"The Picture Gets Kinkier"
On the Sword & Sorcery Craze and the Cultural History of Gender -- Part 2
This one was supposed to be fun and easy. Part 2 of my essay on the Sword & Sorcery craze and gender in the 1980s is mostly focussed on regional specificities and individual movies: Conan vs. Corman, Hundra vs. Hammer, Gor vs. Golan/Globus. But this one ended up being quite a lift. For one thing, somehow a post about a bunch of bargain basement Conan-knockoffs involved me re-reading Jean Baudrillard, tracking down an early BDSM-manual from the 70s, and revisiting a ton of 80s feminism. And that was the fun part of the lift. The essay also wound up being about representations of sexual violence to a degree that I didn’t anticipate — please be forewarned!
One thing that had struck me during my first foray into the wave of Sword & Sorcery films from the 1980s was the old-handness of it all. While they starred some very fresh faces who’d go on to lucrative careers (Matthew Broderick, Tom Cruise, Liam Neeson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others), very few of these films were made by young guns. Instead, the Sword & Sorcery films were directed, edited, written and scored by old hands, often inveterate schlockmeisters with far more respect for the craft of making B-movies than for the fantasy genre itself.
But here's the thing: the movie industry was less globalized in the early 1980s than it is now. And it was probably less globalized, more localized the further you moved into low- or micro-budget filmmaking. While interest in Sword & Sorcery fare seems to have been a particularly Anglo-American phenomenon, in the end very few of these films were filmed on Hollywood soundstages. These films had both a pretty global character, but were were steeped in local situations and preoccupations. I will center this second part of my series on the Sword & Sorcery boomlet on films that emerge out of very different film industries or production processes. None of them are “good movies” or even “movies”, if you want to be a real stickler about it. But they show how this new genre reflected gender politics in the early 1980s, and how it registered various confusions in that politics. Though they’re invariably set in lands before time, with witches and wizards and ancient gods walking the land, they do constitute reactions to feminism, to body culture, to changing notions of masculinity. I’ll try to talk about a bunch of movies, but my focus will be on three: 1980’s Hawk the Slayer, and 1982’s Hundra and Sorceress.
One theme that emerged for me in watching way too many of these back to back to back over the last few weeks is the figure of the kick-ass woman warrior — which on the one hand seems miles ahead from the damsels you get in comedies or most of science fiction at the time, but which ultimately isn’t as progressive as you’d think. That’s usually not about the set up (Red Sonja is an absolute badass), or about the resolution (Red Sonja triumphs) — it’s about the path taken between those points. I kept being reminded of Carol Clover’s Men, Women, And Chain Saws, the classic gender analysis of the “modern horror film”.
What’s proved most enduring about that book is Clover’s nuanced and ambivalent description of the Final Girl of the slasher film. “She’s the character whose story we follow from beginning to end; […] and it is she who, at the end of the film, brings the killer down.” “Needless to say,” Clover adds, “this sounds more like a male protagonist than a female one.” Clover’s point is that the Final Girl may “look something like a female hero”, an avatar of empowerment, but that, looked at more closely, she’s far more ambivalent. Once you take into account “affect, identification, pacing and audience,” Clover says, “the picture gets kinkier”:
“Yes, the Final Girl brings down the killer in the final moments, but consider how she spent a good hour of the film up to then: being chased and almost caught, hiding, running, falling, rising in pain and fleeing again, seeing her friends mangled and killed.”
I think the female-led Sword & Sorcery films, though nominally far removed from the then-new genre of the slasher, feed on the exact same ambivalence, although the sequence is usually reversed from the slasher. The Sword & Sorcery barbarian starts as a complete badass and is then brutally worked through, before she can finally in the end assert herself again. The overall effect is the same though: the heroines of these films, like the younger, scrawnier and more androgynous Final Girls, are “victim-heroes” or “tortured survivors”, as Clover calls them.
The Sword & Sorcery boom is about US cultural imperialism and it also isn’t. On the one hand, greenlighting these pictures seemed to be a North American specialty, as were D&D, Mattel toys and the Satanic Panic. Still, making them always involved other countries serving US interests, and sometimes doing their own thing with it. And the boom clearly hit different countries’ film industries differently. There were people making sequels to Corman fantasy films shockingly late into the 80s, the Italians kept cranking out Ator films (Ator the Fighting Eagle, Ator 2: L’invincibile Orion, Iron Warrior and The Quest for the Mighty Sword) until 1990.
