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.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Legend of the Surami Fortress!

Theme: Stein um Stein - Rammstein

Let me tell you a tale...

Everyone knows Sergei Paradjanov for his seminal 60s classic Sayat Nova (aka The Colour of Pomegranates), an ostensible biopic of Armenia's most celebrated poet. It was obvious to everyone that Paradjanov had the most singular talent and vision among filmmakists since Ozu, but the Soviet regime did not approve of his flagrant flouting of socialist realism formula and penchant for stirring up nationalist sentiment in the benighted SSRs, so he spent four years in a prison camp on what nearly everyone agrees were bogus charges of rayping a Party functionary before being released, only to reprise his controversy-courting schtick in the mid-80s because, in his words, "lmfao yolo nigga idgaf".

Paradjanov surveying all the territories occupied by his balls (1985, colourised).

While this absolute madladdery merits celebration in itself, the fact that Legend of the Surami Fortress adapts so effortlessly Paradjanov's patented succession of album-cover-worthy compositions and bizarre vignettes to a more traditionally narrative folkloric template makes one wonder why no indie hipster fast-tracked by H*llywood has tried to make a franchise flick this way, until one remembers that indie hipsters don't actually watch arthouse films or have integrity, audacity or character. Yes, Legend, set in a bizarrely stylised medieval Georgia, has a plot, albeit one the great filmmakists often seem indifferent to conveying with any great clarity or urgency, in favour of complete non-sequiturs like this:

????

The plot concerns a fortress which repeatedly collapses, to the great consternation of the Czar, and the intertwining fates of various slaves, merchants, warriors and clairvoyants that culminate in a solution: a young man must sacrifice his life to be entombed within the foundation of the building, ensuring its stability for the ages. This might seem like an odd idea, but similar legends are found as far off as Japan, so many cultures shared it. I myself have immured several victims in my foetid crawlspace, but less to consecrate the building and more because they wouldn't stop wearing her face.

Neighbours know better than to bother me or ask too many questions. You heard nothing; you smelled nothing.

But Legend's impact lies in its striking visual style over the vicissitudes of plot anyway. Closeups are few, lending the objectivity of detachment that makes the stagey imagery stand out in its naked strangeness. Compare Kurosawa's Dreams and Terayama's Pastoral: To Die in the Country for examples of similar atmospheric derealisation. Off-symmetrical framing is another motif, introducing subtle dissonance into an ordered world:

I'm showing these compositions to Stanley Kubrick to watch his eye twitch later this evening, but you're not invited.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Beast!

Theme: We Never Learn - Clan of Xymox

Like Jawbreaker, The Beast is what I'd call a problematic fave if I spoke YouTuber With Pending Sexual Misconduct Allegations. This is because it cannot escape the Boomer Truth framework in which (or, very occasionally, against which) virtually all movies have been made. Fortunately, as you know, I have no hangups about liking what I like despite the soy-soaked motivations of its authors, because everything good is derived from a Platonic form of truth crudely translated by uncomprehending mortal vessels blind to its higher significance and resonances in the grand celestial design.

Goddammit, Pat, you are NOT steering this into another hidden depth. I MEAN it, I will turn this tank RIGHT ROUND.

So it is that an H*llywood m*vie doing everything it can to frame its critique of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan within safe regime-compliant terms wound up forecasting eerily the Yoo Ess Ay's own clusterfuck of an adventure in the Graveyard of Empires some decade-and-a-half later. For The Beast has its cast of commie marauders speak English in their own American accents, so if you happened to tune in while channel-hopping on TV (a primitive form of YouTube watched by early homo algorithmus), you might briefly think you'd stumbled on a 2000s movie about then-current events, except that the camera doesn't flail about as though the cameraman were being electrocuted, which for some reason everyone thought looked super cool in the 2000s.

"Uhh don't you think this would look better if we couldn't see what the fuck was going on?" - every director in the 2000s at once.

While most war movies suck and are boring (to say nothing of their propaganda content, which is on a par with newspapers), The Beast is audiovisual candy from its first frame to its last, and makes you wonder why they quit using those dreamy synth scores around the same time everyone traded in their Poison and Cinderella T-shirts for flannel. The detached, crystalline soundscapes and aerial tracking shots along Martianesque canyons render what you're seeing like a daydream, lighter than air, which is no small feat for a movie that opens with a Pashtun village massacre that culminates in a guy getting crushed to death feet-first by the titular tank.

They're doing this to me at work tomorrow.

I could prate on about the obvious parallels between bloated empires ruled by geriatrics overextending with Middle East wars but every day is Groundhog Day and you don't need to hear "I Got You Babe" again from me. The parallel less often drawn is how all libtard empires justify their wars of aggression with appeals to that perennial idol, pRoGrEsS. The Soviet tank crew's Afghan comrade justifies selling out his people on the basis that the Sovs will modernise his backwards homeland, citing laughably outmoded theory of the promised future "dialectical materialism", which is hardly less laughable than the neocon slime bewailing the loss of the Gendyr Stydies Dypartments at the sham universities they propped up during their later occupation of the same unhappy country.

Soviet/neocon outreach to the Afghans (1982-2022, colourised).

Growing up is realising there's not only zero daylight between commies and libtards, but as little between said libtards and neocons. It's all one big slurry of murderous, bottomlessly stupid garbage, every word of it premised on Boomer Truth.

So while this cringe would-be mic-drop seems merely trite if you put any stock in the writers/directors/miscellaneous rapists as the authors of the work, it's actually deeply revealing and thematically on point: the only language the smartest pinko in the crew can grasp onto to gesture vaguely at the truth is LE BAD NATZEES, just as he can appeal only to the women who attempt to stone him with one of three words in their language he's learned the whole time he's been in their country.

Hezbollah bros brief me on the finer points of their Lebanon defence strategy (2026, colourised).

The tank commander tells a story of the battle of Stalingrad in which he was pressed into use as a child soldier using Molotov cocktails to disable German tanks. Sooner than realise his own loathsome regime (who were the majority stakeholder in the invasion of Poland and had already murdered millions in peacetime) was the problem, he and all his fuckup crew can only project onto their archetypal shadow enemy. In Boomer Truth tHe NaZiS are simultaneously unique in their cartoonish evilness, but also every undesirable act by anyone today means they're tHe NaZiS, because tHe NaZiS are the collective boogeyman for generations of arrested children.

This tired maymay is unintentionally brilliant because it perfectly demonstrates the maximum level of introspection permissible under the Boomer Truth Regime: are the objects of the daily Two Minutes' Hate, in fact, The Bad Guys? Why yes, comrade! Back to work, no further questions.

It's worth mentioning that this film was shot in isr**l, an actual supremacist ethnostate with a history of nothing but ethnic cleansing and genocide for lebensraum, whose self-described master race lobby their Epstein colony's congress night and day with definitions of aNtIsEmItIsM that make it a specific thoughtcrime to compare them to the hated natzee shadow archetype, thus making it impossible for the Newspeak speaker even to articulate the thought that anything they do is bad, because badness = natzism and natzism badness.

But since, for now, we have the words to do so, let's reflect once more that murdering the German civilisation in World War Heckin Two did nothing to remove ethnosupremacism from the world, only to clear the way for a far more powerful, dangerous and evil ethnosupremacist clique to seize global control unopposed. For this reason, there can no longer be any defence of the boomoid myth; you must confront it, and repent.

Next week: Dude Where's My Car!!!11