This is a review of the 1983 movie "Deathstalker" which will point out the Gorean influences in the film and also be pretty freaking entertaining. It's from my book "The Hottitude of Servitude: Slavegirls In The Movies and On TV" but has been revised and updated.
Watching this Youtubevideo about sexy 80sfantasy movies was a trying experience for me. The movie reviewer just kept missing the obvious Gorean influences on the scripts and in the scenes. The Gor novels sold six to twelve million copies in the 80s and 90s, HUGE for the science fiction and fantasy genre. We're not talking Fifty Shades of Gray here, but DEFINITELY a precursor... yet no one mentions them as influential. So let me be the one!
Take the opening of what is probably one of the best (maybe the best, certainly one of the most influential) of the 80s sword and sorcery movies, 1983’s “Deathstalker” (the first movie in the series). It is also arguably the finest Gor movie ever made, even if it wasn't called a Gor movie. Here’s a vidcap of the scene:
In this scene the mostly naked woman in the foreground is in bondage the whole time. She’s got a rope around her neck and her hands are tied in front. She is a captive of the slaver guy standing immediately behind her, and he's put her on the leaf-strewn rock table so he can rape her. The guys seen in the background interrupt his plan with their own plan, which is to kill him and rape the woman themselves.
Then Deathstalker shows up and kills all the ambusher guys. To show his gratitude the slaver guy offers Deathstalker the use of his woman, but then tries to kill Deathstalker, who is way ahead of him and kills the slaver guy easily.
Then instead of freeing the woman Deathstalker binds her by stabbing a handy tree with a big knife and draping her bound wrists over the blade, and then he starts raping her. But he's interrupted by a priest messenger for the king, who's got a mission for Deathstalker. Deathstalker talks with him for a bit and says "Fine I'll talk the king after I finish raping this woman"... only to discover that while he has been distracted by the priest-messenger, she had gotten free of her bonds (knives are a kinda of dumb thing to hang women tied by ropes from) and she has scarfered off into the forest.
Now THAT'S how you start a Gor movie! The poor, half-naked female captive is in bondage the whole time, captive of three different groups of men, all of whom want to rape her while she’s bound, including the titular hero!
And it doesn’t stop there. There’s Kaira, the naked female warrior whose wonderfully full breasts are on display almost every time she’s on screen (and she’s onscreen a lot) ably played by Lana Clarkson (RIP). And there’s a harem full of mostly naked cuties, sometimes caged cuties, one of whom is played by former Playboy Playmate Barbi Benton, who as a prize in a killing contest, gets a filmy negligee ripped off her otherwise naked body while she’s chained to a rock wall, followed by some barbaric smooging on her while she’s still chained up. And there’s women wrestling naked in mud as part of the entertainment at the same party where Barbi gets stripped.
There’s also a scene of a bunch of bad guys attacking a different woman than the one in the opening scene who’s also tied to a tree, though not as naked, and also rescued by Deathstalker of course.)
And there are tons of scenes of Deathstalker beating up bad guys with his fists and stabbing bad guys with his sword. Of course, that’s nothing new in a sword and sorcery adventure movie, but heroic adventure and fighting bad guys is also a part of the Gor novels, that and sporting with the slavegirls. A lot. Often while they are bound and gagged.
(BTW, the 2025 Deasthstalker movie has no, repeat, no, sex or nudity in it. I haven’t seen it, but one of the review sites straight out said “no sex, no nudity” and I watched a couple of reviews and none of them mentioned nudity or sexy times. To be fair, Deathstalker 2025 is generally praised for being full of really well-made fight scenes and lots of well done practical effects. It is probably the perfect pre-pubescent sword and sorcery movie, at least, for pre-pubescents who aren’t bothered by lots and lots and lots of gore. In fact, the right way to describe the movie would be, “lots and lots of gore, but no Gor.”)