The fact that the genre represented a fad intersecting with various, and very different, national film industries is something you can tell just by looking at the visuals. Hawk the Slayer (1980) beat Conan to theaters by almost two years, debuting at the Odeon Marble Arch in late 1980. Part of the delay with Conan the Barbarian was something that’ll be one of the themes of this essay: the violence. These films were, as I pointed out in Part 1, kind of stuck between several rocks and hard places: children’s story framing commingled with brutal violence, creature feature goo with literary references, homosocial bonhomie with grindhouse sadism. Conan cost almost 20 million dollars to make when all was said and done, so it had to figure out a way to thread that needle. Hawk the Slayer looks like it cost about 20 dollars, and generously half of that ended up on screen. So it didn’t have to worry about picking a lane — and didn’t. It got to be first of the pack. But at the cost of not really being part of the pack at all.
Hawk the Slayer was directed by Terry Marcel and starred John Terry and Jack Palance. It tells the story of Hawk who seeks to slay his brother Voltan in revenge for killing their father. Also Hawk’s wife — separate incidents. His dying dad bequeathes him a sword that gives him command over terrible special effects. The film has an abiding respect for the literary genre that inspired these films: In his quest for revenge, Hawk encounters new and old friends, assembles a party, consisting of a fighter, a giant, an elf, and a dwarf with a whip. Roll initiative! He and his group inevitably get captured and sprung by a sorceress. It’s arguably closer to your average D&D game, or to Swords against Deviltry than Milius’s version of Conan the Barbarian would be.
At the same time, the film’s visuals place it in a very different genealogy than the other films I’ll be discussing. The film gives you a good sense as to why some of the better efforts in this genre were largely filmed outside, and in in tax-favorable locales. Hundra (1983) and Hawk the Slayer have the exact opposite problem: Hundra was filmed in a Spanish national park and the outside photography is uniformly excellent — the characters (largely played by athletes) hop around striking rock formations, making the best use of the landscape. But while the locations look great, the set design seems to consist mostly of lighting fires and draping furs around the scenic outdoor locations.
Hawk, like Labyrinth, was mostly filmed on soundstages. But unlike the massive Elstree Studios for Labyrinth in the case of Hawk the Slayer that soundstage seems to have been the size of a Fiat Uno. The rest of it seems to have been filmed before some of the most scenic matte paintings in all of England, and in one single actual forest, which the filmmakers populated with random snakes and lizards to make it look a little less … Buckinghamshire. I’m not kidding, I felt like I started recognizing individual trees in scenes 20 minutes apart!
Hawk the Slayer is pure, glorious cheese, right down to a soundtrack that can only be described as “what if Swedish porno soundtrack, but more brass?” The film’s fantasy elements are fairly attenuated. Yes, there’s magic, yes, there are elves. But there are monasteries, knights, castles. This is more of a period piece; there appear to be Christian nuns here and the castles look medieval. Hawk is eons away from Conan’s Hyboria. That historicism, the reliance on interior shots and its squeamishness when it comes to showing actual blood or nudity position this as less a successor to the Western, but the Hammer horror genre. Producer/composer Harry Robertson was a Hammer veteran. There are some hat tips to the Western genre – director Terry Marcel is fond of close-ups during Mexican standoffs, even when his combatants are wielding claymores –, but overall these scenes feel stagey, talky and character driven. The set design, long a Hammer strong suit, does as much work as the special effects. These aren’t just old habits dying hard, of course. It’s a bet, albeit a different bet from Conan, Krull, Gor and Masters of the Universe on who the hell this is all for.
I don’t know enough about the British film industry to know exactly, but it feels like Hawk was made for a very different distribution stream than Conan, let alone something like Sorceress. It apparently had a theatrical release in the UK, but it debuted in the US on CBS. The lack of bare breasts and bloody swords must have been an asset in the transit to TV, even if that hadn’t been the producers’ original intent.
There was a garden of forking paths through the media streams of the early 1980s for this crop of films, one that Hawk navigates differently than the rest of the fantasy boomlet: go for TV rather than either multiplex or grindhouse. These various streams intersected with the various anxieties swirling around kids, media, sex and fantasy in the early 1980s. Hawk made its debut on CBS as a Late Movie on December 3, 1982. About 4 weeks later, on December 28, CBS ran the Tom-Hanks starring D&D panic movie Mazes and Monsters (which I discussed with Sarah Marshall of You’re Wrong About (unfortunately behind a paywall) here). This is what I pointed to last time: Again and again, the fantasy boom ran up against notions of appropriateness, in a double sense: what was the best way to find the kinds of people who’d want to pay money to see this? And what was the best way to make sure the wrong kind of people didn’t see it?
