Well now, life is full of surprises. You know how sometimes, you watch a movie with a group of friends, and conversation subsumes the movie, and you wind up thinking the movie is a boring incoherent piece of crap simply because you failed to pay attention to it? You also know how sometimes you watch the movie again and actually listen to what’s going on, and the movie is actually entertaining and cool (but still almost aggressively incoherent)? Could the last Ator movie be the best? I think it could.
The movie begins with evil sorceress Phaedra imprisoned by Deeva and the council of good witches, who are portrayed as a bunch of TV-glow blue bodies displayed on a giant video screen behind Phaedra, who is trapped in a whirling hula hoop. The whole thing looks like a bad Flock of Seagulls music video, and is decidedly un-stone age. Deeva tells Phaedra of a daughter to be born to the king through her, who will bring peace to the land once the king is gone. Deeva is to be banished to the dungeons until the girl comes of age, at which time they just assume Phaedra will have gotten old and tired and unable to use her evil magic. There’s a plan worthy of a Bond villain. The ancient sorceress could never possibly still be evil in 18 years, right? Surely she’ll have used up all her hatred and evil magic on, like, rats and lizards and stuff, right? Sure…
18 years later, Phaedra is loose and up to her old tricks. First thing she does is summon the Iron Warrior, a huge man dressed all in black, with a shiny chrome skull covering his face, leader of the hordes of hell. She and the Warrior head straight for the castle, where they kill the king and his entire guard, and banish Princess Janna from the land. And who’s the only guy who can retrieve Janna and get her kingdom back for her? Haven’t you been paying attention at all!? Motherfuckin’ Ator, beeyotches! Our boy is all grown up. Gone is the Kip Winger hair, the fuzzy Bon Jovi boots, the innocent, boyish look. Ator’s hair is pulled tightly back into a braid, his face branded with a world-weary scowl (which makes him look more than a little like John Phillip Law, who is more awesome than you), and he’s covered in studded leather armor that makes him look like a member of the proto-black metal band Sarcofago.
What follows is an even more disjointed, and at the same time more logical (because he’s not fighting a bunch of random monsters, it’s all the same group of evil bastards), trek through lands fraught with peril than either of the other two (there is actually one more Ator movie, but it doesn’t have Miles O’Keeffe as Ator, so it doesn’t count). That sentence is about as easy to follow as the rest of this movie. If you are an English teacher, please reserve your hate mail until the review has come to a complete stop.
After Ator rescues Janna from a pack of jawas and confronts the Iron Warrior, they head to the town of her father’s birth, but it’s a ghost town, sacked by Phaedra’s hordes. They make camp next to a statue of a forgotten goddess, who whispers to them not to give up their quest. One would think that was weird enough, when the lights go all green, everything lapses into slow motion, and the jawas recapture Janna. The dead king appears to her in her prison, and the next thing you know she’s back with Ator, now wearing a blue silky shift as opposed to the red one she had on before. They journey on, until they wind up on a rope bridge, which that bastardly Iron Warrior (who apparently is able of predicting their moves and has stolen bigfoot’s teleporter) cuts. Facing a chasm or the sword, they jump into the air…only to wake up in Deeva’s cave!? What the hell is this movie on? And will taking some myself make it make any more sense?
Deeva tells them that the Iron Warrior is actually Trogar, Ator’s twin brother, who Phaedra kidnapped when he was a child (as seen in the pre-credit sequence). She has since brainwashed him and trained him to be her personal warrior. Now Ator must go to the island of Stimu (I guarantee you that’s wrong, but you try interpreting mumbled words from a bad English-language dub on an old VHS tape) and retrieve the Golden Chest of the Ages, which only Deeva can open, to unleash its power to right all the wrongs in the land.
