The Sword and the Sorcerer

Having spent the early decades of my life fascinated by the Frazetta-inspired movie art of this enigmatic sword and sorcery flick, I decided, quite on a whim, that it was high time that I finally watched it. I am pleasantly surprised to inform you that it is as good as I always suspected it would be. And then some.

In this D&D adventure module brought to cinematic life, Talon (Lee Horsely) is the son of the king and witnesses Cromwell (Richard Lynch) kill both his father and mother. He inherits a projectile sword that shoots sections of itself, but then disappears, Conan-like, to become a wandering, fur-clad, semi-barbarian maverick, probably with a chaotic-neutral alignment.

Before all of that, we get horror scenes of twisted, flesh-like monstrous faces that look as if they could have passed as the album cover art on some lackluster death metal epic from 1993. Then, the late Richard Moll, who was in all of these movies, is presented to us as the evil wizard Xusia, sitting on a stone throne in his 2d6 dungeon, and then there is some other stuff that happens. Cromwell betrays Xusia (which, as he is an evil wizard, would not seem as if it is the wisest move) by stabbing him and casting him off of a cliff. Set the stage for the rest of the picture.

The municipality of Ehdan, which must be hex-crawled by the best of them, is undergoing a tempestuous and anarchic revolutionary period, as that leather-gauntleted rapscallion, tyrant, and all-around sour pisser Cromwell is ruling the land with an iron fist. Prince Mikah (Simon MacCorkindale), who seems a sort of johnny-come-lately here, vows, plots, cooks up, and more or less schemes to overthrow that dastard Cromwell, and relates his plans to over throw the old ogre with some scrappy group of intrepid renegades to sister Alana (Kathleen Beller). However, he's captured by the Red Dragon archers of Cromwell. Alana flees and is nearly captured, and then ends up in a Forgotten Realms tavern making a deal with Talon that, if he'll go in with the adventuring party and confront the hairy NPCs, rescuing Mikah, she'll give him one night of all the free nookie he can handle. He agrees to it lustily, doffs a goblet of wine, wipes his hairy and greasy chin with one braceleted and very dirty mitt, and leers like a madman. Okay. Nobody claimed these sorts of fantasies weren't aimed primarily at the thought processes of adolescent boys.

The midsection of the film involves dungeon crawling on a massive scale, and one gets tired thinking of just how many dice rolls one would have to do for each turn of combat for each Red Dragon archer. It's hard to keep track at this point exactly as to what's going on, but Talon gets captured at one point and then we learn he's going to be crucified. Which seems as if it's dragged from a whole other mythology, but I reckon the term "gettin' medieval" applies here just as much as anywhere.

The movie has a slam-bang ending, and Talon and Alana go off to make the beast with two backs (whose armor class is pretty much nil, I take it). The special effects are good for the era, although we saw no flying dragon (unlike in Dragonslayer, which came out the enchanted year before, and which I saw as a child at the theater, having had it scar me and leaving me believing dragons really flew like bats through the smoke-choked air over fantasy villages--I've never been quite the same, let me tell ya').

RIP to Richard Moll, who, as stated earlier, was in ALL of these horror and shlock scifi and fantasy epics of that era. He elevated what was otherwise passable dreck to high art. He's still missed.

Excelsior!

Directed, by the way, by Albert Pyun, who made a lot of these sorts of pictures. B-pictures, I mean.

The Sword And The Sorcerer 1982 1080p full movie

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