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.

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.

NEW EXCLUSIVE comic first look TEASER PREVIEW!!!

The Thinking Barbarian saga CONTINUES in LAST OF THE AMAZONS - Summer 2026!!!

Stop Motion Dreams: The Greek Myths of Ray Harryhausen!

Article theme: Pi Alpha Nu - Stormtroopers of Death

Brilliant genius Ray Harryhausen made some of the greatest and most memorable kinos of all time, which were my absolute jam throughout my childhood and manchildhood, and hold up just as well today - better, in fact, because they told classic tales of heroism, instead of lamely and redundantly ""deconstructing"" them.

"Nooo you can't just heckin kill evil monsters! I'm going to make a statue reversing this! If you were media literate you'd know evil monsters are misunderstood and cool heroes are the real monsters" - both unironic Moviebob fans.

Jason and the Argonauts

Remember to stay hydrated.

Jason opens with a major plot intrigue never to be resolved: Jason is rightful heir to the throne of Thessaly, but in exile because the wicked Pelias rose up and killed his parents. Jason saves Pelias from drowning, unaware of who he is, but Pelias is forewarned that Jason will take his revenge, so steers Jason into what he believes is an impossible quest to find the Golden Fleece on far-flung Colchis. You'd expect the movie to conclude with Jason returning in triumph to overthrow Pelias, but this never happens, indicating they were hoping for a sequel. Whatever the case, I never felt short-changed the forty or so times I watched this as a kid, because the movie is packed with great setpieces and imagery.

I always liked this notion of the gods playing chess with the lives of mortals, although now I look at it, this game looks more like Risk.

Jason becomes a proxy in a game between Zeus and Hera, who are on friendlier terms here than they were in Kevin Sorbo's Hercules. Hera grants Jason five wishes, through which he burns at an impressive pace. I suppose he could just wish for the Golden Fleece, but maybe that would be against the spirit of the game. Anyway, Jason assembles a crew for the voyage that includes Hercules, and Hylas, an upstart who presumes to beat him at discus throwing by skipping the discus like a stone over the water. There's a moment where Hercules takes a beat to react to this and then cries out with delight, hoisting the little guy aloft in the air. It's a scene of bro bonding kino numales will sadly never understand.

They then went on a panty raid and TP'd the crusty old dean's house.

Even sadlier, this pair is doomed to disappear from the story in tragic scenes suggesting a redemptive Hercules spinoff was also mooted, but never produced. For the Argonauts run afoul of TALOS, who does this to their boat:

He swaps his sword to his other hand to do this because he's right-handed. Fucking imagine having that kind of attention to detail.

One thing about Harryhausen is that he knew the limitations of his medium of choice, and wisely opted to animate subjects in whom slightly stilted movements would seem natural, like giant bronze statues and, most famously of all, skeletons. For this is the one with the most famous stop-motion sequence of all time: the skeleton fight!

The design on the shield to the right of frame looks a bit like the Kraken that would later appear in Clash of the Titans. It could just be a coincidence, or maybe Harryhausen had a prototype already in mind, making this a reverse Easter egg. In support of this conjecture, note that the one behind it is clearly Medusa.

Harryhausen already dropped one banger skeleton fight scene in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, but this one is far more complex, with seven skeletons all fighting Jason's crew at once. The logistical legwork required to make this sequence land is literally incomprehensible to anyone alive today.

To put this in perspective, I can't even draw a fucking skeleton.

That wide shot alone must have taken more effort than most entire films, but the action doesn't tap out at a few sword swipes and shield blocks. Here our hero yeets a skeleton over a cliff using its charging momentum against it:

Come on, dub it with a slide whistle.

Beheading also works:

His surprised reaction to losing his head is so genuine. There are A-list stars in Hollywood right now who can't sell this much human emotion, and this is a muppet of a skeleton.

We might, however, question the utility of stabbing one between the ribs:

Nooo not the air between my ribs! My only weakness nooo!

Clash of the Titans

Me on the crapper.

Harryhausen's final epic saw him retvrn to the Greek myths at the dawn of the 1980s, when Star Wars was all the rage and Conan just around the corner. Clash concerns the legend of Perseus, who, with the aid of an invisibility helmet, must tame Pegasus, the winged horse, rescue Princess Andromeda from marriage to the deformed Calibos, follow a golden owl to the three witches from MacBeth to learn the way to slay Medusa, whose gaze can turn any living creature to stone, and use her severed head to in like manner petrify the Kraken, so saving the princess chained by the sea's edge in sacrifice to Thetis, Calibos' vengeful mother, who has an ongoing beef with Zeus. This might seem like a convoluted plot, but, like all Harryhausenkinos, it largely serves as a shuttle between one setpiece and the next.

weee

Because it dropped at such a specific moment there's a clear time-capsule appeal to Clash: Perseus' pet golden owl boops and beeps like R-2 D-2, and he's given friendly guidance by Mickey (Burgess Meredith) of Rocky fame. In fact the cast was so packed with famous names the guy that actually played Perseus got eighth billing in the end credits, being relegated to the "Mortal" category of cast:

Brutal.

I remember as a kid I always looked away when the Medusa came onscreen in case she turned me to stone. I choose to champion this as evidence of the power of cinéma instead of further proof that I'm retarded, but the memory stays vivid either way. Nor was Medusa the only formative nightmare fuel in the picture: Calibos looked creepy as hell too:

IDK why they chose to switch between an actor for the closeups and a model for the wides. Maybe synching the animation to the character's dialogue would've been prohibitively time-consuming. We should take a moment to appreciate his taste in furniture: this is the edgiest chair I've ever seen (I want it).

But the coolest of all Harryhausen creatures hands-down is the Kraken. Though invariably depicted as an octopus or giant squid in lesser hands, the master said fuck that and designed the sum of all cool monsters land-locked or aquatic. Harryhausen's Kraken is like King Kong meets the Creature from the Black Lagoon but with four arms and an immense crocodilianesque tail. Its arms even appear to have little suckers on them, making them halfway between arms and tentacles.

"I endorse the aquatic ape theory and the historicity of Atlantis" - Ray Harryhausen (I assume).