The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982)

I went on another of my increasingly frequent detours into my film-watching past over the weekend, when I discovered that a film I hadn't seen since the eighties was available to stream on a completely legit service via Roku.  The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982) was director Albert Pyun's first and some would say best feature film.  Cynics would doubtless add that being his best wouldn't be difficult in view of his subsequent output.  But that would be a tad unfair: although Pyun tended to work well within the low budget direct-to-video market, some of his films do rise above the usual level of this sort of fare. Moreover, they are all competently directed, making decent use of the usually meagre resources at his disposal and frequently display a degree of imagination higher than might usually be found in an essentially derivative genre.  Sword and the Sorcerer, though, can't be said to be particularly original.  Indeed, it is clearly a quick cash in on the contemporaneous Conan the Barbarian (1982), which kicked off a cycle of similar fantasy films, yet it succeeds in establishing its own style, seemingly derived from classic 'swashbuckling' movies that starred the likes of Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power and Douglas Fairbanks Sr.  

I originally saw Sword and the Sorcerer when it first came on to TV in the mid-eighties, with a late night screening on ITV - its scheduling dictated by a couple of gory sequences, a crucifixion and some female nudity (all pretty tame by today's standards).  I remembered it as a cheap and cheerful action film with a stand out sequence toward the end when a character tears his own skin off to reveal that he is really a demon underneath.  Watching it again, after all this time, I was pleasantly surprised to find it still an enjoyable experience.  Sure, it's budget was clearly pretty low, but the production values aren't too bad - the sets at least look solidly built, (probably borrowed from another, better budgeted, production) and the cast are mainly TV actors, but they are mainly adequate for what the script requires of them.  While leading man Lee 'Matt Houston' Horsley is no Errol Flynn, he's decent enough in the action scenes and soon-to-be-in -Dynasty Kathleen Beller is attractive and feisty enough as the heroine, the film does boast a stand-out villain in the great Richard Lynch.  Playing the villainous usurper Titus Cromwell to the hilt, (he's so untrustworthy he even double crosses a demon he has revived to assist his rise to power), B-movie veteran Lynch entertainingly chews up the scenery whenever he's on camera.  The script is surprisingly good, frequently subverting genre conventions to good effect, (both the brave rebels and the hero's own band of mercenaries prove incompetent and end up being unceremoniously and easily captured when storming the castle to save him, for instance), throwing a few decent plot twists and reasonably witty lines, while never taking itself too seriously.  Pyun moves the whole thing along very smoothly and at a decent pace, with well handled set-pieces, so that it never drags. Oh, and that bit where George Maharis' tears his head apart to reveal the demon, still stands up pretty well.

It's easy to criticise films like The Sword and the Sorcerer - and it was treated with absolute scorn by critics on its original release - but the undeniable fact is that it made a pretty decent profit when it was released, (to cinemas, in the US at least, rather than just a direct-to-video release).  It had the advantage of being early to the market when sword and sorcery films started to become popular and of not being a Conan clone.  Most of all, though, it has a sense of fun, which carries it through its various deficiencies.