Iron Warrior: Ator Gets Rusty

Once upon a time in a fantasy realm, two brothers (played in the backstory sequence by Malcolm and Conrad Borg) were playing in some ruins, when one of them was kidnapped by the witch Phoedra (Elisabeth Kaza). The benign witches of the realm, led by Deeva the Sorceress (Iris Peynado) – yes, as a matter of fact it is pronounced Diva – banished Phoedra to the underworld for transgressing the taboos of their sisterhood, and took from her the ability to directly cause death. In the eighteen years since Phoedra’s banishment, the child who was not kidnapped by her grew into adulthood and became Ator (Miles O’Keeffe), a heroic warrior. The benevolent witches also wove the strands of fate, to ensure that the realm’s king (Tim Lane) would sire a daughter, the Princess Janna (Savina Gersak), who would eventually come to protect her kingdom from Phoedra’s wrath.

Now, however, Phoedra has returned, and whilst she cannot bestow death directly, she does have an underling to do it on her behalf – the mysterious warrior Trogar (Franco Diddi) and the horde that the narration delightfully refers to as his “minions of misery”. As a first gambit, Phoedra and Trogar have slain the king, with Janna fleeing for her life. Can Janna and Ator join forces to defeat Phoedra and Trogar? What of Ator’s missing brother? And would you believe that Trogar is more machine than man and wears a big distinctive helmet that conceals his face? The latter two questions may be connected, but to uncover the truth Ator must defeat Trogar – the Iron Warrior.

This is the third movie in the Ator series, a sequence of Italian sword and sorcery movies starring O’Keeffe as the titular character. The original two movies – Ator the Fighting Eagle and The Blade Master – were directed and produced by schlockmeister extraordinaire Joe D’Amato, knocked out in 1982 and 1984 to ride on the coattails of Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer respectively. With no further Conan sequels forthcoming, D’Amato moved on to hop fresher bandwagons, but veteran director Alfonso Brescia (credited here as Al Bradley) was up for churning out a third one in 1987.

The first two Ator movies were not great – there’s good reasons why both of them ended up featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 – with The Blade Master, in a copyright-evading edit called Cave Dwellers, providing fodder for one of the show’s most widely-acclaimed episodes. Iron Warrior probably has too much in the way of bare or insufficiently obscured titties in plot-critical moments for this to get greenlit as an MST3K episode, but it’d otherwise be perfect for it; it heightens some of the cheesy, at points downright incompetent aspects of the previous Ator movies whilst at the same time committing entirely new flavours of mistake hitherto unattempted by the series.