Friends! Patrons!

I thought I would just take a moment, here at the end of the year, to say thank you to all my patrons who give so generously every month so I can keep doing this.  Some people have hundreds of patrons, some have thousands, but even you few make a big difference to me, believe it.  Some of you I know personally, and some I don't, so here I will thank each of you as individually as I can.

Cassandra – Sandy has been a supporter of mine for a long time, since waaaayyy back in the day, and I appreciate her so much.

David Chamberlain – I don’t know David very well, but he has been a strong backer for many years now and I am so grateful for that.

Eilis – one of my best friends and the first reader for all these stories. Thank her for all the typos you don’t see.

Laura Bowen – Someone who I have known since I was 11 or 12, and who had a big role in introducing me to fantasy literature.

Mel Reams – Another longtime supporter who I don’t know well, but who I appreciate a whole lot.

Mike Baird – My metal brother who is a good friend despite living on the far side of the country.

Becky Davidson – Someone I have known since junior high who has become a good friend years after.

And the few of you I don't know personally, so it's impossible to say anything warmly individual about you, but who I appreciate nonetheless:

Etio

Jason Carney

Matt Doyle

This isn't a big Patreon, but  it matters a whole lot to me, as every dollar counts in my budget.  It's fun telling these stories, and I hope it is fun to read them.  Next year should be a lot of fun as well.

I will be taking off next Monday, but I will be back with new content on January 6th.  I will be preparing the ebook for Age of Chaos, and that should be available sometime around the middle of the month, and you will all get copies.

Thanks so much for all you do, and have a good holiday.

Lord of the Wasteland

The sands blew savage across the desolate ground, streaming across the sky in trails and threads of yellow and black. Lightning flashed crimson in the darkness, and the strange rock formations loomed like carved giants in the heat of the storm. Shath leaned into the wind, cloth drawn across his face to protect him from the blowing dust. He held Ellai close beneath his robe, shielding her as well. They moved east, wading through the shifting sand of this wasteland, seeking the path to the sea.

Legends called this the wastes of Ur, and tales said it was a poisoned land where no men dwelled, only monsters. Shath did not fear monsters, and he sought only to make his way to the Sea of Azar, and there he could find a way to return to the east and the cradle of the empire he sought to destroy. To the north were razor-edged mountains and to the south a steaming, trackless jungle. Shath did not fear legends, and he walked with his sword in his iron hand, squinting through the ravaging stormwinds.

Wind moaned as it cut through the rocky crags that rose on all sides of him. Shath felt as if he were in the remains of some dead city, so worn down by time that it no longer seemed to be a work of the hands of man. The wind sounded like beasts bellowing in the dark, and now and again the stones glowed with incipient fire.

The Black Flame

In the ancient days, before the desert came, there stood the empire of Kithara, where obsidian towers rose beside the lost Sea of Xis. It was a place of learning and knowledge, of lost sorcery and the wisdom of gods now forgotten. Over it all ruled the royal bloodline of the Mutarai, descended from the race of giants who brought civilization out of the sea before the memory of man.

The greatest ruler of the lost empire was Amezalan the Wise, and he had three sons. Two were born of his queen, and the third by his sorceress concubine. The eldest son was Siduh, who grew to be a man of great learning; the second was Eshuh, the warrior; and the last was Utuzan, born of a darker bloodline, and he became a worker of magic like his mother.

Then the emperor was slain, and strife tore the land apart. Utuzan rose against his brothers, and there was war in the ancient world. Armies marched, rivers flooded, and cities burned. At the end, the dark prince was cast down and bound with forgotten magics. He swore he would return to have his vengeance, but he was sealed away for all time.

Ages passed, and the empire wore away beneath the coming of the desert. The Sea of Xis withered and vanished, and the once-great cities of Kithara became ruins in a desolate wasteland. The descendants of the people went north and built a new civilization in the river-valleys and on the coastlands. A thousand years passed, and then two, and then three. Until Kithara was only a name whispered in legends, and the Dark Prince Utuzan a fable.

Peoples have risen and fallen, kingdoms been born and destroyed, and the very face of the world has changed. Now, in a dangerous time when empires clash, the Dark One will be freed from his imprisonment. Now kingdoms undreamed when he was sealed away will learn to tremble at his name. After aeons of waiting, he will have his throne, and a new world will learn to fear the power of Prince Utuzan, the Chosen of Anatu, The Black Flame.

Annnnnd here's the teaser for next year's story.  So many times in Sword & Sorcery the villain is an ancient wizard conjured up from the past to wreak havoc.  This time, I'm going to make one the hero.  I think it's going to be a good time.

