Sword and Sorcery Tuesdays: Barbarian Queen!

Theme: Warrior Queen - Visigoth

Perhaps the most cheerfully tasteless of the brief sword and sorcery cycle of the 1980s was Barbarian Queen, whose first rape scene takes place in its first minute of screentime.

Wow, that escalated quickly. I mean that really got out of hand fast.

If The Warrior and the Sorceress was the first sword and sorcery western, Barbarian Queen is probably the first sword and sorcery rape/revenge flick, which concludes the plot summary. Deathstalker's Lana Clarkson stars as the titular heroine, who leads three more barbarian women (not to be confused with Amazons!, I guess) to avenge the raid on her village that saw randos slaughtered left and right, her groom-to-be captured as a slave for the gladiator pits, and everyone else raped by a faction of generic goons and also Karl Marx:

"A spectre is haunting Euraaaagh not my neckerino noooo pleeease help meee *gurgle* *sob*" - Karl Marx (Berenstein timeline).

In the flick's most haute-trash sequence, Clarkson finds herself bound in a torture dungeon to be raped by, to put it as diplomatically as possible, the happy merchant:

*balding movie analysis YouTuber voice* you see, the rack represents the casting couch, and the Jew represents err, umm, please stand by, we are having technical difficulties.

Was this the first flick written by /pol/? Astonishingly, yet not astonishingly at all, no! For the credited screenwriter is named Howard Cohen, making this drooling pervert his self-insert, making this one of the more damning cases of:

HOW will our heroine escape this average Hollywood screen test? If you guessed "by squeezing the torturer's dick with her barbarian vag muscles, forcing him to free her hands, then shoving him into a vat of acid he carelessly left directly behind him", you might just share the sadomasochistic paraphilias of Mr Cohen.

There are like twenty jokes I want to make here that my lawyers have advised me not to make.

Barbarian Queen may be the graveyard of good taste, but (therefore?) it was a hit and spawned a very nominal sequel (it has nothing to do with the original besides Clarkson returning) in which Cohen fails to beat the allegations by having her strapped to yet another rack. Hilariously, the sequel actually tries to pretend to be a stronk womyn empowerment flick, which I doubt even the densest gendyr stydies majyr bought for a second. Clarkson's career may never have escaped the bargain-bin ghetto of these flicks, but you may have heard of her for an even sadder reason: she was fatally shot by Phil Spector in 2003, in the most evil act of his career since producing John Lennon's Imagine.

RIP to this Farrah Fawcett tier hair game.

Sword and Sorcery Tuesdays: Amazons!!

Theme: Song of Women - The Hu

Actual character in Amazons!.

A clear precursor to Xena Warrior Princess, but R-rated and sans the cringe Three Stooges humour (Xena had its moments; it's just that they were all Ares or Callisto scenes), Amazons! stars nobody you've ever heard of and does it wrong by being somewhat competently made and having its two female leads get along (I know it's fantasy, but there are limits).

This sounds like something wahmen ask each other at the end of yoga class or whatever it is they do when they're not having pillow fights and purging.

Queen Budget Judy Dench As M sends Amazons! (1986) to find the only magic sword that can save their people from doom, for the queendom of Whateverland is menaced by Evil William Shakespeare:

"O, that I wore a glove upon mine wang, that I might clap thine cheeks" - Evil Shakespeare.

Bad Will Hunting has a pet lioness, which at first I surmised was just a nod to the curious Frazettaism of leaving big cats lounging around places, but it turns out it's actually a shapeshifting woman, or werelioness(?), whom he despatches to hunt down our heroines and bring him back the magic sword.

I aim to furnish my pad with a big cat just as soon as I can procure one.

I can't remember any of the characters' names, but I think you'll agree it doesn't matter. There's an evil traitor Amazon who sends her young-Britney-Spears-looking daughter along with our main protagonist to backstab her and steal the sword, but the two bond and become history's first genuine female friends. Will Brit Brit be able to slay her new bestie, or will guilt cause her to hesitate at the climactic moment???

"People can take everything away from you, but they can never take away your truth. But the question is, can you handle mine? They say I'm crazy, I really don't care. That's my prerogative."

"That is so deep."

If you remember Wonder Wahman and Captain Marvel releasing in more recent years, you will recall being amazed that the first ever action movie to star a wahman dropped twice in your lifetime. It must then be more astonishing still to learn that movies like this were commonplace and unremarked-upon decades prior. The Amazons! (1986) fight both against and alongside men, have their own internal conflicts, and never have to clap back epic style against a strawman secksist. Sure, it's pure cheese, but compared to the sovlless, sexless turboslop of the enlightened 21st Century, this disposable wad of fluff might as well be Good Shakespeare.

"All's well that ends with a happy ending" - Good Shakespeare.

Stop Motion Dreams: Q the Winged Serpent!

