• Directed by Don Coscarelli
• Written by Don Coscarelli and Paul Pepperman (based very loosely on a novel by the uncredited Andre Norton)
• Starring
  • Marc Singer
  • Tanya Roberts
  • Rip Torn
  • John Amos
• Produced by Don Coscarelli, Paul Pepperman, and Sylvio Tabet

It’s one of those interesting parallels: What Robert E. Howard’s heroic fantasy tales were to “sword & sorcery” fiction, the Conan the Barbarian movie was to barbarian movies. Unfortunately, the movie was (as far as I’m concerned) a pale echo of Howard’s tales, as derivative and plodding as any of the uncredited Conan ripoffs. So the barbarian film subgenre that flourished after the film’s 1982 release (with the Italians overrepresented, naturally) was a crummy copy of a crummy copy.

Given the parentage and siblings, then, The Beastmaster did comparatively okay.

So one day, Thor says to himself, “Hey! I’m tired of being the goodie-goodie…”

Now, I can’t say that The Beastmaster went into production as a direct consequence of Conan the Barbarian’s release; the dates are awful close together. But on the other hand, the idea of two movies so similar coming out so close together is a coincidence that’s a little hard to swallow (especially since The Beastmaster was an independent flick, so there wouldn’t be the cross-pollinating Hollywood gestalt that one sees with summer blockbusters these days). So I won’t go to the bother of pointing out similarities between the movies; you can do that on your own.

The Beastmaster begins as most sword & sorcery films do, with an ominous prophecy that the heavy is going to eventually have his ass handed to him. In this case, the heavy is Maax (Rip Torn in a huge false nose, and it’s pronounced “MAY-ux”), underhanded advisor to King Zed (Rod Loomis) of Arak, and devotee of the god Ar, who demands unborn child sacrifice. (Actually, as shown later, Ar’s plenty happy with just about any kind of human sacrifice — born, unborn, child, adult…) He’s also got a hankering for the kingdom, but his Macbeth-ish three witches tell him that Zed’s unborn son will be his undoing. As usual, instead of doing in the child, he arranges for it to be the next sacrifice, in a unique fashion: He has one of the witch women lead a cow into the royal bedchamber (I’m guessing some palace guard got his walking papers for letting the livestock wander free), where the baby is magically transferred from the Queen to the cow. The witch then leads the cow out of the city to a secluded spot where she can cut open the cow, remove the baby, brand the baby’s hand with the mystical symbol of Ar, and then sacrifice it. (You know, I’m sure there are a lot of people that think that my religion is ungainly, but jeez!)

All of which would have gone according to plan, if a lone traveller (Ben Hammer) hadn’t passed by, seen what was going on, taken offense to child sacrifice, and butchers the witch. He takes the child home and adopts him, and so young Dar (played in his youth by Billy Jacoby) grows up as an Emerite, being taught by his adopted father the manly arts of swordfighting and farming, as well as exhibiting a trick or two of his own, such as having a strange connection with animals. He grows to manhood as Marc Singer, just in time for the evil Jun Horde to ride into town and massacre everyone including his dad (!) and his dog (!!), leaving him alive but unconscious.

“My quest for revenge begins. But first — a Dollar Cuts.”

When he awakens, though, he finds that his animal powers have increased, allowing him to see through the eyes of a friendly eagle (or hawk or some kind of bird of prey — birds have never been my specialty). He sets out on a revenge quest, picking up some other avatars on the way: Two ferrets whom he names Podo and Kodo, and a “panther” (a tiger spray-painted black) named Rhu or Ru or Roo or something (hey, it’s not like the tiger’s name was listed in the credits). He also instantly adds two inches to his hair length.

Hey, animals are all well and good, but then Dar finds something that makes the animals pale in comparison: A woman. And not just any woman — Kiri (Tanya Roberts), bathing topless with a companion. (Remember when you could get topless bathing in your PG flick?) Having apparently watched Planet of the Apes too many times in his childhood, he sends the ferrets to steal her top from the shoreline, and then he uses the panther to scare her into his “protection.” Oh, and he also steals a kiss for payment. You know, aside from that revenge quest and his nifty animals, he’s seeming less like a hero and more like a boor at this point. He finds out that she’s a temple slave in Arak, where Maax has taken over, which just happens to be the direction he’s heading.

Before that, though, he and the animals have a run-in with some weird bat creatures or something. Anyone who can explain this to me, please do; the bat critters apparently digest things by wrapping their membranous wings around their victims; when they open their wings, there’s nothing left but bones and fillings. But they don’t kill Dar, apparently because he’s accompanied by the eagle, which looks an awful lot like the Maltese Falcon idol in the middle of their camp, and anyone travelling with a bird must be okay in their book. Instead, they give him a medallion with a bird on it and send him on his way.

Hey, I just report the movies. I don’t write them.

