The Sword and the Sorcerer

  It'd be unfair to blame the success of Conan the Barbarian for the run of early eighties fantasy movies - especially Albert Pyun's The Sword and the Sorcerer, which came out on the same year. There must have been something in the water... or maybe it was D&D's popularity at the time.

 What is interesting is that most of these movies fit more in the Sword and Sorcery genre, as popularized by Robert E. Howard and other pulp authors, than within D&D's Tolkien pastiche. Unlike D&D-style fantasy, S&S tends to downplay the fantastic elements, avoids clear morality, and borrows a lot from horror. Magic is evil, or at least dangerous, and always mysterious.
 This movie follows suit, as the title makes clear, but it's not a great take on the genre. Clearly, it's not in the same league as the first Conan movie. But it's not in the same league as The Beastmaster, either, which also came out in the same year; Sad to say, despite directing some B-movie classics the late director Albert Pyun was mostly a purveyor of mediocrity, and this... well, I do kind of like it, but can't really say it's not mediocre. There's some good stuff but you have to wade through a lot of crap to get to it.
 More along the lines of Hawk the Slayer, then, or The Barbarian Brothers, though it does seems to have a respectable budget for this sort of thing.

 The movie begins with an excursion to an evil misty island, where the main villain of the piece king Titus Cromwell (Richard Lynch) awakens the secondary villain, an ancient snake sorcerer called Xusia (Richard Moll). His sarcophagus is a thing of beauty, a great bit of prop design with stone faces carved all over, which of course animate when the sorcerer is revived. Very cool.

 What's not cool, though, is Xusia; When one of the kings lackeys questions what the sorcerer brings to the table, instead of killing the lackey, he kills the witch that revived him! Asshole. Also, whenever he does magic his fingernails turn bright pink, like light sabers, in an effect that never stops being funny.

Seriously, though, that's one damn cool resting place.

 In any case: King Titus is going after the kingdom of Ehdan, one of those prosperous, good kingdoms ruled by peaceful goodie-two-shoes. With Xusia's help he wipes out half their army, but then backstabs the sorcerer, who escapes by jumping off a cliff. Then he proceeds to kill the royal family, but one of the heirs - Prince Talon escapes him, bearing a really goofy-looking three bladed sword (the blades are in parallel, which you'd think would be a problem when trying to use it to slash at anything). Luckily it seems they realized the thing is so stupid-looking, so they don't ever really show it used in a fight, but they do show it shooting off the two blades on the side.

 So King Titus managed to lose a dangerous, evil sorcerer, and the last descendant of the royal house he's usurping. The guy really needs to get better at tying loose ends.

 We jump to eleven years later, and Talon's grown up to be a Conan-like figure (the narration makes a point to name a lot of Conan's titles, even) played by Lee Horsley, a smug little shit with a perma-lopsided grin and immaculate feathered hair. He comes back to Edhan with his mercenary company to 'repay a debt', and things develop from there.
 Unfortunately, this is where the movie kind of dies on its ass, as we delve into the politics of Ehdan - freedom fighters staging a coup, a beautiful princess figure (Kathleen Beller) who's basically pressured to pay Talon with her body so he goes to rescue her brother, a conspiracy to kill off the kings from neighboring kingdoms, Xusia pulling strings from the shadows... ugh, honestly, I can't be arsed.

 The acting is porn-level bad, the characters are broad and stereotypical, there's no wit to be found in the script as it goes through the paces, and the action is mediocre, only redeemed because every now and then it gets pretty bloody. And it's all smothered by an orchestral score that buries everything under swashbuckling themes. The tone is kept pretty light (aided by that fucking soundtrack) but the script just can't support it, dumb and charmless as it is, and neither can the unlikable, barely delineated characters.

 There are good bits strewn throughout, enough to keep the whole thing from being a complete waste of time. The acting is bad enough to be funny sometimes. And despite the cinematography being pretty workmanlike, Pyun does have a pretty good eye for striking shots, so we get some of that. Also: lots of boobs and a few gory deaths.

Axe to the faaaaaayce!

 Re: boobs - women don't tend to get a lot of respect in this genre, and this is no exception. They get very little to do other than look pretty, and the female protagonist's big thing is to use her feminine wiles and then knee people in the balls. Ineffectively. Even animals get in on the action - there's a bit where a snake attacks a lady late in the film, and it has to get in between her thighs like it's on a Whitesnake album cover or something. So if that sort of thing bothers you, this is not the movie for you. Also, if you're looking for a good movie.

 It made a shitload of money compared to its budget, and is well-remembered enough that it got a sequel (as promised in the end credits) almost thirty years later, with Kevin Sorbo. I guess I'll need to watch that someday, but forgive me if I put it off for a while.