There’s something about fantasy movies from the early 80s that tend to hit a little different – they’re harder, they’re harsher and they seem to take the concept of a lawless time awfully seriously. Even the movies skewed more towards the littler ones in the audience seemed unwilling to take no prisoners as movies such as Dragonslayer and The Dark Crystal made their universes with a surprisingly grim edge to go with their wonders.
However, while the kid’s movies tended to play a little rough, the ones that leaned more toward adults took no fucking prisoners as graphic displays of violence, gore and sex were often wall to wall. Be it John Milius’ fantastically uncompromising Conan The Barbarian, Albert Pyun’s unhinged The Sword And The Sorcerer or John Boorman’s utterly untold Excalibur, I’ve often watched these movie while wondering who exactly they’re supposed to be for as the fantastical and sometimes adolescent natures of the plot often merge with extreme gore and lashings of nudity. However, none are as confusing and confounding as that of…. Deathstalker.
In a world that is ruled by the evil, tattooed, slap-headed sorcerer Munkar, we find the wandering opportunist known as Deathstalker; a muscled, blonde-mopped warrior with no battle to fight except for those that foolishly seek him out.
After a busy morning of thief slaughtering and ravishing women he’s only just saved from gang rape, Deathstalker eventually is persuaded to do something useful with his life thanks to a random witch, who urges him to attempt and gather three items of unimaginable power to end the reign of Munkar once and for all. Despite something of a selfish type, the permanently oily barbarian agrees, and after finding the enchanted sword almost immediately, he adds others to his quest, such as Salmaron, a thief who, until recently, had been turned into an imp, the charming swordsman Oghris and a female warrior known as Kaira, who has the rather distracting habit of constantly having her boobs out, even in battle.
However, even though Deathstalker has one of the items, the catch is that the evil sorcerer already owns the other two items – a necklace and a chalice – and the only way our hero can possibly hope to get close to his enemy is for him and his half-nude band to sign up for a tournament Munkar has arranged to choose an heir.
However, after a signing in process that seems to be nothing more than an excuse for a mass orgy (honestly, any excuse with these guys), the battles start in ernest, but with magical items to collect, an evil sorcerer to depose, a hulking pig man to defeat and a kidnapped princess to rescue, will Deathstalker realise that one of his companions is planning to betray him?
I mentioned earlier on that fantasy movies of this time period are a little strange to figure out as their near unending displays of sex and violence tend to sit awkwardly with plots that tend to be so idiotically childish; but the better ones (Conan the Barbarian, I’m looking at you) usually work by creating a bizarre world that’s at least a little tangible.
However, Deathstalker chooses to ignore all of that and chooses to put all of its eggs in the basket marked “nudity” in the hope that frequent flashes of tits and ass is enough to distract its audience from the fact that it’s fucking awful. To give it credit where it’s due, I guess it worked, because the movie carries something of a cult reputation despite barely being one step removed from soft core porn. It’s not that I’m prudish in any way, after all, Schwarzenegger’s Conan repeatedly got his end way in his first film, but it’s the nature of the sex and nudity in Deathstalker I have an issue with as it almost exclusively takes the form of rapes that disturbingly seem to occur every fifteen minutes. Worse yet, our hero is guilty of at least two of them and it just starts to feel decidedly unnecessary after a while.
However, maybe producer Roger Corman saw how fucking abysmal the movie was and decided to up the sex quota in order to deflect from a plot that stubbonly refuses to make sense at almost every turn. Deathstalker refuses to undergo a quest offered to him by the original, usurped king, yet happily accepts the exact same quest from a moldy witch and then goes and finds the first, mystical item on his wish list without even breaking a sweat. Elsewhere, his companion Oghris turns on him with barely any set up whatsoever and no explanation is given as to why Kaira feels the need to enter every battle nipples first other than the director seemingly feeling you can’t fully appreciate his fantasy epic unless you’re at least partially erect.
The thing is, if Deathstalker wasn’t so obsessed with making every single male in its cast an enthusiastic sex offender, maybe it would have ascended to bad movie heaven like the legendarily tacky Hawk The Slayer, but its bizarre scenes of our hero wrasslin’ with a half pig, half man, or Munkar meeting his grusome end by being ripped apart by townsfolk are constantly thwarted by the fact that the movie just can’t keep its pork sword in its pants.
In fact, the movie may offer one of the most sexually strange scenes in fantasy cinema, when Munkar subbenly decides to transform a bungling underling into the exact likeness of the captured princess in order to assassinate Deathstalker. However, upon sneaking into his room, the henchman finds that his intended victim is awake and disturbingly in a partying mood – and I suppose you can guess what happens next… Yup, that’s right, Deathstalker attempts to have sex with him/her and I’m genuinely curious to know what exactly was the writer’s intentions when he scribbled down such a confounding scene. Even more confoundingly, Deathstalker subsequently went on to score three more sequels, all of which boasted stunning poster art which no doubt hoodwinked many an impressionable youth into renting this misogynistic claptrap.
Best described as a sort of creepy merging of He-Man and soft core porn, if you are the sort of person who thinks Lord Of The Rings would have been better if the characters fucked more without consent, then I guess Deathstalker is the film for you. However, for others, you might want to make sure you get a restraining order on Deathstalker before he discovers that the one enemy he cannot hope to defeat is a crippling dose of syphilis.
Molesters of the Universe.
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