Deathstalker: An Incredibly Gorean Movie

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:

Half naked woman in bondage, check. Handsome hero with slave rape on his mind, check. Ugly barbarians in background, check. This is so fucking Gorean!

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.

Turns out Deathstalker is in the mood for some slave rape of the damsel he just rescued, too. Heroes and villains both have the same thing in mind for slavegirls. So Gorean!

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.

Princess Codille loses the negligee and gets smooged on in the midst of a barbaric party in the castle.

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.)

Sexy, sexy harem girl provided plenty of sexy scenery for the movie as well.

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.

Lana Clarkson: not a slavegirl, but DEFINITELY a plot driver.

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.

The Gor Novels' Real Base Is And Was Horny, Unsatisfied Romance Readers

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Fidget Spinner... of Gor!

I've heard that the trick to the Gorean fidget spinner is to give the girl in the ropes a good strong spin once her ankle ropes are released, strong enough to keep her ankles from drooping to the floor as she spins around.

From kink.com shoot 28917 featuring Audrey Hollander as the spinneree.

Getting Inspired, The Fun Way

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Sex Slavery Fantasy Fuel: In Praise of John Norman

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Good Gorean Combat Video On Youtube

A still from a Gorean combat video showing a naked slavegirl just hanging around while a battle rages around her. Image source: TheGodofBeer's Gorean battle video.
The God of Beer, aka BradAtWar "Superman"Guardian has posted a few battle videos that give a pretty good idea how Gorean combat works, like this one here. It's basically Brad carrying a camera during a mass raid on the Agarath Vikings and camming around on various people as he fights. Or doesn't fight, you can't really do an effective job of fighting in an SL Gor Evolved if you are doing anything else at all. Brad gets downed twice, and I've been in fights with Brad, he's a legit super bow, and mostly it's other people who get downed when he fights. I think he was basically just doing the filming in this fight.

Experienced Gorean fighters will be able to easily figure this out, but I'll point out a few things for those who are not experienced fighters.

You'll note a lot of large pointed stake-like objects growing out of the ground. Those are tree trunks. They look like stakes because Brad has his alpha channels turned off, and the foliage on trees is normally rendered in the alpha channels. I know this for sure because when Brad is downed, no red bubble (also rendered in alpha channels) pops up around him.

Some Second life viewers, like Firestorm, allow you to place your camera so that it views another avatar in the same sim you are in with a mouseclick. That's what Brad is doing when the camera suddenly jumps to a different scene in the battle. He's watching others fight, basically.

Interesting bit at the end. There are various people lying on the ground bound in ropes. Brad takes one as a captive, leashing her up. (You do that by clicking on the ropes and then clicking on the popup menu that says "leash." You can then drag the person in the binds wherever you like.) And so Brad starts dragging his captive off to the docks, probably with a view to roleplaying with her for a time and thus encouraging the Agarath Vikings to raid his lands to rescue her.

But as he's leaving, he gets sniped by a defender, arrows hitting him from the fort. So Brad drops his captive since you can't run while dragging a leashed captive (in fact, you CAN run with a leashed captive in the game, but it's against the rules of battle on most sims). Once he's free of the captive, he starts shooting it out with the sniper, which typically would not go well for the sniper, but an Agarath Viking, unknown to Brad, makes a run out to where Brad is and sneaks up on him and downs him with a sword while he's engaged with the sniper. Excellent tactics.

Brad's former captor then proceeds to bind him, but she does not take him captive, when the video ends she is clearly headed away from the fort, which generally means she is going to sail him, the fate of most invaders who are losers in a battle. Generally just one or two are kept captive to be roleplayed, though sometimes virtually a whole group will be taken. It's up to the victors how many get roleplayed, and since that means committing an hour at least to interacting with the captives, there's a tendency for most to get sailed.

An important part of many Gor Evolved is missing here. Most Gor Evolved groups use Vent when they raid. It makes things a lot more exciting, hearing your friends voices as they shout on Vent, "Over here! I'm downed! My captor is in the red, you can take him down easy!" or "We got snipers in the tower to the southeast" or "Ok, lets stick together here at the gate and wear them down before we go in."

Finally, I do not believe this video is at all typical of Brad's performance in battle when he's not filming. He generally gets into the thick of the fighting and stays there. The filming made him hang back a lot, so in that sense it's not typical of Gor Evolved battles. Mostly you want to be in there, shooting and stabbing. But it still gives you some idea what goes on in a battle, and that's a good thing!

Gor Mentioned Withhout Usual Horrified Shreiks In Mainstream Website!!!!!!

A fighting slavegirl of Gor Evolved runs amok, her slave claws extended, wearing a shield for protection (cause she doesn't have so much as a chainmail bikini to protect her), her slings and broom (I THINK that's a broom on her back) ready to deal outrageous fortune to any who cross her path! Image source: Second Life Gor Evolved.
Well paint me purple and call me Barney! Things are really turning around. I've written how Fifty Shades of Grey has, at least temporarily, gotten some elements of mainstream media to stop putting all those "Eeeew" bookends up whenever they discuss BDSM or BDSM-related matters, though of course the real dinosaurs are still at it. It's gotten to where I expect a certain amount of civility in the mainstream discourse about BDSM, something very new to me.

