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 Pet Shop Girls Trilogy: Publishing Tomorrow For The Memorial Day Weekend

Just for your information, that's Nataly the Violent Virgin at the left and Katie the Fool is riding Nataly the War Captive. This cover was a BEAR to create. More about that in another post.

Just in time for the Memorial Day Weekend, I've put my three Pet Shop Girls stories together in one volume and will be selling them for a low, low price. Even better, for Memorial Day Weekend I'm putting together an even lower sale price. (My accountant had to be revived with smelling salts when he saw the price!) 

New Promo Image for Sword and Submission

Came up with a new promo for Sword and Submission. Looking for that image that will reach into the subconscious of my readers and drag them to my books. I think this one might be effective. Her nakedness and vulnerability in the midst of the shirtless, muscular barbarian guys will hopefully press a few buttons in a few ids. We shall see! Here's a link to the book just in case: Sword and Submission.
 

Due to Facebook's stupid censorship regimen I had to come up with a version that hides the goodies because Oh, no! Sigh. Not nearly as effective if you ask me. (Not that any of the tech bros ever does.) You can see for yourself and make up your own mind. 

"Sword and Submission" Is Now On Sale at Smashwords!

 

"I, state your name..." Princess Zindra submits to King Horth. Click on the cover to be whisked to Smashwords where you can buy the book!

Here's the blurb!

 When King Mardag of Canoris rode out to conquer the neighboring kingdom of Zandor and give the upstart mountain barbarian King Horth a much-needed beheading, a quick victory was anticipated by all.

Instead, the result was a disastrous defeat resulting in the death of King Mardag and many of his warriors, and the capture of all the rest. In no time King Horth had conquered Mardag’s castle and very nearly captured Queen Lissandra. Horth did capture Mardag’s daughter, Princess Zindra, in the midst of a pitched battle in the throne room.

Horth and his wife and slave Queen Simora (it’s complicated) wasted no time in stripping, binding and collaring Zindra and seeing that she was enslaved and publicly raped, which in those days was the humanitarian thing to do to a captured princess.

Zindra failed to see any humanitarian motive in all this, but one good thing happened. When Zindra had been stripped they had removed the chastity belt she’d been locked in since puberty, and she was pretty darned sick of it since it had been ten very long, very horny, very unsatisfied years without so much as a single orgasm. Hence, Zindra discovered the joy of sex all at once and very intensely and repeatedly. It was the only part of the whole being overthrown situation that worked for her, frankly.

When Zindra realized she was a slave now and that she would be owned by someone or other for the rest of her life, she was certain that all her chances at a happy life were over. But then Zindra met the mighty warrior Faswik and something passed between them and it wasn’t just the usual gooey stuff. Neither of them knew what it was. But it changed both their lives forever.

Read this 41,000 word novel and find out how it all happened. You’ll be glad you did.

My Latest Novel "Sword and Submission" Coming Soon!

 

Promo art for "Sword and Submission."

I’ve been thinking about exploring a new niche, something I could do well that had a pretty good fan base. So I asked myself, what is the most successful BDSM erotica to date? The answer, obviously, was “Fifty Shades of Gray.” 70 million copies worldwide in one year, it dwarfs even MY sales! By about 70 million copies! I mean, everything I’ve sold on Smashwords would be a tiny rounding error compared with 70 million copies.

There are also John Norman’s Gor novels to consider. (Norman is still with us as of this writing, he’ll be 94 this year. Way to go, guy!)

The Gor novels are not nearly as successful as “Fifty Shades of Gray” all 38 of them having sold only 6 to 12 million copies over the 58 years they have been on sale. And that’s quite a range, 6 to 12 million copies. Still, even if you go with the low end of the range, 6 million copies, in comparison all of my sales at Smashwords are, once again, rounding errors, just slightly larger rounding errors, not enough to matter, still.

So obviously, if I were to come up with a way to combine the success of “Fifty Shades of Gray” and the Gor novels, sales of such a book might be a lot rounder than my other books, at the very least!

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present to you my latest novel, “Sword and Submission!”

It’s not on sale yet, but it will be on Friday. And yes, it is a combination of “Fifty Shades of Gray” and a Gor novel. Not any Gor novel in particular. I suppose the closest analogue would be the stories about Talena, daughter of the ruler of Ar and hence a Gorean princess. She, too gets captured and enslaved, though not nearly as explicitly as Princess Zindra in “Sword and Submission” does.

