1983 fantasy flick
Rating: 9/20 (Fred: 21/20; Libby: 12/20; Josh: 10/20)
Plot: The titular hero–though more of an anti-hero if you ask me–is sent to find a magic sword, a magic amulet, and a magic chalice before the bad guy can get them and undoubtedly do something awful. Along the way, he rapes a few women and enters a tournament.
This has to break some kind of record for having the most crap in it that just doesn’t have anything to do with the actual plot of the movie. That tournament? Doesn’t matter at all. The couple of love interests thrown at Deathstalker? Nope, there’s no reason to care or even learn the women’s names. Throw in an old guy who seems to be nothing more than an excuse to see some more scantily-clad bimbos, a BFF our hero finds along the way, and gratuitous mud-wrestling, and you’ve got a collection of stuff that just doesn’t matter all that much. Plenty of fighting and nudity which makes this the perfect realization of every male geek’s fantasies. With a rousing score that makes this feel a bit like a spaghetti western at times. This starts about as great as a movie can with a title screen complete with a pair of daggers for T’s and an unprecedented quadruple taint, four barbarian taints within the first minute of screen time. It was glorious, ladies and gentlepigmen, just glorious. The hero’s introduced, and he’s got to be one of the most unlikable heroes ever encountered. It’s hard to root for a rapist anyway, but add in some cockiness and 80’s hair and you’re really asking for a lot, producers of Deathstalker. But the producers of Deathstalker don’t care about a plot that makes sense or even a plot at all, so they’re surely not going to get hung up on creating a likable hero. They’re just here to show us some T&A, and they definitely accomplish that purpose. There’s easily more naked women action than fighting even though there’s supposed to be a tournament at the center of all this. With that, I was rooting for the Pigman, maybe until Hammerman came along anyway and squashed opponents into puddles of oblivion. But a scene with Pigman contemplating and then taking a bite out of a pig head was so Zen. And there’s a scene where Pigman rips off a guy’s arm and beats another guy with it, and it’s hard to argue something like that. There are a few other classic scenes in this though–a henchmen’s transformation into a woman, said henchman’s rape ending with a “What the hell are you?”, a decapitated wizard dude picking up and replacing his own head, evil guy’s bloodier-than-bloody death. I love, as a middle-aged man, watching these movies that would have been my favorite movies as a kid if the Internet would have existed. This is about as far from cinematic perfection as you can get, but it’s a ton of fun. And I’ve already shot my wad thinking about the three sequels which I will be watching–with or without my Facebook friends–as soon as possible.
That poster’s bad-ass, but I want to warn you that there’s nothing that looks like that in the movie. That’s completely misleading. The poster is, by the way, created by Boris Vallejo who made the one for National Lampoon’s Vacation.
Larstonovich, have you seen this one?