Still, I was AMAZED to see the Gor movies mentioned in this article on I09 as the potential basis for a TV series along the lines of HBO's Game of Thrones and Starz's Spartacus series. This is of course, a brilliant idea, I know this because I had it myself. I just don't typically expect brilliance from writers on mainstream websites. And I don't expect it to be so matter of fact:

However, a Gor TV series would basically be a pay-cable network’s goldmine, seeing how sex and violence is what sells, and Gor has both in ridiculous amounts. A Gor series is tailor-made for the Starz executive who says, “Yes, our Spartacus TV series was could but what it really needed was more tits and violence.”

Wow. The author, Rob Bricken, is totally right of course. Seeing that much simple sanity in a mainstream site writing about the Gor movies is fricking STARTLING. Mostly when Gor is mentioned in mainstream sites, it's heavily bookended with "horrible sexist rapists who wish to enslave and degrade women wholesale and their deeply disturbed female followers!" crap. I'm not exaggerating ... much. Almost anything written about Gor, including the Gor movies, in mainstream sites will almost always include stuff of this nature, if not phrased EXACTLY as I have phrased it.

And that's what makes the simple recommendation of the Gor movies on I09 so startling. Of COURSE there have to be some caveats, but they're fairly mild by mainstream media standards:

John Norman’s long-running fantasy series had two terrible movies, which, depending on how you feel about the series premise that women are naturally subservient to men, and are much happier being dominated by them socially and sexually, is probably fine. ... And, if that executive were not fully on board with Norman’s gender politics, a decent showrunner could subvert the series’ core “values” much like Paul Verhoeven did to Starship Troopers.

These bookends make reference to Norman's "all women are natural slavegirls" philosophy as espoused in the novels (and that's how I know the writer, though referencing the movies for the sake of the article, which is about movies, is thinking about the books, because the movies were anti-slavery in theme and had precious little in the way of sex or violence to recommend them).

And I have to point out (and this is the point of my illustration at the top of the article and below) that Bricken's hypothetical showrunner won't have to expend a lot of creative energy on imagining a more egalitarian Gor, because that has already done -- that is what Gor Evolved IS. In Gor Evolved, women warriors run around with bows shooting male warriors up on an equal footing. To see how a more egalitarian Gor would work, one need only visit a few Gor Evolved sims and see how they work.


A fighting slavegirl (center) and two female warriors pause while wreaking havoc on a Gor Evolved sim. Image source: Second Life Gor Evolved.
Ordinarily, I'd feel very comfortable in predicting that there will be no Gor TV series even on premium channels, given that the Gor novels still make gender feminists shriek in fury, but given how completely I failed to predict the success of Fifty Shades of Grey, I am a bit shy about doing so. And the premium cable channels cannot fail to have noticed the success of Game of Thrones and Spartacus with all their primitive sex, nudity and violence. As Bricken points out, Gor has that in spades.

Slavegirl On The Shore

Very Slavador Dali! Click on this pic for a larger, desktop sized image.
Been fooling around in Gor, trying to come up with some cool images with some animations and atmospheric effects. Came up with one that reminded me of Salvador Dali's stuff, lacking only a melty watch or three. If you click on the pic, you can download a much larger pic that will be desktop worthy. See what you think!

Blowjobs As Usual In Congress

"The Chair recognizes the honorable Members' member!" Image source: Second Life.
Found this thought provoking thread from 2010 when I did a Google search so as to break out of the doldrums imposed by the Google news' agents reliance on big aggregator sites. It's about Gorean slavegirls showing up en masse in Congress. My personal feeling is, if Gorean slavegirls invaded the halls of Congress ... nothing much would change. The lobbying technique would be exactly the same. More photogenic, perhaps, but who believes that Congress operates in any other way?

Cinemax To Create Animated Gor Series Using Actual Second Life Locations!

Cinemax sets sail for adventure with a new original series set on the planet Gor.
Cinemax, creators of original series such as "Banshee" and "Hunted" and such original adult series as "Life on Top" and "Femme Fatales," has announced that it is starting production on a new animated adult series based on John Norman's Gor novels, set in the virtual world of Second Life Gor.

Insiders at Cinemax say the cable network has been eyeing the successes of HBO's series "Game of Thrones" and most especially Starzs' very successful "Spartacus" with a desire to create their own breakthrough series. This has led to the creation of several bland, low-budget action adventure series, such as "Banshee" and "Hunted."

