Surely the greatest victory that Deathstalker achieved wasn’t the smiting of yet another asshole sorcerer or once again scoring a horizontal conquest with the latest in a surprisingly long line of deposed princesses; no, the big lug’s most impressive win is surely grinding out a franchise that somehow lasted for four, barely watchable, movies. I have my suspicions why Deathstalker managed this unfathomable feat (crushingly low budgets, truly awesome video box art, copious nudity), but by the time the 90s rolled around, you would think that the world would have moved on from threadbare fantasy sets and clumsy swordplay, yet in 1991, Deathstalker managed to squeeze one more rodeo out of a budget so tight, it probably wouldn’t have covered the glitter and bubble allowance on Ridley Scott’s Legend.
Anyway, with a weary sigh, and very real sense of my own mortality as I waste another 90 minutes of my rapidly ebbing existence, Deathstalker IV actually seems to think it’s giving me hope as it brings back original actor Rick Hill to close out the series. Come on guys, now who’s living in a fantasy world?
We rejoin Deathstalker as he continues his way through the dark times, rescuing the occasional wrench from cat-headed sex offenders and searching his misplaced Sword of Justice whom he accidently left with an old friend after a previous adventure; but as we mull over the fact He-Man was never so rock headed to just simply misplace the Sword of Power like the remote to the TV, Deathstalker manages to fall ass-backwards into yet another adventure.
Believe it or not, his latest escapade once again involves a Princess disguising herself as a peasant girl after her rightful kingdom was hoodwinked out from under her family by the evil sorcereress Kana, and her faithful potioneer, who sports the sort of moustache and hair that suggests he’s not allowed within 100 feet of a school. She’s come up with the fiendish idea (probably from renting Deathstalker 1) that if she holds a huge tournament, every warrior from miles around who could possibly thwart her plan will simply walk happily into her castle and from there she can turn them all into stone soldiers with mixture of enchanted wine, magic and a lot of showing of her boobs.
Why exactly Kana would need an unstoppable stone army if all her enemies are already off the board is frankly none of my business, but soon Deathstalker and the princess get wise to her little game and with the help of warrior-virgin Vaniat, they seek to bring her down and save…. actually I’m not sure who he’s trying to save – the people, I guess?
Anyway, can Deathstalker manage to end this plot and regain his sword while laying the groundwork to get his end away during a post adventure hump-a-thon? Answers on a postcard please…
After a quick jump over to Letterboxd, I was amused to see that many people gave this stunningly shoddy film props for bringing back original Deathstalker actor Rick Hill like he’s the equivalent of Tobey Maguire scoring Spider-Man 4 – however, I for one wasn’t overly happy to see him return as his version of the character was uncomfortably…. now, how can I put this delicately?… oh yeah, rapey. Now, this wasn’t Rick’s fault of course (or at least, I hope not), but to give the guy his flowers, with his mob of blonde hair, muscley build and a square jaw you could light marches off, he embodies that fantasy aesthetic far more that the other two actors did, but thankfully, this film chooses to give him more of a Han Solo swagger and mercifully cuts his alarming libido down by 60%.
I have to say, this shift in his character is extraordinarily welcome even if he still occasionally flirts with the borders of a Medieval me too movement; however, while Deathstalker has marginally changed for the better, the script does him a huge disservice by simply rehashing the plot of the first film. However, it doesn’t stop there; as the unmistakable whiff of cost cutting is rife in the air as the movie shamelessly reuses footage from previous movies to up its production values and desperately pad out that runtime; which is something that’s always confused me. Did the producers think that people who loved Deathstalker enough to stick around for a fourth installment wouldn’t notice that around 20% of the footage is eerily familiar – or did they just simply not care? Buy the way, that’s a rhetorical question as I think we all know the answer.
Still, I guess we shouldn’t be that surprised that a movie that obviously didn’t even have funds to teach its actors how to sword fight would stoop to recycling footage, as the film is literally about the best Warriors in the land pitting their skills against one another, the fight literally look like they were staged by two five year-old dueling with sticks. Add to this the fact that the villains henchman has an accent so thick I could only understand every other sentence and a bunch of cat people whose fur doesn’t even cover their arms, and you’ve got yourself a truly impressive stinker that’s admittedly fun to watch for all the wrong reasons.
Weirdly enough, the only character who gets even a sniff of an arc is Maria Ford’s princess who has to contend with a gang of lesbian, barbarian mean girls who target her like Robert E. Howard tried to write a high school drama, but it’s not even really connected to the create-a-stone-army plot, so technically it’s just a random story thread blowing in the wind of indifference.
Credit has to be given for trying to give Hill a more swashbuckley role rather than the thrift store Conan material he was giving in the first film, but while the lightening of the mood is something of a relief from all that murky cinematography and endless scenes of sexual assault, Deathstalker IV is still nowhere as fun as the jokey, second film, which made up for its lack of everything with a fairly meta sense of humour.
Anyway, ranking the Deathstalker movies isn’t unlike trying to rank your favorite zits, so the fact that the character didn’t exactly go out on a high is hardly a shocking revelation – especially considering he didn’t start on one either, but believe it or not, there’s still promise for the franchise yet…
With a Deathstalker reboot on the way that’s being made by the guy who brought us Psycho Goreman, we may yet get an entry to this flimsy franchise that not only carries the goofy humour of part 2 and the gore of part 1, but we may actually get a Deathstalker movie that actually lives up to one of Boris Vallejo’s epic posters.
Now wouldn’t that be something to stalk about?
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