Pathfinder

This is almost undoubtedly the movie that got director Marcus Nispel the gig to helm the 2011 Conan reboot that failed so miserably. Nominally a remake of a 1987 Finnish film of the same name, it is actually almost a completely different movie save for some elements of the basic setup. With a strong cast including Karl Urban, Clancy Brown, Moon Bloodgood and Russel Means, this had all the pieces to be a solid mid-budget action film, and yet it somehow fails to come together.

Karl Urban plays Ghost, a man who was marooned as a child on the shores of North America by a Viking ship and then left to be raised by the Native Americans who found him. Despite having lived among the natives, he is still held as an outcast by some of his tribe. Once he has grown to adulthood, more Vikings turn up, led by the villainous Clancy Brown as Gunnar, and Ghost has to use his knowledge of his former people to defend the Native Americans from the savage raiders.

It’s a bloody film if you get the unrated version, though the theatrical release was cut down for some unknown reason. There are impalements, severed heads, stabbings and spilled entrails left and right. All the blood and gore is, refreshingly, practical, rather than painted on splashes of CGI red. People are shot with arrows, hacked up with swords and axes, skewered on sharp stakes, and burned alive.

Nispel is doing his best work here as a director, and that means he gets some really gorgeous shots. They filmed in British Columbia, and took great advantage of the snow-covered, mountainous vistas all around. Nispel has a great eye for composition, and he uses light and color to make really dramatic images. True, he abuses the digital color correction pretty shamelessly, but it was 2007, everybody was doing that.

As a historical effort, the movie is a disaster. True, we know that the Vikings visited North America long before the age of exploration, and that they did battle with the people they called “skraelings”, but we have no evidence that their entry into the New World was with violent or rapacious intent. In fact, Viking raiders would never have voyaged to the Americas when richer targets were much closer to home. Explorers and colonists traveled to Greenland and later Newfoundland, not reavers.

The look of the Vikings in the movie is simultaneously outlandish and awesome. Vikings never wore horned helmets, nor did they wear plate armor. The Norsemen in Pathfinder are made into almost inhuman monsters by their design, as if the director held up a print of Frazetta’s Death Dealer and said “make it like this”. They wear horned helmets with goggles that cover their eyes, so all you see of most of them is a demonic helmet, a huge beard, and teeth. The actors apparently wore football pads under their costumes to make their armored shoulders look huge and intimidating. The swords and axes look entirely fanciful, and spiked flails are used prominently, when such weapons were never used by Vikings and in fact may not have existed at all.

I would be interested to see a Native take on the Amerindian people in this movie, as they pretty much just seem like standard white stereotypes. (The screenwriter, Laeta Kalogridis, is of Greek ancestry) The movie does get points for casting actual native actors and actresses, though the great Russel Means is criminally underused.

Most of the problem is that Nispel, as a director, is not good at building or maintaining tension. The movie is slow to start, and proceeds at a lumpy, uneven pace throughout. He often uses slow-mo just to highlight a cool image, but then the image doesn’t mean anything – it just looks good. The action scenes are poorly planned-out, as the layout of the physical space is unclear, and the number and disposition of enemies is not given, so the battles have no shape to them. You need to know how many bad guys there are, you need to know what each side is trying to do and what happens if they win or lose, otherwise your action scenes have no shape and just go on until they arbitrarily stop.

The themes of savage peoples battling each other in a harsh landscape is very Sword & Sorcery, and Ghost stands out as a good basis for an S&S hero, even if he never really seems to step up and catch fire. The characterization in the movie is generally weak, and that makes the whole thing also seem unimportant. This had all the elements to make a good movie, but despite some good bits in the action scenes and some beautiful cinematography, it remains strangely unengaging.

The Voice From the Deep

Shath sat on the ember throne and brooded on his fate, and the war that was not yet over. The great hall was silent, for his barbarian warriors were still out in the city, gathering their dead and slaying the last of their enemies. It would be days before they had hunted out the last remnants of the legions and piled their heads into great towers. In time they would decorate the walls of the city with the skulls as a reminder to all who would think to set themselves against the new emperor.

He looked up as a shadow flitted high in the towering columns, and he watched with pleasure as Ellai flew on her delicate wings among the great pillars, gliding with grace and a lightness that made her seem weightless. Her silken robes and veil billowed like colored fire in her wake, as light as she, and then she spiraled down, easy as a fallen leaf, and touched the floor with no more sound than a breath.

She came to him and he held out his hand, embraced her when she came close. Shath had never sired a child of his own kind, and he doubted he ever would. But this small child of the wilderness was as beloved to him as a child of his own blood.

“The battle is done,” she said in her small voice, relieved and weary. “I hope you shall never again have to preside over such destruction.”

