It's Battlefield Earth writ small
The only significant difference between this and Battlefield Earth is, without a doubt, the budgets. Battlefield Earth might have been so-bad-it's-good, but the awe-inspiring sight of seeing so much money turn to dust was sobering and a little sad. And talented people were involved, people who are going to have a hell of a time getting past it. Lemme tell you: L. Ron Hubbard ripped this movie off, and don't think I don't know how insane it sounds that anybody would.
Yor: The Hunter From The Future, on the other hand, was made for about seventy-five bucks and is hilarious from start to finish. It's actually hilarious before it starts, because reading its title aloud invariably gets responses like "I am?"
Most of the budget for this movie went on the cool poster art, and that's understandable considering what the script calls for. In terms of making money, this movie may as well have been 90 minutes of Wok With Yan, because it was never gonna be a success on word of mouth alone.
Even before we meet Yor (who isn't really from the future), we meet his theme song, which sounds like it might be Toto, but there's no way this movie's producers could have afforded Toto circa 1983 (today, just maybe). You've got to hear it, it's awesome (by which I mean terrible), composed by a team of six Italians who, like the director (Antonio Margheriti, hiding behind a pseudonym, who cheerfully admitted later on that it was obviously bad), seemed to want to just rip off everything that was popular at the time. And it keeps cropping up again in the movie during triumphant moments, like when Yor and another caveman (yes, there are cavemen, hang on) perform gymnastic maneuvers over a big pit, or when Yor hang-glides with a dead pteranodon (don't ask).
So, we meet Yor, played by Reb Brown. Yor is always shirtless, and usually well-oiled. He's a caveman, but he's a better hunter than the rest of the cavemen, not to mention better groomed (he's got this hilarious hairstyle which looks like it'd be cute on a teenaged girl, maybe) (flashbacks to his childhood show him with the same haircut even then). He wears a bronze amulet around his neck, which he's had all his life, but he doesn't remember where it comes from ("It's like fire burning inside me, a question without an answer.").
So one day rescues two people from a stegosaurus with a triceratops' head. They're Pag (Luciano Pigozzi) and Ka-laa (Corrine Clery), the daughter of Pag's dead king. Ka-laa adores Yor instantly, though she doesn't seem that bright, spear-fishing six feet away from the water. They're attacked by a rival tribe (with even worse hygiene), who haul off women to the command of "Take her back to the cave!" (because, y'know, they're cavemen). Yor fends them off too. Yor appears to be indestructible. So they decide to set off in search of this mysterious woman who was seen wearing a similar amulet, and endure a few more caveman attacks (don't miss that hang-gliding scene), rescue another tribe (causing another girl to fall in love with Yor), and find the mystery woman (who falls in love with Yor). This woman narrowly missed being frozen in the glacier that froze all her friends, bringing to mind that Far Side cartoon where the guy finds indisputable proof that the ice age caught cavemen off guard. Eventually they do battle with The Overlord (John Steiner), the mean old guy who lives on a distant island and rules everybody with an iron fist, or something.
Depending on your mood, this will be one of the more excruciating viewing experiences of your life, or there'll be never a dull moment. Can you get a chuckle out of dialogue like "You cannot understand." "I understand...that one of us must die!"? If not, stay away. If so, this movie is a gold mine. I couldn't stop giggling.
The ripping off of the Star Wars movies is more rampant than was usual even for 1983; The Overlord dresses just like the Emperor, his robotic henchmen all look like regional-theater costumes for Darth Vader, and like I said, there's even that scene where they swing on a rope over a deep pit. (not that Star Wars invented that one, but it was a good time to put an end to it)
The plot is...I just saw it, and I don't remember half of it. But The Overlord wanted Yor's genetically perfect semen to reproduce with his robots, which belies a fundamental misunderstanding of human reproduction. I guess asking for logic from a movie like this is like asking for oregano in a candy bar; oregano's good, but do you really want it in an Oh Henry?
So we have to wallow in the absurdity of this movie, which ultimately pits three cavemen and a blind man against the Overlord and his laser beam-wielding Darth-drones. Their ultimate weapon against him turns out to be a barber pole, though I don't know where it came from. The movie finally ends with a voice-over from some previously unheard-of narrator who tells us of Yor's new quest. "Will he succeed?" he asks. It pretty much sets up the same kind of sequel as Battlefield Earth did, I hear (remember, only the first half of that movie was adapted into the movie, and the second half, I understand, concerns the very events that are hinted at in the voice-over here).
Enthusiastically recommended to bad-movie connoisseurs; oh, who am I kidding, this movie's like the Casablanca of bad movies, if not the Citizen Kane. If you haven't seen it by now, you're not a connoisseur. Also known as The World Of Yor, or if you're a stickler for the original Italian, Mondo di Yor.
Believe it or not, this was actually based on a book (by Juan Zanotto and Ray Collins), which I've just got to read now. And according to the IMDb, it was edited down from a four-part Italian TV series. You know what? I'd like to see the whole thing. I really would.
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