After a very long and goofy Indiana Jones boulder-chase sequence in which the boulders manage to roll uphill (because all ancient caverns were lined with WD-40), and eventually collide, causing a huge explosion (because all ancient boulders were filled with nitroglycerine), Ator and Janna retrieve the Chest and return to Deeva’s cave. Unfortunately, Phaedra anticipated this plan and went to Stimu ahead of time, swapping the real Chest of Ages with a phony. She then hurls the real Chest into a chasm, and it explodes. Jeez, Gallagher was born about an ice age too late.
While all this Golden Chest silliness plays out in the land of the good witch who once starred in a really bad Jaws rip-off about a giant prehistoric octo-fish (oh, look it up), Ator confronts Trogar and kills him. Pulling off the chrome skull mask, he finds his own face looking back at him. Ooh, all dark and serious. Then again, so has the whole movie been.
Phaedra switches the real Janna for an imposter, and sends the fake back to the castle with Ator, letting him think he won. Surprise! Now Ator must fight the entire evil army! And of course, he kicks their asses (with one particularly badass bit being where two evil soldiers ride at Ator, hanging a long covered in razor blades from horseback thinking to clothesline our hero, and he simply ducks and slices the thing in half with the Sword of Torin like it was made of Kleenex and spoo).
The evil guards defeated, Ator confronts Phaedra, who cannot be run through with a blade, despite the fact that everyone knows iron is anathema to magic. Sword failing, Ator snags a torch and ignites the old witch, hurling her off a cliff. He saves Janna from the sacrificial altar she’s strapped to, but when she hugs Ator and looks over his shoulder, Deeva’s striking blue eyes are staring out. Wait, what?
“Wait, what?”, is pretty much what the viewer is saying through this whole movie. Despite not having to face a bunch of ridiculous threats having nothing to do with the main story like the other two movies, the action jumps from scene to scene with the barest of linear narrative to tie them all together. This could be explained away by this being an Italian movie.
The reason that many Italian horror movies, those of Fulci in particular, are so disjointed and strange, is that in Italy a horror movie is seen not so much as a story as a nightmare committed to film. Often they are directed and edited to be intentionally incoherent to give the impression of that strange dream logic that is very different from story logic, as Neil Gaiman will tell you. Granted, this isn’t a horror movie (although it is much more mature and dark than the other two Ator movies – no giant sock puppet monsters here), but fantasy is close enough, and it could be argued that fantasy is a genre even more given to dreams than horror.
Ator having a twin brother with whom he played in ancient ruins does quite a bit of rewriting of Ator’s origin story. In the original, he was sired of a demigod named Torin, prophesied to be the destroyer of the Spider and savior of the kingdom. In the second movie, after his bride/adopted sister Sunya died and some time after he studied under the great Akronas, he moved to the East to meditate and learn the martial arts. No mention was ever made of a brother, just as no mention is made here of Sunya, or the fact that he is the son of Torin (aside from the visual cue that he still carries the Sword of Torin). Of course, he doesn’t remember he even has a brother until Deeva tells him the tale, and since Trogar was captured by an evil witch, it’s possible she cast a spell so he’d forget. Of course, you’d think his father in the first movie would mention something of a brother, unless he was enchanted to forget as well. Chances are, I’m thinking way too hard about this and they just abandoned continuity to rewrite the origin story like every Godzilla movie after Godzilla 2000, but I don’t have much intellectual stimulation at work and this is what I think about.
Either way, the strange, dreamlike editing and directing are much more reminiscent of Italian horror movies of the period, which I am a huge fan of. Also being a huge fan of Ator (in sort of the same way I love John Carradine – I wish they made more Ator movies with the real Ator – gotta be Miles O’Keeffe, accept no substitutes), these two things mesh into one helluva good time. Dark, serious, hallucinogenic, black metal Ator. Check it out.
The Moral of the Story: Eighteen years in a dungeon will only make an evil witch more bitter… and watch out for the fuckin’ jawas!
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
- Watched with a large group, the conversation will make you lose track of the movie faster than driving drunk in a thick fog. Not recommended.
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