• Produced and directed by Sylvio Tabet
• Written by Ken Hauser, Doug Miles, R.J. Robertson, Sylvio Tabet, and Jim Wynorski, based (hah!) on the novel by Andre Norton
• Starring
  • Marc Singer
  • Wings Hauser
  • Sarah Douglas
  • Kari Wuhrer

I’m sure that, at one point, this seemed like a really good idea. After all, The Beastmaster had found a surprisingly accepting home on cable TV, where it lingered for most of a decade. Why not make a cheap sequel which, ostensibly given a theatrical release, will then follow its older sibling onto the perpetual cable circuit?

And from a balance-sheet perspective it worked. Beastmaster 2 probably logged even more hour on cable TV than its predecessor, if the highly questionable data in my memories holds true. It even managed to spawn yet another sequel (this one directly made-for-cable) a scant four years later, which led kept the lineage alive for the syndicated TV show in 1999.

Nah, I’m… uh… staring at that dangly ring thing. Honest.

And yet, I can’t bring myself to believe that I’m the only person who thinks that this is an incredibly forgettable movie. The first one may have had its share of turgid lameness, but by golly, it was sincere turgid lameness. This one’s just showing up to turn a buck.

See, immediately after the death of King Zed in the first movie, the kingdom is taken over by the evil sorceror Arklon (Wings Hauser). (Nobody ever says what became of boy-king Tal.) Naturally, there’s a rebellion, and naturally, thanks to budget strictures, it’s entirely off-screen, but we’re assured it’s there. All we know is that Dar (Marc Singer), the Beastmaster himself, is a part of it.

Dar is captured and brought before Arklon, but escapes thanks to his animal friends: The eagle Shekar, the two ferrets Podo and Kodo (either these are the two ferret pups we saw at the end of the original, or we’re conveniently ignoring that one of the two became ferret flambe at the end of the original), and the tiger Ruh, who is honestly a tiger this time, instead of masquerading as a “panther” (probably because they couldn’t find someone willing to spraypaint a tiger this time out). Arklon is, quite naturally, Jes’ Plain Evil, and has all of the mwa-ha-hah dialogue you’d expect; compared to him, the solitude-loving Dar is practically mute. Which is good, because as soon as he opens his mouth, one-liners have a nasty tendency to emerge. (Example: Dar and Ruh have made mincemeat of the dime-a-dozen lackies, and the eagle has just attacked Arklon and scarred up his face. Dar to the ferrets: “Let’s get out of here before someone really gets hurt.”)

I was already gearing up to do a Phantom of the Opera joke, and then the script made if for me.

These early scenes do have a certain charm, thanks to the fairly nifty locations in Glen Canyon, Utah. (They had to have interesting natural backdrops to make up for the lack of budget to recreate the bronze-age town from the original.) However, they’re about to spend all of their money in one place.

An indeterminate length of time later, Arklon (now sporting a bad-in-black leather halfmask over his scars) is still picking off incredibly poorly organized rebels, using his trusty double-ended raygun artifact with badly-animated green power beams. He’s approached by the witch Lyranna (Sarah Douglas), who tells him of a means whereby he can rule the entire world. And she shows him — the Guardian of Forever! Well, maybe not exactly, but it is a stone arch in the middle of nowhere, and when she twinkles her fingers over it, it shows them the far-off and exotic land of Los Angeles!

But more importantly, she shows him of a newfangled device, the Neutron Detonator, which is about to be tested in our world — with the ability to possibly destroy a continent, or maybe even the whole world. (It’s 1991, Russia’s no longer much of a threat, and we’ve got no other enemies worth taking out a continent for — why in the hell would we be making one of these?!) Arklon realizes he could rule his world, though why he’d want to rule a barren section of Utah when he could use the same device to rule California is beyond me. Unfortunately, there’s some kind of problem with actually entering the portal, which frankly, I never understood; sometimes people can go through, sometimes there’s some kind of time limit, sometimes it takes a blast from Arklon’s double-balled lasergun. I think it’s a plot-sensitive magic here.

You noticed Jim Wynorski’s name in the credits, right?

For instance, Lyranna says that Arklon can’t get through without her help — but from the L.A. side, spoiled rich snot Jackie Trent (Kari Wuhrer) has no trouble blasting through from her side, which just happens to look like the brick wall at the end of an alley, followed by two police cars. What are the police doing chasing her, you ask? Why, because of her oh-so-endearing habit of speeding like a bat out of hell, and then trying to evade the cop cars instead of just pulling over. After all, she’s a senator’s daughter — she shouldn’t have to put up with normal people’s rules, right? (You may think from my description of her that her character arc is to mature and stuff, right? Wrong. What I’ve given above are supposedly her sympathetic characteristics. She doesn’t learn anything. And I get to spend the rest of the movie in her company. Wa hoo.)

In the meantime, by the way, Dar has been evading Arklon’s goons, with the help of an ugly man-in-suit monster that lives in a swamp and turns out to be Dar’s aunt (!), who reveals to him that he has a destiny to kill his older brother (!!) to prevent darkness and evil from spreading across the land. Older brother? Half of the premise of the first movie was that Dar was actually the heir to King Zed, but didn’t know it because he had been abducted by baddies. Now the story is apparently that his older brother met the same fate, and was likewise presumed dead. (Of course, if Zed had indeed lost a child previous to Dar, he might have instituted tighter safety precautions in the palace — tight enough that, say, a witch leading a cow wouldn’t have made it into the royal bedchamber unchallenged. Am I thinking too much here? You betcha.)