An age when men were real men, women were real women, and loincloths were real short.

By the time Dar finally shows up at Arak (which is surrounded by a pitch-filled moat — this is important, you know), Maax is full into the child sacrifice routine. Dar manages to rescue one little girl by having the eagle grab it from the edge of the fiery pit, despite the fact that the kid weighs at least as much as the bird does. Then he sets about rescuing — who else? — Kiri. None of the other slavegirls are much concern to him, nor is the king, who’s imprisoned inside the Mayan-looking pyramid on which the sacrifices are made.

However, he does fall in with a couple of other people trying to free the king, namely the king’s old guard Seth (John Amos with a Hari Krishna tail) and Tal (Josh Milrad), the king’s son and heir to the throne. Together they rescue Kiri (when they go for the rescue, there’s a whole gaggle of slavegirls; as soon as the rescue’s over, the other girls conveniently disappear). Then they set about to rescue the king, which takes up plenty of time, and then they defeat Maax, which takes more time, and then there’s the climactic battle as the Jun Horde comes to attack Arak, and we find out that pitch is actually a wonderful explosive.

I kinda sped through the last bit for a couple of reasons. One, you can watch the movie yourself to see how it ends; two, dear heavens, this movie was really starting to stretch out to infinity.

“It says it right in my contract: ‘Mr. Torn’s nose shall be no less than two-thirds the size of Mr. Singer’s nose.’”

See, The Beastmaster was directed by Don Coscarelli, whose previous movie had been the seminal but slow-moving Phantasm. Now, that movie was supposed to be injecting a strange dreamlike surreality into suburbia, and thus a creeping pace was appropriate, if not always enjoyable. But with sword & sorcery, you’ve got a different set of cliches, most of which are liabilities: Thin characterization, simplistic good-vs-evil conflict, dialogue stilted enough to support the houses in the Emerite village. Adding a glacial pace doesn’t help things.

Given all of the above, then, how can one explain the fact that The Beastmaster has emerged as one of a handful of best-loved barbarian films from the ’80s? Well, here are the two biggest reasons:

1) It may not be great, but it’s well-intentioned. Most of the other barbarian flicks of the era, as previously noted, were knocked out by the Italians in an effort to cash in; by contrast, The Beastmaster, as with all of Don Coscarelli’s movies, was made because he wanted to make it. Thus, there are attempts at lyricism and symbolism; there are also enough helicopter-shot bird’s-eye-view sequences to make The Lord of the Rings seem positively earthbound. The animal work is also good; it’s pretty obvious that the actors were interacting closely and frequently with the tiger. That’s pretty impressive right there.

And on the import DVD, you even get to hear the original theme song: “Ebony and Ivory.”

2) The right place at the right time, baby. The Beastmaster hit the theaters in 1983 and did pretty damned poorly, but that’s just the era in which cable TV was taking off. Cheap ‘cuz it bombed, unbloody violence, minimal nudity that could be edited out without doing damage to the plot, and a concept that would keep adolescent boys tuned it… Could there be a better movie for heavy rotation? The movie’s cable popularity explains why there was finally a sequel in 1991, and why it was made specifically for cable; it also explains why so many Gen-X genre fans love this movie far beyond its merits, as it crept onto their radars during puberty, before their capacity for critical thought had gelled. (Keith at Teleport City recently did an entire month of “movies I thought were cool when I was an adolescent,” and though this one didn’t show up, it certainly would have fit in.)

Me, well, you all know the sob-story about my two-channel youth, so you understand why I don’t have the long-established devotion to this flick. It’s adequate, and stands tall among its unambitious genre fellows. All the same, I can’t help but wish that Coscarelli had made this after the (to my eyes) better-than-the-original Phantasm 2 taught him the effectiveness of picking up the pace.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 89 — plus 1 cow, 1 dog, 1 ferret, and about two dozen horses
• breasts: 6
• explosions: 5
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• spray-painted tigers: 1 — and really, isn’t that plenty?
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 8
  • Rod Loomis (King Zed) played “Dr. Paul Manheim” in the TNG episode “We’ll Always Have Paris”
  • Tony Epper (the Jun leader) played “Drunken Klingon” in the DS9 episode “Apocalypse Rising”
  • Diamond Farnsworth (one of the marauders) is Scott Bakula’s stunt double on Enterprise
  • Billy Hank Hooker (one of the Jun priests) did stunts on Star Trek: First Contact
  • Tommy J. Huff (another of the Jun priests) did stunts in Star Trek 2, 5, and 6
  • Eddie Donno (yet another Jun priest) did stunts in Star Trek 2, 3, and First Contact
  • Eddie Hice (a Jun priest — are you noticing a trend yet?) did stunts in Star Trek 4
  • Freddie Hice (damn, those Jun priests get around) did stunts in Star Trek 5