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.
