Last night I paid another nostalgic visit to those long-gone good old days of video rental shops and the wonderful movies that could be hired from them but which are rarely if ever screened anywhere on TV nowadays, and often have not even been given a DVD or Blu-Ray release. For the movie that I watched is a classic from that bygone age, one whose cover I so well recall seeing on countless occasions in such shops, but which I somehow never got around to renting, despite its sword-&-sorcery (S&S) genre being a favourite of mine. But after recently purchasing it in UK VHS video format from a fellow video enthusiast, I've watched it now, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The movie? Ator: The Fighting Eagle.
Directed and co-written by Joe D'Amato, and released in 1982, this Italian fantasy movie stars a youthful but muscular Miles O'Keeffe as the titular Ator, who in physical form is definitely cast from the classic Conan/He-Man/Deathstalker/Beastmaster mould of mystical warrior-hero. Moreover, the entire film comes across as being very much a S&S movie-by-numbers. Or, at the risk of mixing metaphors, a big-screen fantasy created by diligently following the standard cinematic recipe for such productions, the result of adding all of their principal ingredients, shaking them up and stirring them together, then screening the end product.
Thus we have the stereotypical pumped-up warrior-hero seeking to fulfill his noble, long-prophesied destiny, a glamorous and often feisty female companion whom he has rescued early on in the movie, various magical weapons to assist his endeavours, an evil ruler or despot needing to be conquered for peace and happiness to be restored to the land, a loved one abducted by said ruler/despot and therefore needing to be rescued by the hero, a shocking betrayal by a trusted ally, the hero temporarily distracted by some feminine wiles and witchcraft (literally!), sundry monsters to be slain along the way, and said ruler/despot duly vanquished in the final reel. And sure enough, in Ator: The Fighting Eagle, every one of those requirements is indeed met and ticked off on its itinerary of must-haves and must-dos.
Yet although this movie may be short on originality and imagination, I still found it enjoyable, enhanced in no small way by O'Keeffe's sympathetic portrayal of Ator as earnest and likeable rather than the arrogant, dour, overbearing figure that this particular category of fantasy character is all too often portrayed as in films such as this. Sabrina Siani as Ator's formidable Amazon sidekick Roon is always entertaining too, and I was startled to discover when reading the end-credits that Ator's trainer, the elderly, mysterious Griba, was played by none other than Edmund Purdom, hitherto known to me only as Prince Karl the handsome student prince in the 1954 movie version of Sigmund Romberg's eponymous musical, lip-synching to the glorious singing voice of Mario Lanza.
Ator's antagonist is an ancient spider-worshipping cult, fronted by a decidedly creepy arachnofetishist in the shape of its high priest, who delights in spending his entire screen time letting hairy tarantulas crawl all over him. As for the cult, it has been subjecting the land to an enduring reign of terror for the past millennium, so the scene that I was particularly looking forward to viewing was the long-awaited battle to the death between Ator and the Ancient One – a colossal cavern-dwelling spider whom the cult had worshipped since time immemorial.
Imagine my disappointment, therefore, when I discovered that the entire fight scene had been shot not with the mega-spider face-on to the camera, but instead with the camera positioned behind and above it, so that whereas we get a detailed full-face view of Ator attacking it, all that we see of the spider itself (other than a few split-seconds showing it emerging from its gargantuan cavern before battle commences) is the uppermost portion of its back and the back of its head plus a few flailing legs. Never once do we see its face or its full form as seen from the front.
Equally, whereas various publicity posters for this film that I've seen depict Ator fighting a huge, fang-flaring serpent, such a creature was conspicuous only by its absence in the movie that I watched last night. So has the English version been abridged from the original Italian, with the snake scene deleted? I think that we should be told. By way of compensation, there is an indescribably cute black bear cub that loyally follows Ator wherever he goes, although I am intrigued as to why the fur on top of its head is pale grey.
All in all, Ator: The Fighting Eagle is a pleasant enough if fairly uneventful S&S adventure, with most of the magic & monster elements confined to the latter stages of its storyline. Regrettably, it is somewhat short on the kind of dry, tongue-in-cheek humour that often provides a welcome, diverting source of light relief in this kind of action-heavy fantasy flick (think The Barbarians or Deathstalker II, for instance). Equally, its absence of gore in battle scenes renders it decidedly innocuous and inoffensive by today's blood-drenched standards, but as someone who has always considered gore and splatter scenes to be largely unnecessary and decidedly unimaginative to the point of being downright lazy anyway, I have no problem with that.
Finally: three Ator movie sequels also exist, but I have so far only tracked down the first of them, Ator the Invincible (aka The Blade Master), released in the USA in 1984. The other two are Ator 3: Iron Warrior (1987), and Ator 4: Quest For The Mighty Sword (1990).
Meanwhile, click here to view an official trailer for Ator: The Fighting Eagle on YouTube.
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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