Fred Olen Ray has two obsessions. One is women with boob jobs that look like they stuck a bicycle pump in their nipples and just kept pumping and pumping and fucking pumping until they look like they could be thrown to drowning people by the Coast Guard. The other, apparently, is a Victor von Doom-style need to devise elaborate plans that end with my house being launched into outer space. Okay, not really. But he does stalk me. I can prove it. Because I keep goddamn renting his movies without realizing it until I’ve put the damn thing in my VCR (because no video store in their right mind would pad their DVD collection with re-releases of crap like Biohazard and Deep Space).
I think he does it by attrition, like he’ll go into the video store I frequent (is it ironic that a place called Family Video has a porn room?) and rent all the movies in the vicinity of one of his movies. Then, with a mind-control device he fiendishly implanted in the base of my skull while I was sleeping off a particularly wild pillage, he suggests I wander over to the area of the shelf where this particular movie sits. It being surrounded by empty cases, and me being too lazy, hung over, or possibly still drunk and a little woozy to bother going to another part of the store and dedicating any more brain function on picking another movie, I just take home whatever’s in front of me. Which always fucking happens to be a movie by Fred Olen goddamn Ray. You think I’m kidding. If I was kidding, do you think that tonight’s movie would really be Wizards of the Demon Sword? Seriously?
A wispily-clad maiden is pursued across the desert by a band of soldiers on horseback. Just when they have her cornered, K-Mart Dean Cain (and when you’re a generic Dean Cain, you ain’t shit) rescues her. Seems her father, Ulric, Keeper of the Blade of Actar, Crappy Drummer of Metallica, has been kidnapped by Lord Khoura. Khoura wants to unleash the demon Actar, but can’t figure out how to do it because he’s an incompetent dink.
Khoura and his main henchbitch Selina decide they need pure blood and go on a kingdom-wide search for virgins. Meanwhile, Thane (K-Mart Dean Cain) and Melina (wispy girl) seek out the Seer of Roebuck (Sears Roebuck…get it? I wish I didn’t). On the way, they battle dime-store sand people, sleazy slavers (judging by the accents of whom, this is medieval New Jersey), and stock footage from Planet of the Dinosaurs, a much better movie that I wish I was watching right now.
Once they find the Seer, who turns out to be sort of a hillbilly Moses, he tells them that Melina is the blood needed to release Actar. Her blood being the only key to the blade would make her father all the more protective of her. Thane, pointing out that this is a rather stupid plan that is currently in danger at the hands of Khoura, is rebuffed by the line “Foolproof plans are hard to come by, son!” Because that’s something you’d expect a mystic to say with a Tennessee accent.
On the way to Khoura’s castle, Melina is kidnapped in the middle of the night. In the morning, Damon the Swordsman (who bears a striking resemblance to Sabalom Glitz) finds Thane staked to the ground where the kidnappers left him, and a swordfight ensues in which Thane and Damon resort to fisticuffs, fall to the ground exhausted, then return to their swords (which they’ve comically traded off and have to switch back before they can continue to fight! LAFF!).
Dammit, I’m going to sprain my fucking wrist transcribing all the nudge-wink jokes in this movie, so we’re just gonna wrap this up. Thane and Damon break into Khoura’s castle, free Melina and Ulric, slay all the guards and henchmen, and finally Khoura is defeated in a dazzling display of post-production optical effects.
Up until now, my experiences with Fred Olen Ray’s movies have been something akin to being beaten repeatedly over the head with a frozen chicken while a midget bites my testicles as hard as he can. This movie is just the chicken. No midget testicle biting. It has a certain goofy charm in its disarming nudge-wink, self-aware, super-corny jokes. I have a soft spot (somewhere near my spleen) for corny jokes. Probably because I live in Iowa (see, I told you, corny!).
The corniness, as well as a joyous feeling of a group of people who got their hands on a camera and just want to have a good time and damn the consequences, are qualities that remind me of a little film called Not the Mafia, which was partially recorded (never finished, it’s only about ten minutes long, and that includes all the takes of all the different scenes, of which there were approximately five completed) by myself, the late lamented Brother Ferox (get at me, dawg!), and Fedeler, Friend to the Brotherhood (and presumably the Tomb as well) over the course of however many weekends we worked up the motivation to get together and try to figure out where we left the camcorder. The plot involved a conspiracy to destroy the world’s supply of nachos, and mostly consisted of us discovering the in-camera effect of freeze-framing someone taking a swig out of a bottle of Turtle Wax or Tabasco sauce or whatever, turning the camera off, replacing the bottle (or on one occasion a box of cereal) with a can of Pepsi, and turning the camera back on, resulting in a cinematic presto change-o that we thought was just the bee’s motherfuckin’ knees. You will never see this movie, and your life will not be changed by this.
Even though it’s Fred Olen Ray, I can’t be too hard on the guy this time around. He tugged on my heart strings, he did.
Moral of the Story: Holy shit, it’s NOT THE MAFIA!
H.O.P.E.L.E.S.S. Rating: 
- If you and your friends have ever made your own little
Not the Mafia, you can’t help but chuckle.
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