Perhaps it isn't altogether surprising that one old hand who delved deep into the mini-genre was Roger Corman. A man who — although only slightly older than the people who had fueled the Sword & Sorcery boom in literature and games (Corman was born in 1926, while Gygax, Moorcock and Zelazny were born in 1938, 1939 and 1937 respectively) — had been making exploitation cheapies since the early 1960s. So, just as in the spaghetti-western-to-sword-and-sorcery pipeline, Corman brought a pre-established sense of market, genre and production to the Sword & Sorcery genre. This in spite of the fact that the market, genre and modes of production were of course all shifting in the early 1980s.
If you’d never heard of the various minor entries into the genre I mentioned in the last installment, prepare to be confronted by a bunch of films you’re even less likely to have heard of. Corman decided to start cashing in on the Sword & Sorcery boom the moment the first Conan film hit theaters in 1982, first with the movie Sorceress (more on that one in a second). From the first, Corman wanted to make the film abroad — looking into Italy and Spain, i.e. the countries where the more upmarket entries into the genre had been or were being filmed. Then he considered the Philippines, Portugal and eventually settled on Mexico. Starting in 1983, Corman collaborated with an Argentinian film production company, with whom he produced a whole slew of Sword & Sorcery pictures — all shot in Buenos Aires using mostly Argentinian crews and a few American actors. Among them: Deathstalker (1983) and its sequel Deathstalker II (1987), The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984), Wizards of the Lost Kingdom (1985), Barbarian Queen (1985) and its sequel Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back (The Empress is apparently also not afraid of a lawsuit) (1992), Amazons (1986) and Stormquest (1987). Corman and his Argentinian director/producing partner Héctor Olivera stuck with the genre longer than Hollywood proper did.
Sorceress, however, wasn’t directed by a Latin American director slumming it to get their own films made. It was directed by Jack Hill (b. 1933), an exploitation auteur who had cut his teeth on horror films in the 1960s and then had directed several influential Blaxploitation films, including Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Hill took his name off of Sorceress, which is now credited to his alias Brian Stuart. So where the films in the Conan mould come out of the spaghetti western tradition, Sorceress draws on the talent pool and sensibilities of 1970s exploitation film.
This has ramifications for the gender politics of these films: the Sword & Sorcery films that drew on the spaghetti western were adapting a formula that didn’t really leave much space for women, and part of how these films didn’t seem to know what to do with women, and didn’t seem to know whom to ogle, had to do with that. Corman, unfortunately, had a very clear sense of what to do with women and none of it was good.
His fantasy pictures essentially threw in a bunch of sexploitation tropes: the Conan-films also leered and ogled, the Conan-films were also violent. But there was something unpracticed, something maladroit in their view of gender, sex and the body. The most spectacular body in Conan is of course Schwarzenegger’s; and the bodybuilding craze had a tendency to transform traditional gender presentation. Conan was not an everyman, and the women in Conan were more jacked and androgynous than women on screen generally tended to be in 1983. Corman — in keeping with the values of sexploitation cinema, which professed to be all about transgression, but actually constantly reasserted conservative gender roles — did things differently. In his films women were pinups, flattering a male gaze.
Watching Corman settle into his accustomed perviness, a sexploitation gaze honed on generations of nudies, nudie-cuties, roughies, kinkies and ghoulies (all real genres; don’t look them up), makes you realize that there’s something comparatively untethered and free-floating about the eroticism of the more famous Hollywood films like Conan the Barbarian. It’s clear that beefcake aesthetics aren’t exactly anti-patriarchal, but precisely because swoleness in those movies was available to men and women, being absolutely jacked tended to mess with gender conventions at the same time as it seemed to confirm them.
More importantly, with people like Schwarzenegger, you get male stars that themselves are sort of pin-ups. Skimpily-clad, fully objectified, told not to open their mouths but just smile and look good. Conan is a (certain) male wish fulfillment fantasy, of course, but on a visual level masculinity is trying to come to terms with its own objectification. Not that there was resistance to it: men were just new to being presented so obviously and lasciviously for ogling. The generation of male stars that starred in the Sword & Sorcery flicks were the ones who had to figure out how to be looked at pornographically while starring in a Hollywood film. An entire essay could be written about Sean Connery, paragon of tuxedoed, speedoed mid-century sex appeal, dressing up as whatever the hell this is in Zardoz (1974). It’s not that Connery was new to being objectified on-screen. But with this outfit, you realize there’s a measurelessness to the gaze it attracts, one that accentuates the measuredness of earlier objectification.