“As do I,” he said. “In my youth I sought a great battle, a battle that all men would tell tales of and bow their heads in reverence at the carnage and the terror of it. Now I have fought such a battle, and I will be content if I never see one to equal it.”

“And yet you are not content. I can feel that within you,” she said. She touched his face, her small hand on his rough-hewn cheek.

“Kurux escaped me, at the end,” he said. “The power that sustained him, that rose him up, took him away at the end, and I cannot allow that to endure.”

“No,” she said. “No you cannot.”

“Can you tell me where he is? Help me, as you have so many times. Guide me.” He held her hand. “I could not have reached this throne without you.”

“You could have taken a throne,” she said. “But I would have you be a great emperor, not simply another murderous tyrant. I would have you become wise, now that you have conquered.” She closed her eyes. “I do not need to seek him. He is known to me. I know he has gone into the darkness, and it waits there. It is a power you must destroy, yet I do not know if you can.”

“Tell me,” he said.

The Vikings

Hollywood has always gone through cycles of making historical-fiction epics, and the 1958 Kirk Douglas vehicle The Vikings is a product of the same cycle that also produced Spartacus and Solomon and Sheba. Directed by veteran Richard Fleischer (who also did Conan the Destroyer and Red Sonja), the movie is very much a product of its time, but also retains a surprising amount of grit and energy.

Adapted from pulp writer Edison Marshall’s 1951 novel The Viking, it is a very loosely-based version of the highly questionable sagas regarding the semi-legendary Ragnar Lodbrok. It is very much of a piece with the melodramatic “historical” adventure stories of the late pulp era. Marshall was a regular in the so-called “Adventure Pulps” of the 40s and 50s. These were the better-paying markets in the pulp field, as they tended to eschew any kind of magical or supernatural elements, and thus were more “serious” than the sort of thing that appeared in Weird Tales.

The movie has a great look, with brilliant cinematography by the great Jack Cardiff. One thing that adds a lot to the film is the dedication Fleischer had to authenticity. Rather than film somewhere in Baja and try to pretend it was Norway, they actually went to Norway, built some highly accurate period longships, and actually sailed them around in the fjords. The sets look great, the armor and weapons are (mostly) pretty accurate, and the climactic siege was filmed at a real castle in Brittany. It gives the whole thing a degree of verisimilitude and immersiveness it otherwise would have lacked.

Ernest Borgnine plays Ragnar, the Viking chieftain, with a lot of gusto – certainly more than I would have expected. Kirk Douglas plays his son Einar, who while given top billing is actually the antagonist of the movie. It’s surprising how he really bites into the role, as Einar is a vicious, cruel bastard with few redeeming qualities. He’s got a great physicality and famously did as many of his own stunts as he could. When he grabs hold of Princess Morgana and growls “If I can’t have your love, then I’ll take your hate” he does it with real conviction.

Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh were a couple at the time they made this, and they are both just miscast here. Curtis is a fine looking piece of man, but his major acting style consists of staring off into space like he forgot his own name. He does well enough with the fight scenes though. Leigh is laughable as the Welsh princess Morgana, as she looks about as Welsh as Britney Spears. Nobody is even attempting any kind of accents at all, and while you have some Brit actors to add some ambiance, most of the leads sound like they are just from LA.

The music, overall, is bad. The main theme is a kind of tiresome fanfare that gets repeated and repeated, and the incidental music is forgettable when it is not just out of place. A better score could have really punched this up.

The action scenes are still pretty good, despite being of that particular school of bloodless 50s action. There is plenty of implied gore – like people being fed to starving wolves and getting their hands chopped off – but it always happens off-camera. Nevertheless, the battle scenes, when they finally kick off, have a lot of energy and still manage to be exciting. It helps that the principals really throw themselves into it, and the final showdown between Douglas and Curtis really sells the idea that they want to kill each other.

Watching this, I can kind of see why they tapped Fleischer to direct the second Conan movie and Red Sonja, as his kind of swashbuckling action was the standard ten or twenty years earlier. But the landscape had changed on him, and people wanted bloody, brutal action that just was not what he did. He was making movies for the 50s in the 80s, and missed the mark.

This really harks back to the kinds of adventure fiction that influenced the classic Sword & Sorcery authors. It was historical adventure that led to the popularity of fantasy and added the heavy strain of violence that always runs through a good S&S story. The Vikings may not really be a classic, but it still has legs more than 60 years later.

The City of Iron and Bone

The red sun cut the far horizons of the sea, and the sky was alive with ten thousand stars when Shath rode over the crest of the hill and looked upon Zur, the black city of the emperors once again. He had come to it as a prisoner, and now he came to conquer as he had sworn he would on that long-ago day. The wind was cold out of the sky, seeming to blow from the desolate places between stars, and he smelled the hot, reeking smoke of burning corpses.

