The Last Great Warrior King.
Starring: Rick Hill, Barbi Benton, Richard Brooker, Lana Clarkson, Victor Bo
Director: John Watson
1983 | 76 Minutes | Rated R
“I will be the power!” – Deathstalker
OK, so I’m on some sort of a weird barbarian kick or something. This time it’s Deathstalker that I’ll be watching.
Barbarian warrior Deathstalker (Richard Hill) is tasked by an old witch to obtain the three powers of creation and chaos – a chalice, an amulet, and a sword – before the evil sorcerer lord Munkar can find them and use them for evil. After obtaining the sword, Deathstalker joins with other travelers to compete in a tournament to determine the strongest warrior. Munkar holds a = princess in captivity and plots to have Deathstalker killed. Deathstalker must fight to free the princess and kill Munkar.
If you can make any sense out of that storyline then you are a better man than I. Yeah, I get what’s happening but it generally just doesn’t make a whole ton of sense. It’s probably the way in which the story is told. It basically feels like, as a viewer, I am thrown from one scene to the next with little story to hold it together. I wasn’t expecting much story but for some reason it fell short of what I expected.
Not surprisingly, the acting is terrible. The accents are all over the board and the dialogue is no better than something I could write on a first draft.
The fights are a little better than Barbarian Queen but that isn’t saying much. This is before low budget movies discovered the wonder of choreographed fights. It’s amazing how much better a fight looks when a modicum of thought is put into it before hand.
As with Barbarian Queen, the movie poster is the best part of the movie. Somehow this crappy movie got the great Boris Vallejo to paint their poster.
Deathstalker is clearly influenced by the Conan and He-Man which are definitely good places to gain inspiration. Unfortunately Deathstalker falls short of both Conan and Masters of the Universe. There are a number of Deathstalker sequels so I will likely check those out at some point but I won’t be expecting much.
Action Movie Fanatix 