So it is fortuitous that, when Jackie manages to elude Arklon’s bumbling henchmen (everyone wave to Robert Z’Dar’s chin) and run out of gas in the middle of the desert, she is found by Dar and his travelling menagerie. Which means we get to hear a neverending stream of Valley Girl inanity as she misses the boat on where she is, assuming Dar to be some solitary hippy zookeeper. And when Arklon’s boys finally track her down and capture her, Dar leaps ot the rescue — and everyone leaps through the portal into L.A.

Which is where things deteriorate from mediocre to just plain sucky. Because here we get nothing but the same tired “fish out of water” jokes that have characterized time travel films since, well, the beginning of time. (Not that this is really a time travel film — despite the title, everyone treats the two sides of the portal as parallel worlds.) Arklon and Lyranna take Jackie and go shopping — ha! And Arklon destroys the store — ha! And Dar is surrounded by the police, and Ruh is carted off to the zoo (where he can safely remain off-screen so we don’t have to worry about filming a tiger running around L.A.), and the police are totally dense — ha! And the two main cops are a fat black guy (James Avery) and a short Jewish guy (Robert Fieldsteel) — ha! And then Dar escapes from the police with ridiculous ease, and meets up with Jackie, who has escaped from Arklon with ridiculous ease as well — ha! Boy, the wittiness just keeps coming.

“Where are we going? And will I be able to find my career again once we get there?”

Oh, and along the way, Dar has figured out that — big surprise here — Arklon is the prophesied older brother. Which really throws that whole “rebellion” thing into disarray. I mean, I thought that the reason they were fighting against Arklon was yeah, because he was evil, but also because he usurped the throne. Now we find out he’s the legitimate heir after all. This is problematic at best. (Am I thinking about it too much? Indubitably.)

So, while Dar’s learning about such things as cars and refrigerators and television, plus the proper use of the term “rock and roll” and the word “asshole” (I’m surprised that we wait a full hour before someone mistakes Dar for a surfer), Arklon is off stealing the neutron detonator. How? Simple. He locates the ranking general in a bar, gets him drunk, mindmelds with him (handy, that), and takes his hat and coat. And with that clever disguise (note that he’s still got a long ponytail and a freaking black leather mask covering half his face), he simply waltzes into the Strategic Air Command base (conveniently close to metropolitan L.A.), salutes a few people, then walks down to the lab which all of two lackadaisical MP’s are guarding, and steals the device from the two scientists who have just armed the damned thing, with a thirty-minute countdown. Let’s reiterate, in case you missed it: In a lab within commuting distance of downtown Los Angeles, with security flimsier than that at your local public library, we have now started a thirty-minute countdown on a bomb that could easily destroy the continent BEFORE we’ve transported the bomb to the test site.

Forget it. Blow the continent up already. It’s not like anything displayed in this atrociously stupid version of reality is worth saving.

And it’s as if, once that stupidity barrier has been broken, everything turns unimaginably stupid. Dar finds Arklon simply by following him back to the alley. The police also arrive, and Arklon, instead of aiming his doodad at the portal and jumping back through, instead runs away from the portal, over the police cars. And the army sends the senile general in charge of the project to be on hand to disarm the device, even though the two scientists from before are still hale and hearty, and in possession of all their faculties. And the final battle takes place at the zoo, if for no other reason than to give Dar an excuse to get Ruh back.

Like I honestly care anymore.

How underwhelming.

Even before things take a Titanic-like bottoms-up, there’s an oppressive feeling that nobody involved in making this happen (i.e., the director and full complement of writers) take any of this seriously. I’m not just talking about a fun-loving lightheartedness, I’m saying that not a soul gave a good goddamn about making a worthwhile movie. The script seems like one of those games from high school creative writing courses, where one person writes a page and passes it on to the next person. Director Sylvio Tabet was one of the producers on the original Beastmaster, and that’s probably how he got the rights to make the sequel, but that doesn’t mean he understood anything about making an enjoyable movie.

I note with some bitter amusement that Andre Norton’s “based on the book by” credit is in the opening crawl (she had her name taken off the original in disgust, since the movie bore only the faintest passing resemblance to her novel). Immediately thereafter, Don Coscarelli and Paul Pepperman (who wrote the script for the original) are given one of those “Based on characters created by” credits. Looking at that, I could only think, Now Coscarelli and Pepperman probably know how Norton felt when the first movie came out.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 35
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 17
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 6
  • Charles Hyman (Arklon’s pet inquisitor) played “Lt. Konmel” in the TNG episode “Heart of Glory”
  • Michael Berryman (cameoing as a pilgrim at the end) played a Starfleet officer in Star Trek 4 and “Captain Rixx” in the TNG episode “Conspiracy”
  • Lawrence Dobkin (the senile general) directed the classic episode “Charlie X,” and played “Ambassador Kell” in the TNG episode “The Mind’s Eye”
  • Wayne Pere (“Punker #2″) played “Guill” on the Voyager “Random Thoughts”
  • Dan Woren (“Policeman #1″) played a Borg in First Contact
  • Frank Welker (the vocal talent who provided the sounds for all the animals) did Spock’s screams in Star Trek 3 and the voice of an alien creature in the Voyager episode “Nothing Human” (as well as other voices in the videogame Star Trek: Starfleet Command: Volume II: Empires at War)