The city was changed from his last vision of it. The walls were still towering and polished, black as obsidian, but the sky above the city was dark with the murk of many fires, pillars of smoke rising up from below to gather in a cloud that glowed from the light of the city cast against it. Motes wheeled in the darkened sky, and he knew they were the Skylords Kurux still commanded. They flew high on their leather-winged beasts and awaited the command to strike. Bolts of violet lightning lanced down from the smoke clouds and touched the tips of the innumerable towers, scrawling them with fire.

It was a city out of the ages, a city of ancient noble houses and depthless intrigue. It was a city older than memory, and its walls were mortared with the blood of slaves and those ground beneath the hell of the imperial might. The great gate stood shut, the bars of the portcullis like fangs stained red in the dawn fire. Zur slumbered like a great demon, hungry and fearless. It did not know that it would break today before the sun fell.

He reined in his war-steed as the mass of his Urugan warriors came up around him. They sang a low, echoing song of longing for battle, and they parted around him and rode down onto the plain around the black city. Already he saw specks of people fleeing from the ragged shantytowns outside the walls, clinging to the path of the rover where it flowed past the towering fortifications. He knew Kurux would not allow them inside the gates. The city was already fitted for war, fires blazing on tower and battlement.

Ironclad

A 2011 release that didn’t get much attention, Ironclad is a highly fictionalized version of the siege of Rochester Castle in 1215. Produced for about $25 million with a stellar cast and a devotion to bloody, savage violence above all, this movie is another highly Howardian effort, taking a historical event and making it into a brutal exercise in blood and thunder.

The historical setup to frame the battle is highly complex, and the movie starts with some narration to help the audience get a grip on what’s going on. Essentially, King John (of Robin Hood infamy) faced a revolt among his barons and was forced to sign the Magna Carta – an official treaty limiting royal power for the first time in English history. Afterward, recovering some of his spine, John waged a retaliatory campaign through England to chastise and punish those who had turned against him. In 1215 he faced a small garrison at Rochester led by Baron William d'Aubigny, and the siege held him up for some time.

Thus, the action is narrowed to a single point, with the focus entirely on a battle that stacked a few defenders against much more numerous attackers. The producers make the most of their location, getting great vistas of the Welsh countryside and a good-looking castle. The armor and weapons are pretty good, and the swords especially are very fine-looking period designs. You do get some fanciful axes and maces, but overall the look is pretty authentic.

The cast is amazing, starring James Purefoy as protagonist Marshal – a Templar on his way home from crusade. Paul Giamatti is at his sniveling, shrieking best as the petulant, cruel John, and in the scene where he rants about his heritage you swear he is going to burst a blood vessel. Brian Cox brings his down-to-earth cool to the role of the rebellious d’Aubigny. Kate Mara plays the requisite love interest with some grit, and Charles Dance makes a memorable appearance as the Archbishop of Canterbury. The cast is rounded out by a torrent of familiar faces: Derek Jacobi, Jason Flemyng, Mackenzie Crook, and the towering Vladimir Kulich as the imposing Danish commander.

The movie makes a complete hash out of the historical facts. Characters die who survived the siege, the politics are simplified to a tremendous degree, and events are shifted in time by months or years in order to create proper tension. John’s army is depicted as being made up of pagan Danish mercenaries, when the Danes had been Christianized for centuries by that point. The “Danes” also speak Hungarian and paint their faces blue like Celts. It is also never explained why a Danish mercenary captain is named “Tiberius”.

But the action scenes have tremendous grit and vigor. The blood is plentiful and the head-chopping and limb-ripping is all practical rather than CG. The choreography displays some real historical combat techniques, and the fighting is tightly edited and well-shot, adding excitement without losing much clarity. The actors all throw themselves into the proceedings, and the caliber of the performances allows this movie to work when it otherwise might not have.

Overall, Ironclad is a tense, entertaining movie with some first-rate acting and a lot of intense middle-ages combat. It is a brutal movie, with some scenes of torture and mutilation that are not for the squeamish. It has a really good score, and the production values are pretty high overall, never looking cheap or half-assed.

If there was a witch in it or something, then this would rate as an ace Sword & Sorcery movie, as it definitely depicts a world of morally gray characters struggling to do their best in a brutal, uncaring world. James Purefoy’s Marshal is a pulp hero of the first order – huge and physically powerful, feared by his enemies, in battle an almost unstoppable force of nature. He comes into the story driven by a tortured past and hardened by war, and he leaves it bloodied but victorious with a hot noblewoman across his saddle, headed for better days. After the blood-soaked, savage two hours that lie in between, you feel like he’s earned it.

