Sword and Sorcery Tuesdays QUADRUPLE BILL: Ator!!!1

Theme: Eagle - Gamma Ray

Italy didn't just rip off the Road Warrior formula to hilarious effect; it also got in on the Conan craze, making it the most 80s of countries. Ator is pronounced ah-tor in the first three movies to his name, then ay-tor in the fourth, made by the same director as the first two, giving you some idea how stringently continuity was upheld. They're basically all different movies on the same general theme, and as is oft the case with movie series, it's all downhill from the first, yet this is no bad thing, because the lulz increase in rough proportion to the quality control evasion.

Ator the Fighting Eagle

Miles O'Keeffe stars as Ator, who rocks the most magnificent Dokken-tier 80s hair game in the whole subgenre:

He'd fit right in.

Ator wants to bang his sister, but it's OK: he immediately learns she's not really his sister. I assumed he'd only learn this (we already knew it) near the end of the movie, engendering some lulzy and/or creepy tension along the way, but his step-parents just tell him there and then, perhaps because the writer realised at once that this was an extremely sketchy characterisation for his hero but was determined not to redraft so much as one word he had written, for which I blame him not one bit, because as homework assignments go, "write a Conan ripoff" should be taken as a free pass to have fun. I know I did.

Ator has a pet bear cub, which is adorable.

Sadly for Ator, said step-sister Sunya (Ritza Brown) is kidnapped by the evil Dakar, high priest of the Spider-god, which we will later learn is a very big spider. Dakar spends most of his time watching tarantulas play about on his wrists and head, while his guards wait with Herculean patience, if indeed patience was something for which Hercules was known, which I suppose it was, given that his twelve labours involved a lot of repetition, making this lazy cliché on my part actually make sense.

Girls who "like spiders" when u drop a spider on them.

CAN Ator win back his beloved with the help of Amazon Roon (Sabrina Siani), after she defeats her rivals in combat for the prize of O'Keefe's ridiculously Chad physique in marriage, because male fantasies never really change? Yes, and all that impedes them are the obligatory cultist goons, army of the dead, and some blind smiths, who are about as menacing of opponents as most blind people are 2bqhwu.

Prove me wrong, blindbois. I'll step to any of you bitchass hoes.

The Blade Master

The first sequel pads in the tried-and-true manner of Friday the 13th Part 2: by recapping most of the original in its early scenes. The rest of it is hardly higher-effort. We're told in lulzily perfunctory manner that Sunya died offscreen, clearing the way for another brunette with kino legs, Mila (Lisa Foster), who implores Ator's aid after her father, flagrantly retconned as Ator's mentor, is captured by a lame bad guy whom he will spend the movie trolling so passive-aggressively that you will burst out laughing when the villain loses patience and starts slapping him around toward the end.

Same glorious energy.

Blade Master is a total rehash of the original, but in this one Ator has an Azn sidekick named Thong (snicker) and, in the only memorable scene, produces a hang glider out of nowhere and starts dropping bombs on his enemies.

"????" - Rotten Potatoes.

Iron Warrior

By far the highest-effort of the Ator flicks is also the least sequitur, ditching everything except O'Keeffe and affecting an MTV arthouse style, with some great scenery and lulzy 80s aesthetics, such as our heroine's new wave makeup.

Before the oceans drank Atlantis, dying one eyebrow pink was in.

The plot is that Glinda, the Good Witch of the West, paroles Phaedra, the Wicked Witch of the Worst, whereupon Phaedra immediately takes over the local kingdom, massacres an entire town, and generally wreaks havoc, making Glinda not all that good, really, all things considered.

"We have to let this unrepentant psychopath loose on the populace at large. It's her human rights."
"Don't innocent people have a human right not to be victimised by psychopaths?"
"LOL no, crie moar CHUD"
- Actual dialogue (real life).

