The Sword and the Sorcerer
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: George Maharis, Kathleen Beller, Lee Horsley, Richard Lynch, Simon MacCorkindaleDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 99 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2001-04-24
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay
Movie Reviews of The Sword and the Sorcerer
Movie Review: Trashy fantasy adventure at its best
Summary: 5 Stars
This outrageous, gratuitous, exploitative, low-budget fantasy epic has to be one of the most entertainingly misguided movies ever. The whole thing is played with the rousing, happy enthusiasm of a children's adventure film, but it's loaded with blood and gore, off-color humor, nudity, and sex. It also seems to have been inspired by everything from "Excalibur" to "Conan the Barbarian" to "Star Wars" to various gory late-70's and early 80's horror movies.
Lee Horsely plays Talon, a rogue barbarian who travels around a fairy tale kingdom on his horse, looking for adventure. He dresses like Conan, smirks and wisecracks like Han Solo, and looks just like every wanna-be actor in Hollywood in the early 1980's - with chin stubble, and a big, feathered, blow-dry hairdo. And oh yeah, he also has a trademark weapon (every great '80's action hero had to have a trademark weapon) - a magical sword with three blades. The extra blades can shoot off and look very awkward as they fly through the air and impale bad guys. How the blades get replaced is never explained, but somehow they always do.
Richard Moll plays Xusia the Sorcerer, who looks like a cross between Freddy Krueger from "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and The Emperor from "Return of the Jedi". He sleeps in a coffin covered with human faces and filled with blood. The real bad guy of the movie is Cromwell, a ruthless leader from another country who is trying to conquer the entire land. He seeks out Xusia and demands that the ancient Sorcerer use his evil powers to help him. Xusia rips out the heart of a half-naked witch girl and agrees to help.
Cromwell pillages and plunders and takes hostage the leader of the resistance, Micah, and tortures him in the dungeon. So Micah's sexy brunette sister (played by Kathleen Bellar) seeks out Talon and begs him to help her rescue Micah. Talon (our hero) is at his sleaziest here, as he tells Bellar that his fee for the rescue mission is that he gets to have sex with her. Thus the adventure begins!
The good guys sneak into Cromwell's castle. Talon steals the guard's uniform and gets into lots of fight scenes. Bad guys get shot with arrows, set on fire, stabbed, etc. Another bad guy gets his head splattered on a grinding stone. Kathleen Bellar gets captured by the bad guys and thrown into Cromwell's harem. Once she's stark naked and receiving a full body massage from the other harem girls, she doesn't seem to mind so much anymore. Talon gets caught by the bad guys and crucified with his hands nailed to a big, wooden X. No problem. He just yanks his hands off the spikes that have been driven through them, and goes back to fighting!
The big ending takes place in a scary, cave-like dungeon with smoke and blue lighting. One of Cromwell's servants takes the sexy heroine (now barely dressed in a skimpy white costume and pearls) down to this dungeon and acts like he's going to rescue her. But then, in a very gruesome special effects sequence, he rips his own face in half and reveals that he's really Xusia, the Sorcerer in a flesh and blood disguise! The girl faints and falls to the ground, where she is attacked by a snake. There are many slow, lingering shots of Kathleen Bellar's bare legs writhing with the snake twisting around them. Cromwell and Talon show up and the ending is a big, three-way fight between Talon, Cromwell, and Xusia. The Sorcerer tries to use his evil powers to rip Talon's heart out. The magic sword shoots more blades. Cromwell's staff has a secret blade hidden inside of it! Talon breaks the magic sword in half to reveal that it ALSO has a secret weapon hidden inside! Cool! Then Cromwell reveals ANOTHER hidden weapon! Then Talon unleashes a hidden knife blade from his wristband!!!! AWESOME!!!!! There is more violence, and Talon wins. He chops the snake's head off and saves the girl. Then we see him swinging on a rope carrying the girl, as several people down on the ground pump their fists and shout his name! "TA-LON! TA-LON!"
But the funniest part is the very last thing, right before the credits: A title card comes up, promising that "Talon WILL return!" A goofy title for a sequel is offered. But alas, no such sequel was ever made. Oh well.
Summary of The Sword and the Sorcerer
Lean, lanky Lee Horsley (TV's Matt Houston) is hardly the iconic image of a medieval warrior, but in this cheesy Conan the Barbarian knockoff he makes his swaggering, mercenary Talon a genial smart aleck of a barbarian hero. The plot is pure pulp cliché: evil Cromwell (Richard Lynch) raises a demon to conquer a peaceful kingdom, kill the rulers, and imprison the royal heirs, and the son of a murdered patriot returns to take his righteous vengeance with a projectile-loaded, three-bladed sword. First-time director Albert Pyun apprenticed under Akira Kurosawa and brings with him an eye for handsome images and a fluid sense of action that helps overcome B-movie dialogue ("Unlock this door, wench, and leave that to us!"), scenery-chewing performances, and bargain-basement budget. In one fight sequence a guard punches a rock wall--and dents it! Kathleen Beller (the dark-eyed beauty of The Betsy) is the rebel princess who enlists Talon to the cause, Route 66's charming wanderer George Maharis is a conniving traitor under an unflattering mop of greasy hair, and Richard Moll dons a latex monster mask to play the double-crossed demon. It's utterly silly and often awkward, but it does have energy to spare. The sequel promised at the end of the film was never produced and Pyun went on to direct some of the best straight-to-video action films of the 1990s, including Nemesis. --Sean AxmakerSimilar DVD Movies
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