(Norman has his flaws as a writer but he is excellent at letting readers know just exactly what sexual things are going on without any explicit scenes or language whatsoever. It’s called writing “fantasy fuel” and Norman does it about as well as anyone. One of his best is a scene in “Dancer of Gor” where the titular slavegirl character’s virginity is auctioned off to 17 lucky winners at a tavern one night, and she winds up hooded, naked and chained in an alcove, unable to see the 17 men who “take her virginity.” He never explicitly describes any of the sex, but makes it very clear she gets her brains fucked out good and proper, all while hooded and chained in various ways.)

I am well qualified to attempt this project. I have read “Fifty Shades of Gray” and I have read 30 books in the Gor series. (OK, most of the later books I skimmed over the parts where he goes off on a rant about “antibiological sex” and other such stuff, because those rants last for page after page and are both tiresome and the same every time, occurring several times in each novel, generally in conjunction with one of his fantasy fuel sex scenes which I did NOT skim over.)

I know my material very well.

In my story everything is more explicit. But also much more romantic than anything in “Fifty Shades” or any “Gor” novel. The romance is not just emotional, it’s sexual. The sexual attraction between Princess Zindra and Faswik, one of King Horth’s warriors, is intertwined with the emotional attachment between them. It’s a real romance, a sexual romance and a BDSM romance. It’s a very different BDSM romance because it’s playing out in a time when chattel slavery was full integrated into society and the BDSM aspects of it were not recognized or understood.

I did a fair amount of thinking about that aspect of my story. I had three levels of slave sex to deal with: the BDSM understanding of it that a modern reader and I would have, the primeval chattel slavery that existed in Zindra’s Canoris and the slightly more advanced slavery that existed in Horth’s Zandor.

It was easy to work with the difference between Zandorian slavery and Canorian slavery. I just let the characters note the difference between how Zandorian slaves were treated and how Canorian slaves were treated. For dealing with our modern understanding of BDSM slavery, I had a hole card: the ancients recognized love slavery, or something like it.

So there  was a special class of slavery called “love slavery” that was recognized by both Zandorians and Canorians as a special kind of slavery that involved emotional as well as sexual relations between Master and slave. Which of course happens between Zindra and Faswik (but only after Zindra got raped a lot so she could experience regular slave sex).

Zindra didn’t recognize the nonconsenxual slave sex as rape and neither did the Masters who raped her so much. They would have said it was not rape because Zindra was a slave so she could not be raped, only used. Zindra would only recognize the indignity of the rape as part of the catastrophe of going from princess to slave, if she felt it as an indignity at all. As you will know if you read the book, there will be many distractions for Zindra.

I tried to give Zindra and all the characters a primitive understanding of the world, calmly accepting things that would alarm and even horrify modern readers. Even relatively advanced Zandorians accepted slavery and fucking slaves whether they liked it or not as perfectly normal and OK activities for everyone but the slaves, whose opinions on that or any topic didn’t matter unless the free chose to care about them.

As a princess, Zindra had never stopped to think if there were any positive aspects to slavery because it didn’t matter. It someone had pressed her on the topic she would have just said they got pleasure from serving others, especially noble others like herself. The usual self-serving, facile bullshit that the ruling classes have engaged in throughout history.

So she gets totally blindsided by her experience of slavery, especially with Faswik.

I won’t go any farther along those or any lines, lest I give too much away. I wrote the book about Zindra and Faswik's experiences. You should read it!

Susan: Pet Shop Sex Slave 3 Is Now On Sale At Smashwords & Where Have I Been, Anyway?

Click on the cover pic to be whisked away to Smashwords to get this ebook.

It took a long time to get “Susan: Pet Shop Sex Slave” written. It had little or nothing to do with the story itself. The real problems were capitalism and medical. The building we were living got sold by our landlord to another landlord. That landlord wanted to renovate the building so they could rent apartments to other, more money-having tenants. So all of us less money-having tenants got until at the end of our leases to move out.

Moving took weeks and was highly stressful. Looking for housing, packing, packing, packing, making arrangements, it was tough and no fun at all because it was not a voluntary move. That set us back a few weeks.

Then on the way to out new home and once we got there my wife and I both had medical emergencies: entirely unrelated medical emergencies (except possibly being brought on by the stress of moving) had each of us sitting in emergency rooms chewing our nails wondering if the other was going to live or not. It was horrible, and distracted me completely from writing. It definitely put writing in perspective, along with everything else.