Fortunately Ator, minus the kino hair but plus downright Road Warrior tier shoulder pads, is on hand to save the day. There are some downright imaginatively dumb fight scenes, including one where he and Skeletor play catch with the same two spears, followed by another in which bad guys on horseback pick up the princess and attempt to run her into a spear placed in the ground, thus:

The editing is (I think) intentionally disorienting so you're never quite sure what the fuck is going on, and characters keep turning out to be the witch in disguise, so in the end when Ator saves the princess he'd thought was dead, you're expecting it to turn out to be the witch again, but it just isn't and we cut back to Phaedra interred once more in the Phantom Zone, which is (I think) unintentionally actually a clever little double-fake-out and an example of how Subverting Expectations can be a fun way for genre entertainment to remain fresh, provided your filmmakers are actually as smart as they think they are, instead of drooling fuckwits.

Quest for the Mighty Sword

Series originator Joe D'Amato returned for part 4, which, in the tradition of all the other ones, has nothing to do with any of the other ones. Apparently he considers 3 unofficial, which means he somehow considers the flagrantly contradictory 1, 2 and 4 official, which makes one of us*. In this one Aytor is no longer Miles O'Keeffe (merely yards) and is a king for about five minutes until getting shrekt by Thorn, a god who has some beef with Aytor over his titular sword, leaving his son, Aytor Jr., to avenge him and/or rescue hotty Dejanira (Margaret Lenzey) who is in the movie; IDK, it feels like there's a bunch of backstory they never bothered to explain, but I'm not overwhelmed by curiosity.

It's illegal to upload clips from this turd in >240p.

The late Aytor's queen/Jr.'s mom, Sunn (I guess it didn't work out with Mila from 2, or Joe D'Amato forgot all about her), takes the sword to be reforged by a goblin named Grindr, who rapes her with the aid of a love potion and proceeds to raise her kid until he's the most elderly-looking 18-y/o in movies (quite a feat), whereupon he's entitled to reclaim his birthright, but the goblin pranks him a few times with fake swords first, just to be an even bigger asshole. Happily Aytor eventually kills him, but unhappily there's still like two-thirds of the movie left to slog through. Line readings are stilted, budgets are stretched, and eyes are rolled. I'd recommend the first one for your lonely TV-dinner distraction, the fourth if you're still in that MST3K phase where you think being smarter than B-joint writers makes you smart, but most of all I'd recommend a walk.

*Due to sharing a costume with the movie Troll 2, Quest was released in Germany as Troll 3, which I consider to be its proper series lineage.

Cool Thing: Tsaatan Reindeer Riders!

Theme: Run Run Rudolph - Chuck Berry

POV: you just said hApPy HoLiDaYs in a Merry Christmas neighbourhood.

The Tsaatan are a nomadic Tuvan people found in best country, Mongolia. While most people ride horses or the bus, the Tsaatan ride reindeers, which is more cool. So central are their lil Christmassy bros to their lifestyle that Tsaatan means "the people with reindeer", and they move their ortzes (tents) around the oft-frozen taiga with their herds, milking them, trading their antlers (doan't worry; they grow back), and sometimes ritually merking one to drink its blood to give them warrior strength, which seems somewhat pointless because there are only 200 of them in the entire world, they live in the harshest wilderness imaginable, and absolutely noone cares to trek out there in -40ºC temperatures to pick a fight with them, unless perhaps cable hasbara tells boomers they're building a reindeer-powered nuke.

The Tsaatan speak Dukhan and practice an ancient shamanic religion requiring them to pick a sacred reindeer from among the herd whose antlers are never amputated. To ensure this reindeer brings good fortune, they place a bowl of milk on its back and walk it around an ortz three times. If the bowl falls off to land facing upright toward the sky, it's an auspicious choice of reindeer. If this just keeps never happening, IDK what they do; you don't have a lot of options in this tough environment, and milk doesn't grow on trees. Incidentally, milk is extremely important throughout Mongolia, with airag, the fermented milk of mares, being the country's signature beverage. All Mongolians are lactose intolerant, but they just drink it constantly anyway, because they're also Chads. Don't let your whiny kid tell you xir lactose intolerance means xe can't possibly deign to stomach a normal diet; if it's good enough for men of the Altan Urag, it's good enough for xim.