The Black Abyss

Kurux roused from black dreams and returned to himself from where his sleeping mind had wandered. He never seemed to fully sleep, not any longer. Instead his mind departed and ventured into vaults of nighted visions, and drifted through realms unseen by mortal eye. He felt great presences moving near to him in the dark, and when he woke they seemed to linger about him, like smoke from a slumbering fire.

He was cold, always cold now, and he rose from the bed and wrapped himself in his black silks. He had no need to command his servants with his voice, and indeed, they lacked the capacity to understand words any longer. He summoned them with the power of his mind, and they came silently. Blinded, their eyes sealed and their tongues cut out, they were pale, hairless remnants of humanity, existing only to wait upon him, to act as extensions of his great will.

They brought him his robe, and they carried the black-scaled train behind him as he went down the steps from his chamber to the shrine below. Here the walls were lightless and gleaming, and the smell of blood was intense and cloying. He detested it, but the warmth of fresh crimson was all that warmed him now. He passed down the wide hall between towering pillars, the walls lined with motionless guards encased in armor they could never remove.

The pool was deeper than he was tall, the sides cut into channels so the blood poured into it in dark streams. A hundred prisoners a day were sacrificed and poured forth to make his bath, and then their empty, pallid bodies were burned in the furnace beneath the palace. It made for a great, black plume of smoke that rose up high into the dark sky, and the smell of burning bones hung over the city of Zur like a curse.

The 13th Warrior

The 13^th Warrior is a movie that casts a shadow far out of proportion to its initial success. Released in 1999 after a troubled and expensive production, the film was one of the biggest flops that year and still remains one of the worst financial failures in movie history. However, it found a home on video, and an audience who still enjoy and talk about it to this day. Not a lot of movies remain relevant in any way after two decades, and even fewer that cratered so badly when they first emerged.

Originally to be called Eaters of the Dead, it was, of course, based on Micheal Crichton’s 1976 novel that mashed up the 10^th-century Ibn Fadlan manuscript with the myth of Beowulf to produce an interesting take on the legend and a rather rousing adventure story. There had been plans to film it as early as 1979, but it would be 20 years before the film reached theaters. There were even teaser trailers released still bearing the Eaters of the Dead title, though test screenings apparently put a stop to that.

The film was directed by John McTiernan, who was then riding pretty high on acclaim as an action director after starting his career with mega-hits like Predator, Die Hard, and The Hunt for Red October. On this one he went famously over-budget, spending what is variously reported as $85 million all the way up to $160 million to shoot it. The test screenings went badly, and Crichton was brought in to direct reshoots and the whole film was recut and retitled. Considering the financial disaster that ensued, we will probably never see a director’s cut, which is a shame.

As a movie, The 13^th Warrior is uneven. The storyline is pretty much straight from the book, depicting Ibn Fadlan on his long journey into Scandinavia in company with a band of Volga Rus warriors on a quest to help Hrothgar, king of the Danes, against an ancient enemy. The book and movie both posit the story of Beowulf as a mythologized struggle against a more primitive race of humanity, still existing as a remnant population. In this story, Grendel is not a monster, but the Wendol – a tribe of maybe Neanderthals living a Neolithic existence, and the dragon of the story is instead their force of torch-bearing cavalry.

The historicity of the movie is pretty bad. The armor and weapons are a slurry of anachronistic details when they are not just bad-looking, with the swords being thick and clunky, without any of the beauty of Viking-era sword designs. One character wears a Roman gladiator’s helmet, which would have been possible, but another wears 16^th-century Spanish gear, and Buliwyf’s Viking plate armor is a total fantastical invention – even if it looks totally awesome.

The movie trades heavily on action, but the fight choreography is not really very good. Most of the excitement of the battle scenes is generated by good lighting, excellent editing, and solid direction. All this serves to make the fight scenes pop more than the rather crude choreography would otherwise indicate. The cinematography is excellent, really evoking this misty, ancient world, and while Jerry Goldsmith’s score is a replacement for the rejected original by Graeme Revell, it is an almost iconic workout in operatic mood, with a heavy, memorable theme that adds a lot of drama.

What really holds the film together is the cast. Banderas is perfect as the intelligent, somewhat timid and fussy Ibn Fadlan, and the depiction of his Muslim beliefs and habits is respectful, avoids stereotypes, and does not make him the butt of jokes. The rest of the cast is not as well-known, with Tony Curran in an early role, Diane Venora doing good work as Hrothgar’s queen, and Omar Sharif lending his gravitas in the first part of the movie.

