Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-12-28 (Saturday)

On 12/29/2024 11:39 AM, shawn wrote:

On Sun, 29 Dec 2024 06:52:55 -0800, Arthur Lipscomb
<arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:
 

Yesterday I decided to kick back and watch some sword and sorcery type
movies from the 80s:
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The Sword and the Sorcerer (4K disc) 1982 sword and sorcery movie
written and directed by Albert Pyun.  The plot has something to do with
Richard Lynch as an evil tyrant who conquered a kingdom and the king's
son is out for revenge.  I don't know.  I really wasn't paying any
attention.  But these movies all have the same plot.  The young
prince/hero has to rescue the princess and save the kingdom.  Plus, I
had the commentary on which muted all the audio.  It was an interesting
commentary with lots of stories about the making of the movie.  Pyun
discussed his battles with the cast and producers.  Apparently no one
had any faith in Pyun's ability to make this movie.  He became very
emotional about that at one point in the commentary.  One of the more
interesting stories Pyun told was apparently Oliver Reed was hired for a
role, but according to Pyun, Reed showed up drunk, and cursed him out
while complaining about not wanting to be in the movie.  He said the
producer went and hid leaving him alone with Reed and Reed then started
to break stuff.  Needless to say, they replaced Reed with a different
actor.  This is one of those movies that I vaguely remembered watching
as a kid, mainly I remember it as the movie with the three bladed sword.
  But watching now as an adult, it's really not a good movie.  And I was
a little offended when a couple of times on the commentary Pyun brought
up Conan, which came out the same year, claiming his movie was better
than Conan.  Not in this time space dimension!

 Hmm, I don't think I ever saw this movie. Now I'm still not feeling
like I want to watch it after reading that and seeing the trailer.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DREG0dOW8jw
 

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It is *not* worth watching!  "The Sword and the Sorcerer" and "The Beastmaster" are two movies I watched when I was a kid.  And if you had asked about 5 years ago to describe the plot of Beastmaster, I could give a general idea of the plot or at least memorable events from the movie.  The *only* thing I would be able to say about Sorcerer is a guy has a 3 bladed sword.  But I wouldn't be able to recall anything specific about the plot or just in general stuff that happened.  And having just watched both movies yesterday, I could now explain in pretty good detail the plot of Beastmaster.  But I still couldn't tell you what was up with Sorcerer.  There were actually two princes in this movie and I didn't even realize that until I read it in Wikipedia.  The movie is an incoherent mess!

Beastmaster (4K disc) 1982 sword and sorcery movie written and directed
by Don Coscarelli.  Marc Singer stars as a man who can talk to animals.
Rip Torn stars as the villain who murders the king and takes over the
kingdom.  Singer is the young prince/hero who has to rescue the princess
and save the kingdom.  Mostly background noise with the commentary track.

 This one I've seen before. Though admittedly not in many years. Tanya
Roberts was certainly a lovely young woman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XOIqJ-U1ys
 The trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3FCM5UVsKU
 The movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg6JGN6R8a8
  

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Krull (blu-ray) 1983 sword and sorcery movie directed by Peter Yates and
starring Ken Marshall (Yes, Michael Eddignton from DS9) as a young
prince who must rescue a princess and save his planet from an evil space
sorcerer or whatever.  These movies do all have the same plot!  I loved
this movie when I was a kid and it's still loads of fun to watch. And it
has a great score from James Horner.  I liked the score the first time I
heard it in Battle Beyond the Stars, and when I heard it again in Star
Trek II: The Wrath of Khan it was even better.  But it's really good in
this movie as well.  Between the beautiful cinematography and James
Horner's Star Trek II score blaring, this movie is great to watch.  I
just wish the blu-ray picture quality was better.

 Another one that I haven't seen in years, but have seen a few times
since the movies release. Mostly I remember it for the special weapon
and the video game based on the movie.
 

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Ladyhawke (blu-ray) 1985 sword and sorcery (or close enough!) movie
directed by Richard Donner starring Rutger Hauer as a hero who must save
a damsel in distress (Michelle Pfeiffer) who has been cursed to turn
into a Hawk each sunrise.  The problem however is he has also been
cursed to turn into a wolf each sunset.  This is a movie I watched all
the time when I was a kid.  Then it disappeared from TV rotation and I
didn't watch it again until almost 10 years ago when I bought the
blu-ray.  When I last watched it, I did not enjoy the movie at all.  Not
only did I not like the story, but the picture quality was unwatchable.
It looked like a bad DVD.  I was shocked when I was checking out the
blu-ray reviews ahead of putting the disc in and the review said it had
good picture quality.  And sure enough, the picture quality was fine.
The movie's plot still wasn't so good, but at least it was watchable and
I was able to squeeze a little more enjoyment out of actually being able
to make out what was happening on screen.  There must have been
something off with my equipment last viewing.

 I know I've heard about this movie and I've seen bits of it over the
years, but I'm not sure I ever saw the entire movie or at least not in
one sitting.
 

If you were a kid in the 80s then Ladyhawke was pretty much required viewing.

The trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGs4o_5jyhw
Amazing that the trailer is from WB and yet it is such poor quality.
 

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Legend (blu-ray) 1985 sword and sorcery (or close enough!) movie
directed by Ridley Scott.  Tom Cruise stars as a hero who must save a
damsel in distress.  I never noticed before now, but "Legend" has a
*very* similar plot to "Krull" with the evil monster in both movies
trying to seduce the kidnapped damsel in distress.  Anyway, this was the
theatrical cut with the tangerine dream score.  I don't care for the
European cut which has the Jerry Goldsmith score.  One of the extras on
the disc talks about the two different scores.  In defense of the Jerry
Goldsmith score they said Goldsmith was forced to start scoring the
movie before the movie was finished filming, which Goldsmith does not
normally do.  That Goldsmith's score was cut to shreds because of the
editing of the movie, and for scenes where he didn't write a score, the
producers inserted similar sounding scores from other movies.  I had no
idea, but that may be why I just never took to his score or that cut of
the movie.
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I think I've only seen this once so much of it has been forgotten over
the years. Ah, so the movie had both music by Jerry Goldsmith and
Tangerine Dream. I get why that wouldn't quite work.
 

Each cut of the movie had a single score from either Jerry Goldsmith or Tangerine Dream.  People have very definite preferences about which cut of the movie they prefer.  I never thought much about Legend when it was first out in the 80s, and I didn't give much thought to the different cuts of the movie or had any idea when version I ever watched.  I'm guessing 99% of the time it was the U.S. cut.  But once I had access to both cuts and I deliberately watched the director or European cut, which has the Jerry Goldsmith score, I found myself really not liking the movie.  Then when I watched it again with the U.S. cut and Tangerine dream score, suddenly the movie was good again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAAd2QKyhww
Comparing the Cuts: Legend (1985) – Iconicon Special
 The trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H210lEsVrvI
 The movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7syOmKqn7s
 

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What did you watch?