"We realized that we had been going at it all wrong when we looked at Games of Thrones and Spartacus," said the insider. "Spartacus has its sexy slavegirls and Game of Thrones has its sexy whores, who are pretty much slaves. Clearly they've been getting in on the taste for sexy female submission just like Fifty Shades of Grey did in the book world. We've been going in the stupid direction there with our original adult series "Femme Fatales" which was basically hot dominatrixes having sex. It's earned us a devoted following, but a very SMALL, I mean, a really TINY devoted following relative to Game of Thrones, Spartacus, and especially Fifty Shades of Grey."

"So we looked around and discovered that John Norman's Gor was once a very hot property in the old maledom/femsub area, but it got optioned by idiots back in the 80s and nothing useful got done with it," said the source. "And we realized that Spartacus with tons of hottie slavegirls was just the thing, but you know, most of our series are done on very limited budget. We're talking cheap here. And while filming naked women in chains having sex is cheap enough, all the sword fighting and giant bird flying and such were going to cost, and cost big, by our standards. We're not HBO or Starz!"

The solution, said inside sources, was provided by the research that was done on the Gor novels. The Cinemax production team discovered that there was a huge fandom for the Gor novels in the virtual community called Second Life, and they had created over 300 different virtual sites, called sims, that were based on the Gor novels.

"When we saw this, we realized that most of the production work we would need had already been done, in an animated venue, and that's when we said, "Why not make it an adult animated series?" explained the insider, who might or might not be the executive producer for the series. "We already knew we could get the rights to the Captive of Gor title and concept from John Norman for peanuts, and we knew we could pay off the owners of these sims for peanuts and get all kinds of extras for the scenes besides, and all we'd really need is some voice actors and some post-production work to make up for stuff like the doll hands." (Second Life avatar hands are noted for being immobile.) "Piece of cake! I mean, one of the iconic cartoon characters of all time is a pig that wears a shirt and no pants and has no genitals! People are very forgiving about animation -- and OUR animations are VERY lifelike and DO have genitals, and they'll be using them. They'll be in bondage, and they'll be in sexual bondage. We can't miss with this one!"

"People will be VERY surprised at how good this will be," said the sou ... it's the executive producer, OK? The fucking executive producer! He won't let me use his NAME but who the HELL else would know all this stuff? "There'll be bowfighting, very big right now, swordfighting, and naked slavegirls submitting to mighty masters right and left. And don't you worry ... the slavegirls in this series will NOT be damsels in distress, waiting for some heroic man to free them. ALL the Goreans want to enslave them, there are no heroes! The slave girls will have to learn to deal with their slave girl problems on their own, whether that involves escaping to another land and becoming panther girls, becoming free women through some act of bravery or whatever, or dealing with their own submissive desires ... something you never see in damsel in distress plotlines. Captive of Gor will surprise you!"

Casting for the voice talent is already underway, scripts are being written, and the post-production team has been assembled. The series should be on the air in Spring 2014.

Visit My Second Life Gor Blog!

A new place to hang out and dig on Second Life Gor and other sexy, sexy slavegirl video game thingies!

I've taken my Second Life Gor related posts and created a new blog with them, much as I did with my Fifty Shades of Grey related posts. It will be a place to easily find the stuff I've written on the topic, and also I'll put posts there that aren't necessarily appropriate for the more kinky, social-observation, newsy topics you'll find on politically sexy. Or I may turn it into a Mechwarrior blog. Hell, I'm capable of it!

Given its more adult subject matter, my SL Gor will be adultly illustrated, unlike my Fifty Shades blog.

Perils of Negotiating While Being Given A Blowjob

"I don't care if the price I quoted for the silk was a silver blowjob per, the cost of guards to prevent blowjobs means I have to blowjob at least blowjob ... blow ... what was I saying?" Image source: The Gorean tumblr blowjo ... er, art collection. Unattributed, as usual. I looked but was unable to find the artist who created it via reverse image search. If anyone knows, let me know, I'll credit them and prolly write up a post about them ... this is some VERY nice work.
Oh, I know the temptation is great. Why wait until AFTER the deal is made to reward yourself by having a slavegirl give you a nice blowjob? You know you're going to win! Why not have the celebratory blowjob DURING the blowjob ... er, negotiations? It won't be distracting at all! Just a lovely slave kneelng between your legs and sucking your dick while you work. Call it multitasking if you will.

Seriously, this is a nicely imagined piece of art. The two guys are arguing vigorously while the slavegirl kneels before her owner, her arms pinioned behind her, sucking master's dick while they talk because that's her job and she has to suck his cock no matter where, when or how she's ordered to do it. The slave behind the master looks on, a litle bored, holding a vase that may be the topic being argued about/negotiated over. It subtly says a great deal about the society being portrayed, where big-time master types were so busy they couldn't even take breaks for blowjobs, and where slaves were not permitted any privacy whatsoever.

The version on the Gorean Art page is much larger, btw, but with the 7 inch width limit on this blog, I cropped it to focus on the essential blowjob ... er, elements.

Bad Sentences of Gor Interpreted

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Movie Reviews of Gor!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.