Norwegian actor Denis Storhoi plays the fun-loving, devil-may-care Herger, who becomes Ibn Fadlan’s best friend, and he lights up the screen whenever he’s on it with his good humor and fearless bravado. He has an effortless charisma that the movie is smart enough to make good use of. The actors playing the warriors all have an easy camaraderie and really seem as if they have known one another for years, working and moving like an experienced team.

It is Czech-born actor Vladimir Kulich, however, who really sticks in the mind. As the towering, magnetic Prince Buliwyf he is barbaric, iconic, and radiates the kind of charisma that makes you understand why men would follow and die for him. It is a terrible, terrible shame he was never cast as Conan, because with the right hair and the right look, the looming, 6’5” Kulich could have been a Conan for the ages.

Despite its flaws, The 13^th Warrior remains a favorite among Viking and fantasy fans. It is a very Howardian movie, with its focus on machismo, the Dark Ages, and battles against prehuman beings that dwell underground, it has shades of stories like “Worms of the Earth”, and considering how big a fan of pulp literature Crichton was, that is surely not an accident. Not a lot of movies manage to survive long in the constantly shifting mass consciousness of our media-saturated age, but The 13^th Warrior still holds its own.

Blood and Fire

Shath rose in the dead of night, Ashari stirring beside him but not waking. The tent she traveled in was immense and hung with rich silks and golden ornaments, and he found it uncomfortable. She grunted and shifted in her sleep, moving into the warm place he had left behind. He left the pile of cushions and went out into the dark.

The camp spread out all around him, lit by thousands of fires. Realizing how vulnerable the ships were, Ashari had ordered them stripped and burned on the shore, and she and all her warriors and attendants followed as he marched inland. Together they were almost a quarter of a million people on the move, and twice as many animals. It was the greatest army Shath had ever seen or heard tell of. With Tathar’s eagles flying overhead and mounted scouts ranging far, he knew no enemy force could creep up on them unawares, and that very thought made him wary.

He drew his fur cloak around himself, took his sheathed sword from its hook and walked out into the dark. It made him feel good to have the old blade at his side again. Ancient, handed down from chief to chief, the invulnerable metal of the elder world unmarked by time, it had slain legions in its long years. It was like a friend returned to him.

No one questioned him, and he made his way to the dark, silk-draped tent where Ellai maintained her reserve and her quiet. She still rode alone, veiled against the sun and revered by the Urugan who would die to protect her.

Excalibur

I have seen this many times described as a Sword & Sorcery film, and while I am certain the comparison was not made with any kind of rigorous definition in mind, I think it bears consideration. Released in 1981, the film had been in development for over a decade, with director John Boorman planning it as early as 1969. The script he initially came up with, and the film he proposed, were deemed too long and too costly, and instead the studio, United Artists, told him to do a Lord of the Rings movie. He worked on that while shopping his King Arthur project around, and supposedly some of the set designs developed for the Tolkien film were ultimately used for this.

It shows, in that Excalibur is a completely fantastical version of the Arthurian legends. There is not a single nod to any kind of historical accuracy of any kind. The opening titles proclaim the setting is “The Dark Ages”, but the knights wear shiny plate armor that was not in use until the 15^th century. The weapons used are a stew of anachronistic styles, and there are no recognizable English landmarks to be seen. The world of the movie seems to consist purely of primordial forests and mysterious castles. No doubt budget considerations prevented them from showing a period town or city, but it works in creating a purely fantastical mood lifted right from the legends.

Combining the shining armor, deep green woodlands, blood, and naked flesh together under the lush cinematography creates a primal and lurid landscape for the story. It seems to come bursting out of the screen in rich colors and dreamlike settings, grounded by the gritty, dirty details and the sometimes graphic violence. Far from a polite fairy tale, Excalibur is carnal and passionate epic, bursting with the larger-than-life characters of the stories we all know so well, seeming to distill them down to an archetypical essence.

Magic, represented in the film by an otherworldly green glow, is very much present, and depicted as a dangerous, unknowable power. Morgana tells Merlin she is a “creature like him”, setting magic as an inborn power, usable only by a few, who are thus not exactly human. Magic wields great power, but is highly dangerous, even to those who use it, and it is Morgana’s unrestrained use of that power which leads to her downfall

The moral landscape of the film could be argued almost endlessly, because while the characters within the world believe in absolute good and evil, the universe itself seems to reflect no such axis. The flawed characters, tormented by failures and driven by passions and oaths, struggle to live up to the standards they set and create, very few of them managing to do so. Even Lancelot – the paragon of virtue and knightly grace – is shown to fail, tortured by his love for Guenevere and the conviction that he has failed his friend and king. All of the characters, even relatively flat ones like Mordred, get little moments that add layers, and when the movie has a chance to out and out confirm the existence of God, it veers off and leaves us with more questions than answers.

