I had planned to be a bit more consistent with Sword and Sorcery 2020, but after viewing this...I just had to take a solid week off to recuperate. Luckily for me, the ongoing threat of the Coronavirus has seen my job and my school come to a (hopefully temporary) screeching halt, so I might actually be productive, and thus have content over the next few weeks! Shock of shocks!
So it is now that we come to Deathstalker, a film that shares a name with a series of science fiction novels that I'm fairly certain that have as much to do with this film as The Beastmaster did with The Beastmaster.
Weird coincidence, though, I'll admit.
The film follows the adventures of the titular Deathstalker, a name to inspire the edgiest of all the lords to lord all of the edges from now until the end of time. At least The Beastmaster is a title that made some sense and was a title rather than a name. Deathstalker just sounds like something a thirteen year old would name his World of Warcraft character and have to awkwardly type on a "6969" because someone else had already taken it. It's that unoriginal. More to the point, why would anyone name their child that? Isn't that like naming your child "Judas McFucksYourFace"? Are there are lot of weird names like that in this world?
Nightbringer? Songsinger? Smellwalker? It's just bizarre.
Anyway, Lethal Restraining Order begins with our titular character saving a woman from a bandit after killing several...goblins? Trolls? I have no idea. They're short, hairy, and look malformed because of the incredibly shitty masks they wear. His first act after rescuing her from being raped is to approach her sexually. Because, y'know...that's how you do it, right?
I want to note Beastmaster had a scene of the title character using his ferrets to steal a woman's underwear and this is the film that makes me feel like I have to take a shower.
Eventually, the gratuitous violence and nudity takes a break to give some actual plot - if you can even call it that. Namely Deathstalker being given a quest to go seek out artifacts of power - your standard fantasy set up - in order to defeat the evil wizard Munkar. It's here, too, that we get the first indications that Deathstalker has taken way too many blows to the head when he claims to steal and kill in order to survive...and outright rejects offers to change his status and thus not actually have to steal and kill in order to survive.
Friggin' Medieval MENSA material right here!
This seems to be a good time to talk about the actor who plays Deathstalker - Rick Hill. According to his IMDb page, he was a bit player in television through the early 80's, no doubt leading into his magnum opus performance in this film. By "magnum opus", by the way, I mean "dear god, could this guy be any drier?". I'm not sure how the direction was - though ironically the director, James Sbardellati, was a first unit director on (you guessed it) The Beastmaster - but he plays everything with exactly the same boring, flat, monotone. If he did not occasionally raise the volume of his voice, I'm certain he could put someone to sleep.
Anyway, after getting some advice from a witch, Deathstalker seeks out the three artifacts of nigh-infinite power: a magic sword, a chalice, and a necklace. Each one powerful on its own, but together they create the Triforce...I mean, channel all the powers of creation in order to...kill Munkar, I guess? Being that Munkar already has the chalice and the necklace, I suppose taking the sword and putting it through his face might be a good idea. As the witch puts it, with the three powers "you can do anything. You can be the power!".
Make a good movie, not so much.
I'm not going to lie to you, I know this film has a fanbase, but I just don't get the appeal. I'm aware this was only 1983, but this legitimately feels like something that came out in the later half of the 1980's. Was it made to capitalize on the successes of things like Conan or The Beastmaster? Yeah, obviously, but that would be like getting snippy with Battle Beyond the Stars for following on from Star Wars. Unlike Battle Beyond the Stars, which knew enough to do its own original story, Deathstalker just feels worn out. Almost as if this were coming out in the 1988 or even the early 90's more than earlier in the 1980's.
It just has that very cheap exploitation feel. The acting is hokey (I've already mentioned Rick Hill being like stale, soggy cardboard, but he is ironically not even close to the worst), the costuming has some beyond hilarious choices (a pig man with a terrible, terrible rubber mask), the sets are of...questionably quality at best, and the fight choreography is all over the place. In that last instance in particular, the "gore" effects get some unintentional laughs when it looks like someone's spraying red Kool-Aid onto swords from off screen in some scenes, and that's only in scenes where they actually show the killing. Also, plenty of T'n'A to go with the violence - in particular the warrior Kaira (Lana Clarkson) who wears literally nothing more than a cloak and a thong. No, really. Her introduction scene has her entirely topless and no one bats an eye in-universe.