I think in a strange way the bigger productions, perhaps precisely because they had to sublimate harder to attain an acceptable MPAA rating, ended up with the murkier and more interesting gender politics. They weren’t allowed to panic. Corman’s films are deeply traditional in their way: women are to be looked at and to have their tops pulled down at least twice every fifteen minutes. They are to have boobs and they are to be naive and they are to crave sex.
When male nudity does happen in Sorceress, there’s inevitably a note of panic to it. Consider a scene where a hunky thief/secret prince is tied buck-naked to a pole. His bare ass is mid-frame in a way that you really don’t tend to see in movies from 1982, unless they play on a different part of 42nd Street. But here’s the thing, the scene is played for some humor and tons of panic. The character is sliding down the greased pole (hah), towards a sharpened wooden spike (hah!) that is supposed to skewer him … somewhere (hah!!!). Get it? In case you don’t get it, the thief/prince tells the bad guy: “You don't have to stick it to me!” I guess that’s the level of subtlety you need to make yourself heard over all the rustling of tissue paper. In a Corman production, being naked on screen means being subject to penetration, by the gaze and/or by a wooden spike — Corman’s women accommodate themselves to that gaze, his men panic at the prospect. And here’s the thing: that’s not true for Conan and the other less exploitation-themed Sword & Sorcery films. Those films are equal opportunity oglers, and its characters — many played by non-professional actors, who’re all seasoned vets of professions where they’re on display to the crassest of gazes — all have a certain unselfconsciousness about being ogled.
On the one hand, the amount of Dungeons & Dragons in Corman’s first foray into the genre is high. Someone involved in the production clearly loved the Sword & Sorcery genre. While a lot of later knock-offs seem to take only a glancing interest in the literature that was ostensibly informing this boomlet, and mostly seem to have rewatched Conan the Barbarian a bunch, Sorceress gets a lot of things quite right: a party assembles and has to resolve a quest two of them have a personal stake it. There’s a fighter-type, a rogue-type, and two amazon-types. It even has a real dungeon crawl: a viking warrior dude and a skimpily attired blonde navigating some tunnels where they get attacked by zombies.
Other parts of the production are comparatively careless. Sorceress tells the story of — you guessed it — not a sorceress. I have no idea who the sorceress is supposed to be. There’s a henchwoman to the main sorcerer, who might be a witch of some kind? The main bad guy doesn’t seem to be a sorceress either. And the twin protagonists (played by twins Leigh Harris and Lynette Harris) are not only not sorceresses, they spend the entire film very much not doing sorcery, but getting ensorceled. Just constantly ensorceled.
So what’s this thing about? The evil sorcerer Traigon has promised some demonic/divine entity (there are a lot of proper names, I’m not even sure the screenplay kept them straight so I won’t try to) his firstborn. But the mother of his firstborn has other ideas and runs away. She delivers twins and refuses to tell him which is the firstborn. It feels like, if you were a psychotic madman bent on world domination, there would be a workaround for this difficulty, but it does not seem to occur to Traigon. The twins’ mother banishes the evil wizard for 20 years, then dies, leaving the newborns in the care of a farmer. 20 years later, Traigon returns and starts looking for his firstborn to finally complete the sacrifice. In any event, they have grown up into two ass-kicking and extremely bare-chested young women who can’t act. They have some sort of special power which manifests in them lighting up in blue in an effect I can only describe as retina searing.
Since Traigon’s minions will be looking for two girl children, the twins have been raised as boys. You might think this would lead the movie into some interesting ideas about gender. You’d be wrong. It’s mostly an excuse for men to stare in disbelief at the twins’ extremely ample breasts when they’re revealed, as they frequently are. And it’s an excuse to have the twins be absolutely uninitiated into sex — a motif from sex comedies, although unintentionally reminiscent of Siegfried’s predicament in Richard Wagner’s Siegfried.
Watching Sorceress you can see why Corman wanted to make films down south. For how cheap this movie must have been to make, it boasts some truly cool sets and large crowd scenes (this one was shot in Mexico, but it’s perhaps not an accident that Corman moved his future productions to Argentina, a country that had violently destroyed its unions just a decade prior). There’s a real panther and some immensely fake looking persons in monkey suits — like an Ewok you bought at Spirit of Halloween and left in the wash too long. There’s a horny satyr-type goat man, a part, I found out, “written for Sid Haig.” Which is amazing, as the part is absolutely wordless and, more importantly, sucks. The cape throwing of various mages, warriors and booby villainesses is truly next level, though.