The acting comes across as quite stagey now, and that’s because Boorman cast mostly unknowns who came from the theater, and so their style was markedly different from the more naturalistic acting then coming to dominate mainstream cinema. It works because the dialogue is also quite elevated, having much more to do with Elizabethan speech than anything modern. This is another divergence from S&S, as while the prose in Sword & Sorcery stories is often elevated, the speech usually is not, in line with the express lower class origins of the characters and the genre.

It is in the realm of symbolism that the film diverges most from a Sword & Sorcery tale, as Excalibur is highly symbolic, while S&S rarely bothers with overt kinds of symbolism. It is telling how the armor in the film begins as dark and dented at the beginning, during the civil wars that divide the land, and then becomes shiny and gleaming during the height of Arthur’s reign. Later, as the knights vanish in the quest for the grail, their armor becomes slimed with mud and dented by years of ill-repair. Percivals’ retrieval of the grail itself is almost entirely symbolic, causing him to shed his armor, emerge from the water, and cross a drawbridge to claim it from a disembodied voice that asks him riddles.

The truth is that Excalibur is not a Sword & Sorcery movie, really, but rather an adaptation of one of the prime sources of inspiration for the form. Myths and legends influenced and drove the kinds of adventure and fantastical literature that served as the bread and butter for Howard, Moorcock, Smith and Leiber. Tales of King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Roland inspired the likes of Talbot Mundy, H. Rider Haggard, and Robert Louis Stevenson to invent the stories of adventure that would go on to sow the seeds from which new kinds of fantasy would spring in later years.

Wings of Thunder

They flew by day, for they had learned that the hunters saw better by night. Tathar led his people through the rugged hill lands, skulking through the misty skies and lairing in hidden rifts and vales by night. Under the red sun they haunted the edges of the crags and cliffsides, seeking the wake of the sea beast as it swam along the great estuary. They hunted it, following always from a distance as it moved west. Tathar sensed a purpose in its motion. It had a destination, and he thought he had some thought of what that might be.

Sometimes the water was too shallow, and it moved overland, lumbering on great, clawed feet, leaving a trail across the earth that could be seen for miles. When it moved from the water it grew wary, and they had to follow from a distance, watchful of the spiral of hunting beasts that rose above it. Tathar wondered if those were its own young, and whether each winged beast might someday grow so immense. It seemed impossible – surely the world could not encompass so many behemoths.

Now Tathar flew ahead beneath a lowering sky and the dim glow of the copper sun. The beast was moving to the north, making way for the deeper waters of the sea, but Tathar wanted to know what its purpose might be. Everywhere through the civilized parts of the empire they had seen pillars of smoke and marks of pillage and death. Kurux had loosed all his war power to bring chaos upon the world, tormenting even his own empire for no purpose save terror and slaughter.

Zakai’s wings left trails of mist threaded through the cold air as he and Suara flew ahead to scout the way. They saw a last barrier of sharp-edged cliffs and then the land turned green and gentle, sloping downward to the north. Tathar knew that long slope led to the waters of the Numarean Passage – the long thread of the sea that led past the Black City and in the west opened out into the Sea of Azar.

They flew onward, the birds glad of the open sky, and Tathar was pleased to look on the green, tree-covered hills rolling below. It was pleasant country, if stony and all but useless for farmland. They swept down over the hills and through layers of fog until they saw the sea, dark and rolling slow beneath the sky. And there, filling the waters, was an armada of ships with crimson sails billowing, and Tathar knew what the thing from the sea was coming to do.

Dragonslayer

The runaway success of Star Wars in 1977 kicked off a wave of SF and Fantasy films that carried through the 80s, as the studios learned that visual effects had matured to the point that they could serve as a major selling point of a film, and the phenomenon of the “effects blockbuster” was born. The original Conan the Barbarian was a part of this wave, even though in the end it was pretty light on VFX. Oliver Stone’s original script had been much more fantastical and monster-heavy.

Another product of this wave was Dragonslayer, a strange little film that has become kind of a cult classic – mostly due to nostalgia from people who saw it when they were kids. A joint production between Paramount and Disney, the move was part of a short-lived venture whereby the big D sought to bankroll films through other studios as an outlet for more mature subjects. The only other result of this pairing was – believe it or not – Popeye, and when neither that movie nor this one made any money, the whole thing fell apart, probably leading to the formation of Touchstone pictures a few years later.

