Somehow, for reasons I cannot explain, I had never seen The Beastmaster until a couple nights ago. This was one of those movies that seemed to appear frequently on the local UHF channel’s movie rotation, popping up every couple months alongside other movies that I can only barely recall. I always did like animals, so it made sense that something like The Beastmaster might stick out, and somehow I never saw it even in its edited-for-TV version.
Well, I may as well see it now. It’s not like I’ve been going anywhere else anytime soon.
High priest Maax (Rip Torn) of the kingdom of Aruk gets a prophecy that the king’s unborn child will slay him someday. He has some witches in his employ, so he sends them out to get rid of the baby. That involves some weird spells and a fiery sacrifice out in the wasteland, but a man comes along and manages to take down the witch and rescue the baby boy. Years pass and Dar (Marc Singer as an adult) grows up to be a strong man with an affinity for animals. However, when raiders wipe out his village (even Dar’s dog!) with Dar the only survivor, he vows to hunt them down and bring them to justice. Along the way, he’ll fall for a slave girl (Tanya Roberts, formerly one of Charlie’s Angels), make some animal friends, and inadvertently take on Maax and the raiders to save his birth kingdom.
Now, it’s obvious that a movie like The Beastmaster may have been inspired by the success of Conan the Barbarian…or it would have been except the two movies came out the same year, so it’s unlikely one was made to rip off the other directly. That said, Conan‘s success did spawn more than its fair share of low budget imitators, and I’ve seen a few. Good news for me is that while Beastmaster is not in the same league as Conan, it is a good deal better than many of the sword-and-sorcery type movies that came out in this era. There’s a certain level of earnestness to this movie. Yes, the way Dar first pins his love interest to the ground and forces a kiss from her has obviously aged poorly, especially considering the first sight we get of Roberts is her bathing and showing a more notable amount of skin than she ever did on the TV show she was best known for at the time, but at the same time, I can’t say Beastmaster is all that bad a movie. Oh, it isn’t necessarily a good movie, but it is competently made with some familiar and reliable faces in the form of Torn and John Amos. And Singer actually does a good job of it too.
However, despite giving the material the right amount of seriousness that it deserves, does have some noteworthy flaws. Maax and the raiders are not allies, and the movie can’t seem to make up its mind as to who Dar’s main enemies are. It probably should be Maax. Torn makes a good villain, and aside from a distinctive helmet, I couldn’t tell you much of anything about the leader of the raiders. Furthermore, the fight choreography is often, for lack of a better word, obvious. It doesn’t look like a fight so much as a well-practiced series of moves the actors make to look like a fight. Between that and the way the two villain problem made it look like what should have been two movies and the one we had is a bit too long, and it ends up marring what is basically a fun movie of its genre. There’s some charm here, but some obvious flaws tend to bring things down a bit.
Grade: C+
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