Theme: (Flesh and Blood) Sacrifice - Poison
In 1982, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred as Conan the Barbarian (1982). But did you know that 1982 also saw the release of 1982's Sorceress, starring hot twins as hot twins?
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| A threesome with hot twins is not incest unless their clits touch. A wise wino taught me that. |
Evil sorcerer Traigon has promised evil god Calamari his firstborn as a sacrifice, but his wife refuses to tell him which twin was born first, buying enough time for Krona, the wise mentor from every shitty martial arts flick, to intervene and defeat him. Traigon's magic saves him to return twenty years hence, in which time Krona hides the twin girls with a family of his acquaintance, who decide to raise them in disguise as boys to throw off Traigon's goons who might come looking for them in the meantime.
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| Their magically glowing slow motion Baywatch run does nothing to make them less visibly stacked. |
This might be the least convincing boy disguise since Princess Fawzia's in The Adventures of Hajji Baba, but it's got nothing on the authentic period detail of the setting, for Sorceress is best described as noncommittally ambiguously set in India:
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| This chick with the pet Bigfoot is as convincing as it gets. |
This is more readily inferred from random dialogue and randomer plot beats than from the sets and costumes, most of which look more Greco-Roman: the warriors are referred to as kshatriyas throughout and, when the wise Krona returns in the wake of our heroines' adoptive family getting killed, he immediately commits suicide by sati:
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| Japanese men when they clock into work at 07:01. |
There's also a Viking who joins our underachieving crossdressers for no reason, along with his sidekick, a satyr who looks like Satan and communicates only in goat noises. I think this character was meant to be an endearing animal companion sort of like Chewbacca in Star Wars, but instead he's the creepiest little shit I've ever seen in a movie (though, in the interest of full disclosure, I've never watched anything with Ezra Miller in it).
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| Look out, Gimli! Fucking Beelzebub is behind you! |
Finally, our discount fellowship pick up Erlick, the failson of a noble line of kings or something who is bumming around Eurasia cheating at dice and hoping to score. He's an amiably fun counterpart to the twins, and provides the movie with a scene of hilarity and suspense in which he's nearly impaled by sliding down a greased pole onto a sharpened stake:
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| I wish this dude had won an Oscar so they could show this clip of him narrowly avoiding getting bummed by six feet of spike set to some soothing classical. |
More fun shenanigans later, Traigon attempts to sacrifice one of the twins, but the gang rally to save her, so he just yeets the ambiguously Indian femme fatale into the flames instead, which got a solid retard guffaw out of me and renders the entire plot moot, as Calamari is content with this last-minute substitute.
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| He looks so pleased. |
But wait! The other twin remembers something Krona told them before taking a flame bath of his own: an incantation that summons a good god to do battle with Calamari:
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| In the cosmic game of rock-paper-scissors, ripped bat-lion shooting lightning out its eyes beats floating head with cosmetic burns. |
Sure, you've never heard of Sorceress and it has nothing on Conan the Barbarian or Clash of the Titans, but it's a good-natured lower-budget spin on the same schtick, with enough bizarre left-turns and memorable quirks to make it an endearing also-ran, in the same ballpark as Red Sonja or The Last Legion, at any rate. Watch it after a long shitty day at work sometime.
