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

Yesterday I decided to kick back and watch some sword and sorcery type movies from the 80s:
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
What did you watch?