Oh, and she and Deathstalker have sex within a single scene of meeting. Because why not?
I like boobs as much as the next heterosexual male, but Jesus Christ...
This, by the way, goes on throughout the movie with such wonderful scenes as women being picked up Munkar's soldiers to have him rape, two women mud wrestling, and an all out brawl where several men (human and the aforementioned pigman) fight over the right to rape a captured woman. It's almost as if they knew they had nothing of substance here and just decided to keep up the sex and violence.
Oh, and by the way, the "heroic" Deathstalker only gets involved when his woman gets threatened. Even then, thanks to Rick's acting, he just seems utterly bored by the whole thing.
It rips off shamelessly, but it fails to realize what the good things are to rip off from those movies. There's not a sense of awe or wonder about the world we see. We also have no reason to care about the protagonist. In Conan the Barbarian, we care about Conan because we've seen his origin as a boy who had his entire village burned to the ground and is mother beheaded. He does terrible things, certainly, but we identify with him because he seeks to avenge his mother and father and goes through a great deal of struggle to get there.
Deathstalker is just an asshole. He's a meathead jock who shows slightly above baseline intelligence, but otherwise is rather crass and obnoxious and overall very unpleasant. It's what the media in the 80's seemed to assume what people who played Dungeons & Dragons wanted to be, and by Kord was I looking forward to him getting decapitated. Alas, no such luck. We aren't given any details as to why he became the way he is, and so we have no reason to want him to succeed.
Rather like with the oppression of the common folk by mages in Izmir, we also see no evidence that Munkar is an evil jackass other than the fact that he displaced a king and mutilated one servant. Bernard Erhard is clearly trying and even does well in a few places, but he seems oddly stilted in the performance. His face tattoo also looks ridiculously stupid, though that seems like a cheap shot in comparison to all the rest.
On the whole, the entire film is one of the worst examples of tripe in the sword and sorcery genre. It's crass exploitation, as if it were just a few marks higher than being a porno spoof of an actual movie. Given the amount of tits and ass flashed around in this movie, I'm sure this would definitely qualify is soft core porn if nothing else. And good Lord is there nothing else to be found here. It's absolute dreck. I'd say I'd be ashamed to have my name attached to this if I were Roger Corman (yes, that Roger Corman), but he's been all-too happy to put his name on such cinematic classics as It Conquered the World, Piranha, Battle Beyond the Sta-wait, what?!
Yes, Roger Corman has had his name attached to many, many films over the years. Some good and some bad. Also, Little Shop of Horrors. I'll leave you to figure out whether or not I think that that is a good one. Also also, we will be getting to Battle Beyond the Stars eventually, though likely not this year given the theme month.
This movie, however, is just...awful. It gives us nothing of the epic scale of a fantasy adventure, the main character is a unpleasant slab of rape-happy cardboard, and the entire film has a hilariously cheap tone and a focus on exploitation that makes me feel like I need to take a shower afterward.
And they don't make water hot enough, people.
They don't make water hot enough.
So, here we are with a stunning example of just how bad sword and sorcery can get. I feel like I have to be on a sex offender registry just for having watched the damn thing. Avoid at all costs!
This is my seventy-fifth film review, and it's by far the worst I've reviewed thus far. I want you to think about that, and I mean really think about that. Think of all we've seen in 75 reviews.
FDR fighting werewolves in a rocket-powered wheelchair.
Elizabeth Bathory killing people through a video game.
ATTACK OF THE CLONES.
A pile of bullshit horror cliches.
...and this. THIS is the worst of it.
Which is why, I'm sure you'll understand, I'm absolutely terrified that this film has not one but three sequels.
Great way to close out March, isn't it?
Deathstalker is brought to us by Palo Alto and New World Pictures.
For the latest from the MadCapMunchkin, be sure to follow him on Twitter @MadCapMunchkin.
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