Director James Gunn recently posted a list of action movies to watch while under quarantine to his Twitter account. I looked the list over. There’s a lot of good stuff there–though I’d question how much The French Connection counts as an action movie–but there were also a number of movies there I hadn’t seen. I did find the list on The AV Club’s website, and they included places where you can stream most of Gunn’s recommendations. A few were only available for free on a service called Tubi. I didn’t know what that was, but I did a quick look-up and found it is a free service that runs, well, a lot of stuff, some of which actually looked good.

But how good was the streaming? Did it include ads or was it censored? The only way to find out was to watch a movie and see. I opted for a 1983 cheap-o fantasy action movie called Deathstalker, one I knew about because I like watching various YouTube channels that riff off bad movies. This one, I think, came from Brandon Tenold’s Cult Movie channel, and it would be fine for my purposes.

Besides, I could write a review for it for here afterwards.

Deathstalker is, well, a Conan the Barbarian cash-in attempt. Despite the fact his name doesn’t really appear anywhere in the credits, this is the work of producer Roger Corman, a man who, well, made a lot of cheap movies over the course of his career. Deathstalker very much fits the pattern of the sorts of movies he made, and it was apparently the first of a series of movies he made in an agreement with the country of Argentina. That would explain why much of the cast is obviously dubbed over to English. Much of that explanation also explains much else about the movie, like the gratuitous female nudity and a plot set up basically to give the title character–yes, the main character’s name is “Deathstalker”–a chance to kill scores of nameless thugs and goons working for the evil wizard Munkar.

And, well, that’s about it. Deathstalker is played by a piece of wood named Rick Hill who at least looks the part, but the character even as written is a rather despicable person. Consider the movie’s opening scene: a group of, well, goblins or cavemen or something attempt to take down a man who has kidnapped a young woman and stolen some gold. The man is clearly intending to rape the woman, but then Deathstalker shows up, kills all the goblin things and then the rapist-thief. And then he moves to have his way with the woman himself, and if not for an interruption by a messenger, he might have gotten away with it. Yes, the woman initially seems into it as things start up, but then as soon as she can, she gets dressed and runs off.

So, we have as our hero an attempted rapist? Oh, and he does something like that again later. Why do we root for this guy? Sure, he may not desire to take over a king’s realm and keep a harem of barely-clad women in his dungeon, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s into sexual assault.

From there, we get the standard tropes for this type of movie. Deathstalker gets a quest to retrieve some magical items before Munkar can use them to do more evil, and Munkar already has two out of the three items. He gains some potentially colorful allies as Munkar is holding a tournament of warriors to fight to the death in order to choose an heir…despite the fact Munkar is supposed to be immortal. And the deposed king’s daughter is kept in the harem after she was captured at some point just before the movie started. So-so special effects, bland at-best acting, and a predictable plot are what follows.

Were there any bright spots? Depends on what you’re looking for. The movie does stick to the plot and doesn’t meander all over, but it’s under 90 minutes, so that’s to be expected. I can’t say there’s anything to make this movie stand out aside from the fact that the one actor in the movie with any real recognition is Lana Clarkson as a female warrior friend to Deathstalker who spends most of the movie if not topless then in a state where she might as well be, and the only reason she has much name recognition today is because she’s the victim in the Phil Spector murder trial.

So, while it wasn’t, say, incompetent or something like The Room, it also has nothing really going for it either unless you like cheap, exploitative movies. The best I can say is it didn’t annoy me.

Oh, and to answer my query: Tubi doesn’t censor content, but the movie did have a couple commercial breaks scattered throughout the runtime.

Grade: D


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