Everything else is just a huge fucking mess. The fight choreography is so manic and chintzy you can practically see the styrofoam bend and hear rubber bonk against rubber. The visual effects look like Robert Rauschenberg paintings. In the final battle, all the bad guys die making the exact same sound, while two animatronic deities hover in the sky looking like they’re holding in farts. The soundtrack is simply the soundtrack from Corman’s Star Wars ripoff Battle Beyond the Stars (1981) looped and edited slightly. (Poor James Horner had signed a contract he really shouldn’t have, and Corman used the soundtrack in like a dozen pictures. Joke was really on him, as Horner went on the recycle his musical ideas from Battle for like a dozen other films himself.)
The acting is incredibly wooden and the editing baffling. There's a scene where an old wizard decides to join those he has failed to protect by walking straight into a fire. You can hear the crackling of the fire as his body presumably burns up. Everyone shields their eyes for like half a second and then the the viking warrior who’s just sort of ambled into the scene moves on to business: "Now lads," he says turning to the girls, "lay aside your grief" — it has been about 8 seconds! — "and avenge these wrongs!" King in the North/Pope of Mope Jon Snow could learn a thing or two from this speedrun through the Kubler-Ross stages.
So there’s a lot to love slash hoot at here. Then there’s the gender politics. Hoo boy. There’s lots of nudity and women in sexy costumes, of course, especially when it comes to women extras who look like they’re locals and being paid hardly anything for their trouble. There’s a thin empowerment message overlaid with optics that undercut female agency at every point. And there’s the ever-present threat, and frequently enough, the reality of sexual violence. Sexual violence is both the thing moving the plot along, and the dusting the filmmakers sprinkle over a scene when they don’t think it lands. It somehow manages to be the most and least essential thing in Sorceress at the same time.
It’s stomach turning, for sure. But there’s also something interesting about it to me: I’m trying to think where one would have encountered this movie in 1982. As in: I think the film’s nastiness (which later Corman productions would easily exceed) masks a profound confusion as to who the hell this is supposed to be for. Men, sure, but what age? What’s true of the man this is intended for? I don’t think Corman by and large made films for the home video market yet, but this strikes me as a bit too juvenile as drive-in bait. Was the target demographic seventeen year-old boys who are somehow intrepid enough to sneak into a grindhouse theater on 42nd Street, but who then decided against straight up porn in favor of this stuff?
As mentioned, 1983's Deathstalker was the start of a series of Corman ventures in Argentina. Corman drafted a whole Stefon-bit’s worth of not-really-actors into starring in them. These films had everything: playmates, professional athletes, a judo master from Sweden. Most of those were Sword & Sorcery films, and their gender politics made Sorceress look like Jeanne Dielman. James Sbardellati, who directed Deathstalker, had shot the upsetting and graphic rape scenes Corman had cut into Humanoids from the Deep against that film’s director's wishes, and without the knowledge of the cast and crew. I’ll have a few things to say about the rest of the Corman-films, but before I say anything more, I’ll say: please don’t watch these. The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984) stars Keith Carradine in what can only be described as one of several career nadirs. The Barbarian Queen (1985) starred Lana Clarkson who had had a small role in Deathstalker. Corman claimed that it was “his Xena, the Warrior Princess”, which takes chutzpah if nothing else. Amazons (1986) seems to be that rarest of birds: a Black-led sword & sorcery flick. It's a magicked-up version of the story of the warrior women of Dahomey — and naturally I couldn’t find it streaming anywhere.
You can’t really open a box labeled “80s schlock” without at least one Golan-Globus production popping out. Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus bought the nearly bankrupt Cannon Films in 1978, and over the next ten years cranked out an incredible number of movies in almost every conceivable genre. They are today most fondly remembered for right-wing coded actioners like Death Wish, barely-there sex comedies like Hot Resort (1985), razzie-bait fiascos like The Apple (1980), diminishing-returns sequels like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987) and trend-chasing cash-ins like Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984). But Golan and Globus were capable of bringing home literary adaptation, arthouse fare, or the occasional multiplex success. My sense is that their success essentially dovetailed the rise of the video store market: films like Missing in Action no longer needed to figure out regional markets in which to release for some quick cash; they found the freaks that would pay money for this shit at the local Blockbuster.