Both of us survived and recovered fully and we eventually got moved, and I am writing and editing again, and VERY happy to be doing so. For one thing, it means I’m alive. For another, it means I’m having fun.

Also, I’ve got an excuse for not completing a new novella quickly that’s light years beyond “the dog ate my manuscript.”

Now as to my new novella. It’s set in the not too distant future, though definitely in the future. Political divisions in America have led to a second American Civil War. The opponents are the Union, much like in the original Civil War but with some Midwestern states and the Far West included, and the Bourbon states, consisting of the old American South and most midwestern states as well as some western states.

This time the war begins with a drone attack by the Bourbons on Washington DC that kills thousands as well as a few politicians. After that the war is on and it’s just as bloody and nasty as the first one.

But the novel isn’t about the war, it’s about a victim of the war, Susan Nutall. Susan is a relative innocent. She wasn’t antiwar, she was just supremely disinterested in it. Still, when the war came through her home she was one of many civilians who were tear-gassed out of a cave they were hiding in and then tasered and shipped off as a war captive, naked hooded and in chains.

While on the way to she knew not where, she was raped several times by unseen men right there with the other captives.

She was also identified as a good Pet Shop candidate by an unseen man, and got shipped to the Pet Shops, which trained comely captives as sex slaves and also contributed to the war effort in various ways.

The Pet Shops trained Susan and psychologically broke her, as they did all Pet Shop sex slave, turning her into someone who would do any sex act on command, unthinkingly.

After being trained, Susan is bought by various “clubs” which were actually bordellos, working as an upaid slave whore, serving customers’ sexual desires abjectly and spending her off time in a cage.

Eventually things change in ways that Susan could never have imagined, for reasons she didn’t understand. You’ll just have to read the story to learn about that, and doing so will involve lots and lots of reading explicit scenes of sex slave training and slave whoring, most of it occurring in extreme sexual bondage. But I am sure you, my loyal readers, are up for it.

Fantasy Fuel

RAAAAAAAAAAPE! (Trigger Warning, you betcha!)

You've often heard me complain about the censorship on Amazon. They won't let you do rape fantasies.

But Amazon isn't the only distributor out there. Smashwords gives CONSIDERABLY more freedom to their writers. They still can't allow books that out and out proselytize about how great real life rape is – no one can, the credit card companies won't process payments for publishers who promote rape as a lifestyle.

Smashwords does allow rape fantasies, however. People have fantasies about rape all the time. As I endlessly delight in pointing out, a lot of the old-time romance novels (B.E. – Before Erotica) were chock full of rape fantasy fuel, with pirates abducting innocent women, Arabs abducting innocent women, gangsters abducting innocent women, and in the case of gay romances, women abducting innocent women. And raping them. It was always implied, sometimes alluded to, and sometimes even described, though generally in the least descriptive terms possible.

But we're not supposed to notice that women have rape fantasies, or even allude to it!

When I first started writing, I was writing sexual bondage fantasies, about women getting tied up and having sex. The logical narrative for that was that somebody grabs a girl and ties her up, probably a pirate or something.

And my first big hit as a writer was “Riverbeast” a novel about a river pirate who kidnaps the daughter of a merchant who does the river pirate wrong. And yes, the full Riverbeast saga is onSmashwords and you can buy it right now. Hell, you can read the first part of the story forfree which has a very nice bit of fantasy fuel when the pirates capture and rape the protagonist and four of her comely young female friends.

Even better, there's the President Slavegirl saga. One of the themes you see in a lot of the old romances was The Fall From Grace, wherein a highfalutin', high born lady is brought low by Fate, or Circumstances, generally in the form of some grubby low class guy who kidnaps her and teaches her The Meaning Of Life the hard, tied-up way.

President Slavegirl is the ultimate Fall from Grace, with a former President of the United States who has stretched the powers of the Presidency so far it would make Donald Trump boggle stripped of her civil rights by the courts and then kidnapped and enslaved by her enemies. She gets tied up and has sex a lot, and she's a freaking prude and a half (that's how she made so many enemies, she put everybody who likes sex in jail, or tried to.) Another novel of mine on sale on Smashwords. And yes, there is a free sample of the first book in the series, “The Homouth” and yes, the former President of the United States of America gets tied up and used thoroughly in it.

That ought to be enough for today, I have a lot to say on this topic, but a blog gives me the latitude to take my time. In my next post, I'll tell you about a popular fantasy author whose books are incredible slave rape fantasy fuel.

I wonder what the fantasy is here?