiny, a Beautiful Princess in need of rescuing, a Magical Talisman, a Quest, a Wise Good Magician, a Blind Seer  and even a harmless incompetent magician to serve as Court Jester. We have an Evil Dark Lord well supplied with minions. There’s hardly a single fantasy cliché that isn’t here.

It doesn’t matter. It’s all done with energy and enthusiasm and style, the story moves along at a brisk pace, the action sequences deliver the goods and the visuals are terrific. If anything the predictability of the plot is an asset. It’s like a fairy tale where knowing what is going to happen adds to the enjoyment. 

While the basic plot outline is predictable the details add some interest. The scenes with the Widow of the Web are very well done. Krull adds nothing new to the genre but it’s consistently entertaining and always great fun. Highly recommended.

Solomon Kane (2009)

Being a fan of Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane stories I have been very reluctant to see the 2009 Solomon Kane movie. I did not believe that any modern film-maker could, or would, do them justice. I’m now delighted to be able to say that I was wrong.

The movie is not actually based on the stories themselves. It is an origins tale. It is however based on Robert E. Howard’s character and it is a genuine attempt to get the character right.

The movie opens with Kane as a pirate plundering a castle and as a result being damned. Kane returns to England and takes refuge in a monastery and renounces violence, believing this to be his only hope, even if it’s a slender hope, of salvation. He is forced to leave the monastery after the Father Superior has a vision that tells him that Kane’s destiny lies elsewhere.

He meets a Puritan family on the road and is invited to journey with them. William Crowthorn and his wife and their two children Samuel and Meredith are hoping to go to the New World to make a new start. It soon becomes apparent that things are going very wrong in England. Bands of raiders roam the country, burning and pillaging and murdering. We will later find out that the raiders are servants of the evil sorcerer Malachi.

Kane and his companions on the road encounter one of these bands, with disastrous consequences. William Crowthorn is killed. Meredith is carried off by the marauders.

Kane is now a man of peace and is unable to defend his companions. He now faces a terrible choice. To save Meredith he will have to take up the sword again, and in doing do he will risk the near certainty of eternal damnation. It’s a risk he is willing to take.

This is not a conventional action movie and it’s most certainly not a comic book movie. It’s unconventional nature seems to have frightened distributors and it failed to get a proper commercial release. It’s been generally written off as a commercial flop but if writer-director Michael J. Bassett is correct in his claims that the often-quoted $45 million budget was wildly exaggerated it may end up turning a profit through DVD sales. Bassett apparently doesn’t mind that it didn’t get its chances in the movie theatres - he’s hoping for a Blu-Ray release which he feels (probably correctly) is the best way for this film to reach an audience.

It’s also been much criticised by Robert E. Howard fans for supposedly having little to do with either Robert E. Howard’s stories or his character. That’s actually rather unfair. Bassett had hoped to use tis movie as a springboard for a series of later films that would have been based on Howard’s actual stories. More importantly, I think the movie does set up the character rather well and I think it does capture most of the qualities that make Solomon Kane very different from other sword-and-sorcery heroes.

Solomon Kane is a man to whom damnation and salvation are very real. He inhabits a world very different to our own. It is not a world of moral relativism. It is a world in which good and evil, Heaven and Hell, damnation and salvation, God and Satan, are not merely realities, they are the only realities that really matter. It is also a world in which the Christian religion matters. You cannot make a movie about Solomon Kane while indulging in fashionable anti-Christian polemics, and to his credit Michael J. Bassett understood this. He also understood that there could be no place for political correctness in such a movie - apart from anything else such concepts would have been hopelessly anachronistic.

He also deserves credit for taking his subject matter seriously. In an interview included on the DVD (and even if you don’t normally bother with DVD extras you really should watch this interview) he makes it clear that his intention was to avoid any hint of a tongue-in-cheek or camp approach. James Purefoy, who plays the title role, also deserves credit for playing the title role absolutely straight. Solomon Kane is a gloomy, tortured, utterly humourless man and any attempt to play him any other way would have made him just another generic action hero. Of course it’s likely that the movie would have done better commercially had it been approached as just another dumb action movie, so what we have here is something you don’t see very often these days in the movie world - artistic integrity.

Also noteworthy is the refusal to make Meredith a love interest. Kane’s feelings towards her are, as Bassett notes, much closer in spirit to courtly love than to romantic love. Kane is a Puritan after all. He doesn’t set out to rescue the girl because he expects to move in with her afterwards. He does it because he is fundamentally, in spite of the evil he has done in the past, a godly man and it is his duty. It is also the only way he can save his soul.

The movie also manages to avoid being transgressive or subversive, and that’s always something to be thankful for.

I’ve probably made the film sound terribly serious and dull but while it attempts to be more than an action movie it also succeeds in being a thoroughly entertaining and exciting action movie. If it’s sword fights and monsters and mayhem you want they’re there in abundance.

Visually it’s very impressive. If you don’t have a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve as far as visual style is concerned then all the CGI in the world isn’t going to help you. Fortunately in this case the film-makers do have a coherent vision and despite some budgetary constraints it looks splendid.

While Robert E. Howard purists might not be satisfied this film is certainly closer in spirit to Howard’s writings than I would have expected. It’s an intelligent action movie, a very rare beast indeed.