Theme: The Aztec Rock - The Aztecs

And speaking of David "Is That Rigor Mortis Or Are You Pleased To See Me" Carradine, it must not pass without comment that he was in Q, a movie whose premise sounds like something I would have made up: in the New York City of the early 1980s, an Aztec cult offers sacrifices to the god Quetzalcoatl, whose name I presume the producers thought no one who wanted to see this flick would be able to pronounce, hence the truncated title.

If nothing else it raised the bar for Halloween costumes.

It's widely believed that in the original lore Quetzalcoatl was supposed to be the one god who refused human sacrifice, making this whole premise a nonsense of routine Hollywood proportions. Furthermore, since the victims are flayed, it would have made more sense to have them offered up to Xipe Totec, as Aztec priests would wear the flayed skins of their victims in his honour.

There's a neat little bit of foreshadowing here with the waiter slicing some meat before the big gore payoff of the next scene. Never let it be said they phoned this one in.

Xipe Totec was the Tezcatlipoca of the east, while Quetzalcoatl was the Tezcatlipoca of the west. Just to confuse and annoy you, the Tezcatlipoca of the north was simply named Tezcatlipoca. That Tezcatlipoca's victims could be voluntary: if you had the dubious distinction of being chosen, you could cosplay as him for a year, serviced by four wives, themselves LARPing as Xochiquetzal, Atlatonan, Huixtocihuatl and Xilonen, before being dispatched to meet the real deal. Most sacrifices, however, were of slaves (tlacotin) taken in flower wars, and thus not voluntary at all. But fuck all that, because making it Quetzalcoatl allows the filmmakers to do this:

And you thought you'd go to the grave never once seeing Shaft yeeted to his death by a stop-motion dragon-bird-thing. Actually, you probably never thought that specifically.

The main plot actually involves this Norwood scale victim discovering Quetzalcoatl's giant egg in this nest in the Chrysler building, presumably because King Kong already used the Empire State.

This scene is like the ending of Lovecraft's The Outsider for dudes with thinning hair.

I can't remember the guy's name but he gives a stellar performance as a terminally annoying no-hoper roped into a heist who loses the money and leads the goons hoping to beat it out of him to their deaths in the nest before revealing its location to Carradine and Roundtree's bickering detective duo. The male pattern baldness poster boy is quite the charmer: an ex-junkie who we're told beats up his gf when he's not crying into her pillows. On learning he has an incredible secret to trade to the cops for his freedom, he has the brass balls to angle for a book deal and a cool million bucks too.

He's literally me (just kidding, I have a great hairline).

You watch the flick not knowing if he's going to have some kind of redemption but he never does, even when saved by Carradine from the Aztec priest, making him the most authentically repulsive protagonist ever to get away scot free after all his bullshit. Amazingly, after shooting the priest dead in baldie's hotel room, Carradine takes a do-not-disturb sign from the opposite door and hangs it with the please-enter side facing out on the room with the corpse inside. I don't know why he did that, other than to prank the hotel staff like the world's biggest dick.

"Lol" - David Carradine.

Alas, Quetzalcoatl itself (they sort of hedge on whether it's the actual god or a near-extinct animal simply worshipped by the cult) gets shrekt by heavy machine gun fire and craps out on this building that looks pleasingly sort of like a step pyramid. No sequel ever emerged, but the creature lives on in the hearts of stop motion and shitty B-movie enjoyers everywhere.

"No, it wasn't the airplanes...it was getting shot 5,236 times that killed the beast" - actual dialogue.

Sword and Sorcery Tuesdays: The Warrior and the Sorceress!

Theme: Squeeze Me Macaroni - Mr Bungle

Say what you like about David Carradine, at least he died doing what he loved. I was trying to come up with an autoerotic asphyxiation joke, but I choked at the finish. But lest Davey-poo be remembered solely for the manner of his demise, let it also be known that he starred in a complete beat-for-beat ripoff of A Fistful of Dollars called The Warrior and the Sorceress. Since Fistful is itself a complete ripoff of Yojimbo, this is fine, although it steps clean over a chance to correct the major flaw in its western precursor: if the Man with No Name is such a slick badass, deftly playing both sides against each other, why does he fuck up, get caught and catch a beatdown like his plan was made up one step at a time?

"Durr hurr I'm retarded, I don't have a clue what I'm doing" - the Man with No Name.

It's vaguely implied that the low-tech fantasy setting might actually be more of an after-the-end type setting, making this extremely possibly a Mad Max ripoff. Evidence for this is one throwaway line at the start, the water shortage device, and the possibility that some of the rogue's gallery of weirdos might be mutants. The sorceress of the title seems to channel her magic only by making a powerful sword towards the end, so The Warrior and the Blacksmith might have been a more apt title. Carradine's character is described as a "homerac", but it's never explained what this is, which is fine, both because I don't care and because fictional worlds feel more authentic if everyone just acts like whatever mumbo jumbo jargon they use is perfectly self-explanatory, like zoomers.

