Deathstalker: From Punching Down To Punching Itself

In the wake of the Falklands War, the military junta which had ruled Argentina collapsed and the nation returned to democracy. In the process, this prompted something of a shift in its film industry. In some respects, this resulted in a new generation of serious-minded, highbrow cinema – in part because during the years of censorship filmmakers played it safe and stuck to lighthearted fare and everyone was well and truly ready for a change, in part because audiences wanted a chance to confront the horrors of the junta’s Dirty War and the industry was glad to finally address the subject.

In other respects, this involved a certain amount of desperation. With the economy having collapsed, local studios’ budgets didn’t go that far – but money from overseas carried a lot of weight. Héctor Olivera, co-owner of Aries Cinematográfica – one of the biggest studios in the country – realised that the international B-movie industry was always keen for opportunities to take advantage of favourable exchange rates and other such conditions. If they could get a B-movie maker from the US to collaborate with them, that could bring in a welcome injection of dollars at a time when the industry badly needed it. Olivera and fellow producer Alejandro Sessa therefore reached out to the king of the B-movies himself – Roger Corman – to see if he was interested.

This gave rise to a sequence of schlock, crafted and intended for US audiences, with Corman co-producing. Eventually, some ten movies would be yielded by the partnership, but only three of these – Cocaine Wars, Two To Tango, and Play Murder For Me – engaged much on a diegetic level with the fact that they were being shot in Argentina. (Cocaine Wars was an “American tough guy fights drug dealers in a generic South American country, whilst Two To Tango and Play Murder For Me were stylish thrillers set in Buenos Aires.) The remaining seven – Deathstalker, The Warrior and the Sorceress, Barbarian Queen, Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, Amazons, Stormquest, and Deathstalker II – were sword and sorcery efforts, hopping onto the fantasy bandwagon kicked off by Conan the Barbarian.

I’ve covered The Warrior and the Sorceress before on here, but I’ve not yet delved into the others. Being as I am an aficionado of the absolute cheesiest and worst sword and sorcery movies the Conan boom offered, I’ve had the original Deathstalker on DVD for ages – complete with 4:3 aspect ratio and the shot-through-a-film-of-soap picture quality you get from early DVDs which decided to just dump a VHS rip onto disc and call the job done – but more recently, 101 Films made the baffling decision to put out the first two Deathstalkers on Blu-Ray, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see how they come across in high definition. Let’s see how they hold up now we can get a clear look at what’s going on, shall we?

Content warning: I’m afraid I’m going to spend a lot of this article going “Wow, this artifact of rape culture really does suck when it comes to the subject of sexual assault!” This is particularly the case when it comes to the first Deathstalker movie, which was one of the first films to get widely discussed and panned on “bad B-movie”-themed websites on the early web in part because even in the early 2000s (and, indeed, on release), everyone kind of realised that it was really gross on the subject. A major course correction was attempted for Deathstalker II; rape is not absent from that movie, but it does seem to have been made with an understanding that the previous movie used it way, way too often, and was particularly nasty about how it made use of it.

Deathstalker

Deathstalker (Richard Hill) is a Conan-style vagabond in a fantasy realm. On his travels he encounters the exiled King Tulak (Jorge Sorvik), who was deposed by his court wizard Munkar (Bernard Erhard), who appeals to Deathstalker to venture forth to cast down Munkar and rescue Tulak’s daughter, the Princess Codille (Barbi Benton), from his clutches. Munkar is, in fact, having a (somewhat suspicious) tournament and has invited the finest warriors in the land to participate, which would surely be a golden opportunity to infiltrate and get close to him!

Deathstalker, though, is no chump, and more or less refuses to go on the quest even slightly. Then there is an extremely confusing scene where the witch Toralva (Verónica Llinás) gives him a tip-off about a magical sword, amulet, and chalice which together can be the undoing of Munkar’s power, and Deathstalker decides he may as well attempt the quest seeing how he’s been handed a walkthrough. By the time he’s reached Munkar’s fortress, he’s had a run-in with Munkar’s main enforcer General Kang (Victor Bo) and been joined on his journey by Salmaron (Augusto Larreta), a thief whose curse is lifted by Deathstalker in the process of recovering the sword, and fellow tournament contestants Oghris (Richard Brooker) and Kaira (Lana Clarkson – famous these days mostly for being murdered by Phil Spector).

Salmaron seems to only be in it for himself, but may prove to have hidden depths in the long run; Oghris is simply trying to compete in the tournament, and might not be up for much heroism; Kaira is by far the most heroic of the four, which means she’s too decent of a person for this movie. In the end, it will be Deathstalker himself who must face down Munkar…