In summary: the Tsaatan are cool, Mongolia is cool, I'm a Mongolboo, there hasn't been a good movie released this decade, listen to Hanggai and the Hu, practice khoomei and sygyt, and I'll see you next time with another Cool Thing or B-movie writeup or something; IDK.

The Littlest Dipygus

Theme: Sad Toys Factory - Mimmo D'Ippolito

The following was recovered from the diary of the renowned and oft-resented hoax-finder Marshall Hemming-Webster, on his decision not to publicise his findings in the case of Mary Ellen Lydecker of the Wexley Brothers' Itinerant Sideshow. We publish it here pursuant to his wishes that his private matters be made public not more nor less than one hundred years from the date of his passing.

Mary Ellen Lydecker was so beloved not only of her public but among the carneys too that when she fell pregnant not even the most niggardly of money-men could be heard to utter a word of complaint for the considerable cost incurred in her upkeep during the months she was unable to perform; nor did a single member of the company question the child's paternity, though not a word was shared among them nor any contract made toward that end. Indeed, so sweet was her demeanour that no question of her character was raised, and when she passed, among the little that she left behind was found a wedding band unadorned save for an inscription bearing her name and that of the man to whom she had been wed in secret, and whose testimony I later extracted to my satisfaction that both had believed her barren prior to the union, for it was thought that one so small could scarcely deliver a child under the best of circumstances; circumstances fate, in the event, did not see fit to bestow.

For on the night of Mary Ellen's labour, a great storm blew in from the east, unaccounted for, and in the hastened disassembly of the great tent a pole came loose and struck Delmer Cosgrove, the sawbones who attended to her care the length of her pregnancy, and killed him stone dead upon the instant. It was scarcely more than an hour hence that Mary Ellen's water broke, and she was hied in great haste to the medic's trailer, whereupon it fell to the grief-stricken nurses to do all they could for the delivery. And it was said by those who recalled their attendance on that mad night that the young dwarf's howls accompanying each contraction were as sweet and as melodious as ever was her singing in the carnival, and harmonised with the howling of the gale without; though in my years I have heard many a tale embellished with romantic flourishes of similar fancy.

In the event, however, it can scarcely be credited that aught but a cacophany of wailing must have greeted the reality of that ill-starred labour; for it transpired to the great sorrow of the sad world that the baby was misoriented and could not be righted, such that, however coaxed and prodded with forceps and sundry implements, the little legs descended first amid a stream of blood and water, and then nothing, for the little girl asphyxiated even then as one hanged, her umbilical cord wrapped noose-like around her little throat, so that the lifeless little legs descended between her mother's own in the manner of a dipygus; a striking connexion with which the sideshow folk were well acquainted. And it was perhaps a mercy to her that that poor unhappy mother passed from this world in that moment, whether overcome by grief or horror or from loss of blood or other medical complaints unknown; for no autopsy was permitted, for reasons that became clear.

For the company with one unspoken thought amid the flurry of emotions saw the grim sight and, acquainted with what costs had been sunk into their beloved star, knew only, as a beaver knows to build its dam, that the show must go on despite all the horror of the world, and they began to whisper "don't they look like...?" and "how long might they be thus preserved?". And so, under the blanket of black night and darker calculations and contrivances, the little bodies were spirited hence to still another sideshow, where they gathered quite another audience in their macabre suspension. Thus it is I can confirm, though I should scarcely dream of telling, that the much-discussed exhibit purporting to show the body of the world's first confirmed comorbidity of dipygus and dwarfism was not altogether a conventional hoax, but came of a far bleaker and more melancholic provenance.