In the last installment I pointed out that, unlike the nerd-bait wave of the 2010s and 2020s, the films of the Sword & Sorcery craze were not, by and large, what we today call “established IP”. Sure, it all looked a little like Robert E. Howard, but clearly there was no sense among producers that there was much advantage in having a recognizable hero’s name grace the marquee. I don’t know what that means, and can think of three possible explanations: (1) it may be that unlike, say, comic books, Sword & Sorcery literature just didn’t have as big an audience that would follow the characters into a theater; (2) it may be that Sword & Sorcery literature did have an audience but that audience wasn’t legible to movie studios; (3) it may be (and I think this is most likely the explanation) that Sword & Sorcery literature just didn’t have a fanbase that could be easily identified and marketed towards. Yes, it was juvenile in its basic orientation, but most of the classic texts were by then decades-old, more fondly remembered by early-80s dads than their teenage kids. This probably meant that marketing was more about visuals and vibes than “hey, you’ve heard of this” — because, well, you couldn’t count on your target audience having heard of this.
The one big exception is Golan & Globus. Because Cannon Pictures actually went for established properties. They were the ones who adapted Masters of the Universe into a movie that managed to bomb in the midst of He-Man Mania; they adapted H. Ryder Haggard’s Alan Quartermain stories in King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and its sequel. So when it came to cashing in on the fantasy boom, they likewise turned to an established property to option. In the end, though, their solution was much the same as Corman’s. They resolved the tension in pitch, tone and target demographic in favor of more violence, more sex, more kink. At least in principle. In a decade where one could have adapted Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea books, or Michael Moorcock’s anti-imperialist Elric-novels, Golan and Globus picked the Gor novels.
What are the Gor-novels, you ask? The Chronicles of Counter-Earth are the magnum opus of John Norman (a pseudonym for the now-retired philosophy professor John Frederick Lange), which has spanned over 6 decades and dozens of novels (the first novel, Tarnsman of Gor appeared in 1966, the most recent, Treasure of Gor came out last year). The novels feature a tremendous amount of women in chains, women being whipped, women being enslaved and realizing they’re sort of into it. Lange/Norman even wrote an advice book of scenarios for those wanting to bring this sort of roleplay into their relationships — 1974’s Imaginative Sex.
Gor (1987) was aimed at the US market, but was, like most of its competitors, filmed far away where unions were weak and the human rights record resembled the planet of Gor. In this case, both Gor and its sequel Outlaw of Gor (1988) were filmed in South Africa. And before you start wondering “hey, was apartheid over by 1987 and 1988”, let me save you the googling. No, no it was not. The film starts — as do the books, sort of — with a scene literally dozens of viewers will find recognizable. Professor Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) makes a pass at his teaching assistant and she rebuffs him. In his frustration, he plays with a magical ring, in a sequence of events I beg you not to read too much into, which transports him to another planet — Gor — populated by scantily clad women and the evil sorcerers who capture and bondage them. Before long, Tarl is transformed into a sweaty, muscle-bound 80s Sword & Sorcery cover beefcake and has to locate the fabled [checks notes] who cares from [checks notes again] overpaid thespian who was on set for like two days.
The thing about Golan and Globus is: they were masters of overpromising and underdelivering. They constantly created massive expectations, and often genuine industry buzz, for films that hilariously held back on the thing fans were ostensibly clamoring for. Whatever the opposite of fan service is, G&G were the Paganinis of it. Masters of the Universe was promised as the Star Wars of the 80s (which, to be fair, they’d promised multiple times before), but instead of taking fans to Eternia, most of the film takes place in Southern California in the mid 1980s. Gor is no different: presumably people came to this movie expecting the S&M trappings of the Norman novels, if they came at all. But it’s low on nudity, low on violence, low even on bondage. You get the feeling, as with many of the Goland and Globus production, that this is essentially a poster (or more likely a video slip cover) with barely a film behind it. Not surprisingly, this one ended up teeing up a theatrical release, but then became a direct-to-video affair. Its fortunes improved slightly when the sequel became the subject of a classic MST3K episode in the late 90s. But if being the subject of a classic MST3K episode in the 90s improves them, your fortunes weren’t particularly great to begin with.