♪Pinky and the Brain, Brain, Brain, Brain...

Anyway, two rival warlords are at odds over the only well in the village. One is grim no-nonsense guy from central casting, while the other is this lardass with an overfamiliar interest in his pet alligator:

At least, I thought it was an alligator, but later in the movie it gets up and walks on its hind legs like a person, so IDK. I suspect it might have been inspired by that little cackling muppet that sits beside Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi. This one makes noises, but fatso seems to believe it's giving him advice, none of which pans out well for him. Insane? Fluent in alligator-personese? You decide!

At first Carradine offers his services as a hired goon to the body positivity guru, but it soon becomes clear his real agenda is to infiltrate srs bsns guy's following to free his captive, the sorceress, who has some unspecified past connection with the homeracs. His brilliant plan to do this involves springing her from her cell, then telling the guard it wasn't him. To be fair, it takes several minutes' worth of screentime longer than you'd think for Evil McDourface to catch on to this line of bullshit, making this actually a slightly better-thought-out plan than, say, hanging yourself naked in a closet to get a hardon.

Nevertheless, the bad guy sets a trap for Carradine, pre-emptively one-upping Total Recall's triple-titted hooker with a quadruply-enboobed dancer who knocks out Carradine with some sort of poisoned appendage that shoots out of her. He could have just drugged his drink or bonked him on the head with a mallet or something, but then there wouldn't have been a chick with four jugs in the movie, unless she was just standing around somewhere.

In accordance with our censorship policy, the actress's actual n*pples have been covered with serial child killer and cannibal Albert Fish, to avoid any offence. Since the bottom pair are prosthetics, there is no need to censor them.

The flick grows bored of generic villain and his reptile-rogering rival only slightly quicker than you will, so it ditches both for these dudes who I can't tell if they're meant to be mutants or Star Trek ayys or what:

"Do not keep saying 'got your nose'. That is NOT funny" - these guys.

Fortunately Carradine saves the day with the help of his nearly-always-naked deuteragonist and her blacksmithing ways, but since this is a western pastiche in sci-fantasy dressup, once the showdown is over, he doesn't hang around. I MEAN

"Well, Dave, we did it: we finally became: The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984) HD VHSrip (tops out at 240p)" - actual dialogue.

Sword & Sorcery Tuesday: Sorceress!

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?

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.

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:

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:

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).

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:

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.

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:

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.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Pale Rider!

Article theme: Sinnerman - 16 Horsepower

Clint Eastwood might have put the western out of its misery with Unforgiven, but first he gave it a more dignified sendoff with 1985's Pale Rider, a distillation of the thematic and archetypal core of the genre that leans into and loves the mythic side of it that Unforgiven would less interestingly repudiate.

Because Eastwood rarely bothered much with lighting for his exteriors, his face is often in shadow as he rides around, making him even more like Death on his horse.

Pale Rider is largely a retread of Shane and borrows moments from that film so brazenly we say "go for it", out loud to our PC monitors (you don't still have a TV set, right?). It also nods to Once Upon a Time in the West (the one that got away for Eastwood, who was the first choice for Bronson's role), in these guys' uniform dusters:

>tfw no friends to walk around with dressed like this :(((

No doubt a bigger western NERD could point out other little homages, but Pale Rider is also somewhat of a spiritual sequel to Eastwood's own High Plains Drifter. With his characteristically gritty, naturalistic style of filming, Eastwood might seem an unlikely candidate to delve into /x/ territory, but it's evident that Drifter's flirtation with the supernatural stuck with him. Both films concern a mysterious stranger coming to dispense terrible justice in a town afflicted by greed, corruption and sin, who may or may not be a ghost. In Drifter, Eastwood's stranger befriended a dwarf and made him mayor of the town; in Rider, his Preacher faces off with a giant (Richard Kiel, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker), evoking David Lunch's giant and dwarf casting in Twin Peaks in a subtle thematic pairing of the two films and a hint of kinship between the ghostly strangers and people verging on the look of fairytale beings.

This is the look I give manlets too. Not heightist, just don't like 'em.

With its red town and dream flashback sequences, High Plains Drifter is more overtly, garishly surreal, but it's the very subtlety of Pale Rider that makes it so unsettling and atmospheric, to say nothing of its brooding S-tier score. Moreover, Drifter caricatures its bad townsfolk, while Rider skewers a very real type of scumbag in its LaHood (Richard Dysart):

LaHood embodies the selfish boomercon businessman devoid of noblesse oblige, who sees his own people as kulaks in the way of line going up on chart. Preacher's righteous renunciation of his slimy materialism is invoked and catalysed by a young girl's prayer. LaHood's dark interiors contrast with the snow-white mountaintops whence Preacher rides. When his work is done, he rides back off into the white, perhaps until the next time, when the trumpets sound.