There aren’t many sword and sorcery movies (or fantasy movies in general) that can match the perfect amount of ’80s cheese and awesomeness that Conan the Barbarian possessed. But I would say The Beastmaster gets the closest out of all the ripoffs and lookalikes. The Beastmaster is like a stupidly kickass Doctor Dolittle origin story, but instead of being something lame like a vet or a naturalist having vapid conversations with a parrot, he’s a shirtless barbarian with a bigass sword and weird boomerang thingie who commands a ragtag group of wild animals to tear apart the minions of an evil wizard cultist. He tells his eagle to poke people’s eyes out with its talons at least twice, and that black tiger never goes hungry, if you catch my meaning. This movie rocks.
Once upon a time, in a kingdom known as Aruk, the evil mage Maax (Rip Torn) receives a prophecy from his gaggle of witches that he will die at the hand of King Zed’s son. Maax vows to kill the as-of-yet-born prince, but Zed (Rod Loomis) immediately receives word of this evil plan and orders Maax to be banished from the land. However, before that can happen, Maax orders one of his witches to take care of the prophetic baby problem. She does this by sneaking into the king and queen’s (Vanna Bonta) bedroom as they sleep, uses magic to transfer the unborn child from the womb of the queen into the womb of a cow, cuts the baby out of the said cow, brands the baby, and then prepares to sacrifice it with a knife to an evil god in front of a roaring ceremonial bonfire. Y’know……as you do.
Would it be too tasteless/dark/obvious to make a Roe v. Wade joke here?…….Y’know what, insert your own joke about that here. I’m not touching it.
I’m sorry, slight tangent here, but isn’t there a much simpler way to go about this? Wouldn’t it save a lot of time and energy to just……I don’t know…….stab the queen in the stomach a bunch of times? I get that sacrificing children to a dark god is kind of Maax’s thing in this movie, but is his god that picky about the method of the child murder? If this kid’s prophesied to kill you, wouldn’t it be a safer bet to dispense with the complicated magical hoodoo and take the queen and the baby out Talisa Stark style? I mean, not that I WANT to see that; the whole cow womb transfer seems really impractical to me, that’s all. There’s a chance that somebody could interrupt the ceremony and ruin your plans.
And lo and behold, I was right because before the baby can get ritually sacrificed, a random villager comes in and rescues the baby. He names the baby Dar and raises him as his own. As Dar grows up, ignorant of his royal heritage, he discovers that he has a telepathic connection with animals. This is probably some strange mystical aftereffect from the magical cow womb transference he went through, but there’s never a full explanation given on how exactly that works. He was born from a cow and can now talk to animals. Kind of weird, but no 10-year-old watching this is going to be hung up on the details because HOLY SHIT HE CAN TALK TO ANIMALS THAT IS SO COOL!
“I have my eyes…..
I have my cunning…..
And now I have strength.”
Young Dar soon grows into a majorly buff Marc Singer and is living the good villager life with his adopted dad…….until his village is burned to the ground by a clan of psychotic barbarians called Juns. Dar is the only survivor of the attack and vows vengeance on the Juns. And Maax, by extension, since the evil arch mage leads the barbarian horde. So Dar can get get a two-for-one deal on that revenge. How nice. As Dar journeys to Aruk armed with a sword and a boomerang-ish type weapon given to him by his father, which kind of reminds me of the Glaive from Krull, he is joined by some animal companions. Two ferrets named Kodo and Podo, a golden eagle named Sharak, and a black tiger named Ruh.
Also, Tanya Roberts is there. She doesn’t really do anything, but she’s hot, so it all works out.
No complaints here.
Interesting/sad story about the tiger, it was a regular colored tiger named Sultan that the filmmakers painted black, and it died two years after the film was made due to a bad allergic reaction to the paint. Pretty dumb move, if you ask me. If the filmmakers wanted a black big cat, maybe a panther would have been a better option? Or let’s say they couldn’t get a panther. Did they really need to paint the tiger black? It’s a real goddamn tiger. I’m already impressed! Ah well, I guess the tiger’s death was pretty unavoidable. It’s not like cats LICK THEMSELVES or anything.
RIP Sultan. May you happily feast on cow carcasses and catnip forever more.
In the aaaaaaarms of an angel…….eat that guys faaaaaace and sleep
Despite that sad little behind-the-scenes snafu, The Beastmaster is a genuinely entertaining sword and sorcery flick. It’s really stupid, and its story is pretty basic, but much like Conan the Barbarian, it balances those goofy moments by treating itself pretty seriously with a surprising amount of conviction, and you can’t help but get swept up in the adventure because of that. Sure, there are a lot of dumb moments that don’t make a lot of sense, and the sincerity of the actors and filmmakers sometimes falls short of making a silly moment seem intense or severe. But even when that happens, it’s not a massive dealbreaker because noticing that is also part of the fun, if that makes sense. It’s legitimately cool but in a stupid way. It’s about a hero with cool powers and a pack of animal friends who takes down bad guys and walks off into the sunset like a badass. What’s not to love?
As fun as the movie is, it wasn’t that big of a success at the box office. One of the main reasons it survived was because of its surprisingly popular reception on cable TV. This movie had a lot of repeats on HBO, TBS, and TNT back in the day, and those reruns helped to spawn two sequels and even a TV series (The less said about those pieces of crap, the better, but it goes to show that they thought it was worth something, so there’s that). And I remember reading an article that said that the original director and writer of The Beastmaster, Don Coscarelli, recently regained the rights to The Beastmaster, so maybe we’ll get some more of The Beastmaster in the future? We’ll see what happens.
It can’t be worse than Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time.
DEEP HURTING. DEEEEEP HURRRTING.
The Bard of the Reel 