Have you seen Conan the Barbarian? So has Matt Cimber, because he does a 1:1 retread of the basic set-up of the first Conan movie in the first 10 minutes of his 1983 film Hundra. Hundra (Laurene Landon) is a warrior, member of an all-female tribe of warriors, whose village gets wiped out by invaders sent by an evil sorcerer. If that sounds familiar that’s because it’s basically what happens in Conan, minus the amazon aspect. The soundtrack – by none other than Ennio Morricone – even leans on a similar pastiche of the “Dies Irae” from the Verdi Requiem as does Basil Poledouris for Conan.
But the gender swap does of course matter: Hundra presents itself as a feminist fable a la Wonder Woman. And unlike Corman’s execrable Barbarian Queen, Hundra commits to its own bit. Hundra is unusual within her tribe for spurning the advances of men (the others say they “use” men “through their use of us”). The whole movie is then getting this virginal warrior queen laid. Hundra tells an oracle: “No man will ever penetrate my body with sword or his self.”
So the movie is a strange hybrid: There’s exploitation cinema, but also some truly gorgeous external locations. The same way Conan used Alméria to great effect, Hundra shows off the beauty of … the exact same place. In fact, there are parts of the film that have the look of a Spaghetti Western, except with swords and a lot fewer pants. And the basic conceit — overly self-possessed woman must somehow open herself up to men — seems to derive more from a sex comedy than any of the usual inspirations for these types of films. She even has a gaggle of lady friends (but no gay-coded hairdresser, alas) to tell her what men really want!
The movie is all about gender and sexuality, and about what they’re good for. It’s all about a girlboss kicking ass, but its ultimate message is a theodicy of gender roles. As the priestess Chrysula tells Hundra: “Without a man to plant inside us, we have nothing to cultivate. We have use of men, through their use of us.” You can practically feel the anti-feminist anxieties swirling through this, in the end, pretty feminist, film. Some of these are about family, about sex, about women taking men’s jobs, such as ass-kicking barbarian.
But some of those anxieties are far more basic: Like many movies of the Sword & Sorcery wave, it’s about steroids and how they can blur and complicate the gendered body. Hundra is very interested in what is a normed and normal body — many of the bad guys (and they are guys) do masculinity wrong: there’s a sexual masochist that gets his due, there’s a guy who thinks he can buy a mate. But there are also tons of queercoded dudes among the film’s rogues’ gallery of shitty men. So Hundra’s defiance of gender stereotypes in some way straightjackets masculinity all the more tightly. But Hundra herself is of course what happens when peak gender performance makes the gendered body unavailable sexually. It also makes her an outlier in the film’s world. Hundra is a free woman in a world in which few women seem to know how to be free. When she roughs up the sexual sadist, his concubines stand around not knowing what to do. “Go, you’re free,” she tells them after she’s done with him. They briefly scatter, only to return to his side
Even Hundra — just before you rush to check it out — has, by 2025 standards, truly shocking amounts of violence against women. Which is somewhat offset by the fact that Hundra of course is just nonstop brutalizing dudes. This would also be true for the movie that Hundra anticipates, 1985’s unofficial Conan-sequel Red Sonja. This is something the other films I watched for this do a lot less of. Their heart isn’t in the violence women mete out. It’s in the violence that they’re subject to.
I gotta be honest that this part of the essay was neither fun to research nor write exactly. Roger Corman went all in on Sword & Sorcery in the early 1980s, and he had a very specific m.o. Part of this was filming outside the US, part of it was reusing the same James Horner-soundtrack. But part of it was also just an astonishing degree of misogyny and violence against women. I really can't recommend any of these films, even when they have fun goofy moments. I don’t want to dwell on this too much, but I do think there’s a particular motif that recurs in many of these films that’s worth thinking through in detail: the original trauma.
An amazing number of the 80s Sword & Sorcery films start with a brutal assault on the hero’s edenic village, which will then propel the hero on their epic quest for revenge. It happens to some of the male heroes, and to almost all the female ones. Besides Conan and Hundra, it’s how Beastmaster opens, it’s how Roger Corman’s Barbarian Queen begins. Some other entries have it after their opening (Gor, for instance). Sometimes it’s just a few burning buildings and some screaming women. But as the riffs on the motif percolated into the grindhouse, the sequence seemed to get more sleazy with each iteration, right down to the explicit sexual violence. Red Sonja, the unofficial 1985 Conan sequel, wound up giving Robert E. Howard’s Red Sonja of Rogatino the explicit mission of avenging her own rape.
