Saturday, March 20, 2021

Sword & Sorcery & Cinema: The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984)

The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984)
Time for a rather notorious Sword & Sorcery & Cinema choice.  Another Roger Corman flick and it stars David Carradine as Kain, a holy warrior.  Not to be confused with Kwai Chang Caine, a monk.  But you know, it works here so let's go with it. 

The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984)

Well. We have two suns, so that is a cool thing.  I wonder what else we are getting double of? 

Caine, er rather, Kain comes to a village with one well and two warlords protecting it.  Each keeps the other from controlling it.   Kain kills the guards.  Not 10 mins in and we have both gratuitous violence and nudity.  Right on time Corman.

The movie is a retelling of Yojimbo or A Fistful of Dollars or Red Harvest.  This doesn't make it less enjoyable mind you, the story is pretty classic.  Kain plays the two warlords, Zeg (Luke Askew) and Bal Caz (Guillermo Marín) off of each other well.  

María Socas plays Naja the Sorceress (not the one on the poster) and spends most of her time topless.  Yeah, we are not dealing with a top-tier studio here.   Anthony De Longis is also in this as Zeg's captain Kief.  He was a familiar face in a lot of 80s movies. 

The two fools, Blather and Gabble, make fairly decent enough goblins.  Burgo, the Slaver, appears to be some sort of lizard man.  There is even a little bullywug looking creature that Bal Caz has.

Kain goes back and forth between the camps killing as he likes and is getting paid by everyone.  He is the most self-actualized mercenary adventurer on film. 

I'd like to know what the writer was thinking with the dancer at 55 mins in.  No, the dancer, Cecilia Narova does not look like the poster girl either.  She is a brunette.  I'd also like to know about the stinger that came out of her...navel, was that it?  I'd love to blame Corman for this one, but I don't think I can.

If you have seen any movie, ever, you know how this ends really. 

Maybe all these Sword & Sorcery movies all take place on the same world. 

Gaming Content

Sacred Sword of Ura

This looks like a sword of sharpness or a vorpal blade.  The blade is much lighter than one would expect from steel.  Only the Sorceress of Ura knows the secret of how it was forged. It is a +3 sword and can cut through an anvil, but not leather armor apparently. 

--

Tim Knight of Hero Press and Pun Isaac of Halls of the Nephilim along with myself are getting together at the Facebook Group I'd Rather Be Killing Monsters to discuss these movies.  Follow along with the hashtag #IdRatherBeWatchingMonsters.

6 comments:

Jeff said...

I saw this for years in the rental displays, but knew it wasn't going to fly with my mother. So, when I was an adult, I finally got to watch it. I was underwhelmed. I don't regret watching it. Just that my imagination in the 80s was much better than the actual movie.

faoladh said...

That movie has a lot of behind the scenes stuff. Unfortunately, the director, John Broderick, has passed on so we don't have his side of the story, but William Stout, who wrote the original script before Broderick rewrote it to more directly plagiarize Yojimbo has written a couple of articles discussing the details. This one covers most of the history, while this one mentions the wasp woman, with Stout claiming credit for her.

Tales from the Fallen Empire, a setting book for Dungeon Crawl Classics, includes a character class based on the Homerac, Kain, called the Sentinel. It really helps to have the DCC rules to decipher what the class can do, of course.

Ryan said...

I wonder if the artwork is a mistake, or the woman is supposed to have four breasts.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Oh no. There is no mistake here.

faoladh said...

One of the things that I really appreciate about The Warrior and the Sorceresss is that, despite the surfeit of topless women, it is one of the least rapey fantasy films of the '80s. The only other one that doesn't cause me to cringe at the predilections of '80s schlock producers is Deathstalker II, which as I recall only has some rapey bits in one scene due to reusing footage of an orgy scene from Deathstalker in which a struggling woman is grabbed by an orc-like humanoid and dragged away to some unmentionable fate (though I might be forgetting something else as it's been a while since I last watched any of the Deathstalker movies). For the most part, The Warrior and the Sorceress is rape-free, outside of some slaves who seem to be sex objects in the vile Bal Caz's sinister court, and if they are such assault is not actually shown on-screen. The brutality of Zeg's house is much more straightforward and less sexual in nature, though there is that disturbingly fetishistic scene of a recalcitrant slave being drowned in a glass tank for the entertainment of the master of the house.

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Yeah. There are some issues with a lot of the 80s movies.
I have the first two Deathstalkers queued up for later next month I think.