“Deathstalker” is generally cited as the best of the sword and sorcery movies that came out after the success of John Milius’ “Conan” and for good reason. I totally agree with that assessment. I just don’t think its success was strictly because it was a knockoff of “Conan the Barbarian.” I think its success was because it was one of the few movies that had the balls to copy the Gor novels and give plenty of screen time to all the sexy naked slavegirls being in bondage and doing sexy naked slavegirl things along with all the swordfighting and general whupass. Most sword and sorcery movies concentrate on the whupass and feature a cookie-cutter plot and give scant screen time to their scantily clad slavegirls, which is a definite mistake, but one that B-movie filmmakers seem determined to make, over and over again. (Did I mention that Deathstalker 2525 has no sex or nudity? I believe I did.)
However, I did some research using Google’s AI search engine and was unable to find any evidence that anybody associated with Conan or Deathstalker had been influenced in any way by the Gor novels.
Except of course there IS evidence that Deathstalker was influenced by the Gor novels – it’s right up there on screen. There was NOTHING like Deathstalker prior to Deathstalker. Sure, Conan had slavegirls wandering around naked and harem slaves writhing naked in a throne room but they overall weren’t that sexy and there wasn’t a hell of a lot to them. Ultimately, they were just scenery, like most sword and sorcery slavegirls.
Deathstalker on the other hand used the naked slavegirls to drive the plot forward. The opening scene of the movie with Deathstalker, the slaver guy and the Ugly Guys fighting it out to see who’ll get to rape a half-naked woman in bondage set the tone for the movie. In fact the whole movie is a damsel in distress film, with Deathstalker charged with rescuing Princess Codille (Barbi Benton’s character) from Mad Monkar, the man who deposed the king and also deposing Mad Monkar if possible.
And Princess Codille winds up naked and chained to a rock as a prize for Monkar’s warriors. She’s just a member of the harem now, a toy whose sexual use can be given as a prize. VERY Gorean.
Interestingly, Codille doesn’t get a rape scene. She’s captured by Munkar’s minions (also not shown, but fair enough, the movie is about Deathstalker, not Codille) but all she appears to do in Munkar’s harem is stand around and be physically beautiful (which Benton totally has covered). And given the way the first scene (and a lot of other scenes) established that rape is definitely an integral part of the culture of Deathstalker’s milieu, you have to figure that Codille got raped a lot between her capture and her showing up in Munkar’s harem. But nooooo... the character Codille never has sex.
HOWEVER... at one point Mad Munkar transforms one of his men into the spitting image of Codille and orders him to find Deathstalker and distract him with Codille’s charms and then kill Deathstalker while he is distracted by Codille’s beauty. The soldier is not at all enthusiastic about this particular assignment, but that’s one of the hazards of working for an evil wizard named Mad Munkar, I guess. (Benton does a great job of playing the reluctant soldier, doing his duty because he doesn’t want to wind up in Munkar’s dungeon, but not crazy about it at all.) And he was right to be reluctant, on all counts. Deathstalker is completely fooled by the magical transformation and fucked the soldier/Codille. Then when the soldier tries to kill Deathstalker (and let’s face it, this was probably a personal thing for him afte being fucked) Deathstalker foils his assassination attempt and stabs the soldier, breaking the transformation spell and returning him to his soldierly form just in time to die on the bed he’d just been fucked on.
So... that was weird. Transexual themes were not common in 80s sword and sorcery films, as in, I’ve never heard of another one. And the weirdness went unacknowledged in the film, it was just another thing that happened. But whatever you think of the scene, I think it clearly shows that scriptwriter Cohen was willing to include stuff that was seriously out of bounds in his stories, and obviously no one else blocked the trans-themed subplot from being in the movie, either. So if you are thinking that Cohen and company backed off from some themes because they went “too far” think again. This was a Gorean sword and sorcery movie, dammit! (Not that Gor included a lot of trans themes either.)
So if you are thinking that Cohen and company backed off from some themes because they went “too far” think again. This was a Gorean sword and sorcery movie, dammit! (Not that Gor included a lot of trans themes either. It’s a very cishet series.)
No movie made before or since has matched Deathstalker in this regard, but one may have outmatched it in terms of getting into slavegirl psychology: Barbarian Queen. It will be the next movie we review.
No comments:
Post a Comment