There are a couple of things worth pointing out here: apart from the offensiveness, the reflexive turn to sexual objectification undercuts these films’ ostensible you-go-girl messages. These films often feature, or even center, warrior women who easily best the men — the tagline for The Barbarian Queen was “No man can possess her. No man can defeat her.” But at least in the Corman films, the plot seems to persistently forget that these women are badasses, or remember only once they’ve been stripped naked, humiliated, and brutalized. The same women who we’ve seen stab a dude through the neck in one sequence scream at seeing a severed head in the next. There’s an absurd sequence in The Barbarian Queen, where Queen Amethea (Lana Clarkson) defeats a would-be rapist with the strength of her pelvic muscles. These women win in victimization, and they can’t win without also being victimized. These films combine threadbare messages of women’s empowerment with a vicious, reactionary version of the Hollywood gaze.
And it’s hard to escape the suspicion that it isn’t just the gaze that is exploitative. Dawn Dunlap who plays Queen Amethea’s younger sister made her debut in a film called Laura, L’ombres de l’été directed by soft-focus pornographer David Hamilton. She was 15. She did her first Corman film when she was 17. According to the helpful commenters on IMDB (🤮🤮🤮), she has nude scenes in both films. The Barbarian Queen was her final role before leaving the industry altogether. As for her co-star, Lana Clarkson made a bunch more movies with Roger Corman, but is mostly remembered today for her murder by producer Phil Spector. I don’t want to speak for these actresses, but their resumés post-Corman read as though they didn’t experience much in the way of the threadbare empowerment messages in and through these films, so much as the constant degradation.
At the same time, I also want to point to another valence to the village attack sequences. What makes The Beastmaster interesting is that it’s drawing on a novel in which the main character is Native American, but Beastmaster the movie moves that story to “the Kingdom of Aruk”. These are deliberately fanciful and non-allegorical movies, but the resonances with recent US overseas adventures must have been obvious to early-80s audiences, given they’d seen the real images less than ten years prior. The good guys in these movies are native coded, the violence against them is the violence of the invader.
The film John Milius wrote immediately before writing and directing Conan the Barbarian was Apocalypse Now. Another movie, that is, in which an idyllic village with swaying palm trees gets destroyed by an invading army — in this case the 9th Cavalry Regiment of Colonel Kilgore, “tear-assing their way through ‘Nam looking for the shit”. That sequence too had, as Jean Baudrillard pointed out back in the 80s, a funny way of castigating America for its violence while also restaging that violence — unleashing the full power of Hollywood explosives on a fake Vietnamese village in a former American colony. The film exorcises the “hell of Vietnam” by “having forests and Phillipine villages napalmed” to retrace it. “One revisits everything through cinema and one begins again: the Molochian joy of filming, the sacrificial joy of so many millions spent, of such a holocaust of means, of so many misadventures,” Baudrillard writes. “In this sense, his film is really the extension of the war through other means, the pinnacle of this failed war, and its apotheosis.”
Apocalypse Now is a movie torn between imagining Americans as perpetrators and victims, of imagining US power as mad and as kind of awesome. I think the fantasy film trope of the destroyed village does the same thing: it’s one of those imperial boomerangs that can seem to indict the hegemon, but that can then be appropriated by the hegemon to imagine itself as the underdog. Think about the fact that the film’s female protagonist inevitably goes out and slays everyone — and the viewer switches from being accessory to her trauma to being spectator of her violent revenge. This makes her into an avatar of what Roy Scranton has called “trauma heroism” — a way to discharge “national bloodguilt by substituting the victim of trauma for the victim of violence, the enemy.”
But of course, even in their heroism the films disidentify from these women. They leer at them, laugh at them, set them up to fail and be humiliated. In this they’re different from Scranton’s trauma heroes — as Clover noted with regard to the Final Girl, they’re only provisionally the hero. The Final Girl can look like a feminist figure, but she’s actually also an avatar and product of backlash. I think there’s something similar going on with these girlbosses of Sword & Sorcery. These ass-kickers are resignatory images of male hyperpower. The men who bring them to the screen (whether it’s Corman, Golan/Globus, Milius or Richard Fleischer, director of Red Sonja) feel, on whatever level of awareness, the way Baudrillard thinks Francis Ford Coppola (and Milius) feel about Vietnam: they think the battle is lost, so they simulate it one last time on a soundstage or in some far-flung outdoor set. They call it pre-historic, but with a note of regret. This isn’t quite the cinema that Susan Faludi would identify in 1991 as backlash cinema — the one where men are beset by cruel, shrewish feminists who Want It All™️. But it’s one step before that: the cinema of barely getting away with it one last time.