Written and directed by Matthew Robbins, who was a friend of George Lucas from his film school days, Dragonslayer tells a story that is part archetypical, and partly tries to subvert expectations, and doesn’t manage either that well. A dragon is menacing a kingdom, the people hold a lottery to choose virgins to sacrifice to it twice a year to appease it, and then some of the people send a delegation to find a wizard to come kill it. The wizard Ulrich dies almost before his journey begins, and we follow his apprentice, Galen, as he tries to carry out his master’s last quest.

As Galen, Peter MacNicol is a strange choice of leading man. Short, fuzzy-haired, and just kind of odd-looking, he doesn’t radiate any kind of danger or intelligence, and it is telling that the rest of his career saw him settle in as a comedic character actor, most memorable as the camp director in Addams Family Values. He’s just miscast, and the script seems to mostly use him for humor. In another subversion of tropes, he doesn’t even kill the dragon, but instead Ulrich is conveniently resurrected to battle the beast himself, dying again in the battle.

The movie, overall, is darker than expected, and just has a nice amount of grit. There is blood and killing, some nudity, and the world has a grimy, lived-in look that resembles Excalibur more than a little – though that film had only come out a few months earlier. We get some rather gruesome shots of one of the dragon’s victims being devoured by her young, and overall the movie’s world is depicted as unfriendly and dangerous, which gives it a bit of gravitas that the lead actors don’t lend. A lot of the performers had extensive stage backgrounds, and so there is just a rather formal, artificial quality to the acting.

The real star of the movie, obviously, is the dragon himself – or herself, as there are young, so the grandly named Vermithrax Pejorative is apparently a she. Only glimped in part through most of the film, the dragon, when she finally emerges, is one of the most stunning achievements in creature VFX prior to the age of CGI. Graphic artist Dave Bunnett created the design, which was realized by Brian Johnson – who also supervised effects on Alien and Empire Strikes Back, among other films. The standout sequences where the beast was moving in full view were done by Phil Tippett using “go-motion”, which used a computer-controlled model to move synchronized with the camera exposure, allowing for a much more realistic look, without the jerkiness of stop-motion. Effects legend Ken Ralston created the flying sequences, giving the dragon a speed and deadliness in the air other flying monsters lacked.

It is in the underground scenes, where the dragon is fully revealed more than an hour into the 109-minute movie, that the film really takes hold. The lair is a flame-lit nightmare underworld, filled with steam, burning water, and dripping slime, and then there comes the beast herself, looking more real than any other movie monster ever had. It takes the movie a while to get to the dragon, but when they do, they are not shy about using it.

The pacing of the movie is slow, and the tone wanders around quite a lot, as though the filmmakers were not quite sure what kind of film they were making. It has elements of awkward comedy as well as a strong atmosphere of horror, and the dragon is never depicted as anything but terrifying. Still, it contains one of the great achievements in practical creature effects, and in its depiction of a morally compromised, dangerous world beset by inhuman forces, it is a kind of Sword & Sorcery film without a real Sword & Sorcery hero at the center of it.

A Sea of Iron

With dawn a heavy mist rose off the waters, and Shath’s armies moved through it as they followed the ancient road down to the place called the Iron Narrows. Here the land that lay on the north and south banks of the straits grew close to one another, and the crossing was shortest. Here armies had crossed since before the memory of the histories, and here he would move from the western wilderlands of the imperial territory to the heartland itself.

The earth trembled as his riders moved down to the shore and spread out, seeking for any sign of scouts or ambush. In his train came prisoners dragging the war engines he had captured at the pass, and even more behind carried the scraps and pieces his army had brought together for just this purpose. Shath had no ships, no way to ferry his armies across, and his armored warriors could not swim the channel. For weeks now they had gathered every scrap of wood or debris they could seize so that they might build a crossing of their own.

The Narrows were not deep, but the waters were treacherous, for the seabed was still thick with the remnants of another age, and so jagged spines of corroded metal jutted up from the water like teeth or like the fleshless ribs of some vanished creature. When Shath looked upon it, some vision seemed to flicker before his eyes and show him an immense bridge spanning the crossing, rearing higher above him than he would have believed, held up by massive pillars of stone braced with the ageless metal that was stronger than steel.

He shook his vision off and looked to the east, where the waters vanished in the mist-laden distance. This was the only place where an army such as his might cross, and so he knew Kurux would be a fool to allow him to make the transit uncontested. Shath despised the emperor, but he did not make the mistake of thinking him foolish or weak. He would send a strong force to try and turn Shath back, and as he saw no sign of such a force, he was suspicious.

Still, he gave the command, and his men went down to the shore. They began lashing together the rafts of logs and scrap wood that would make the backbone of their bridge. The waters were calm this time of year, and the iron beams thrusting out of the sea would serve as anchor points. They would lash together a bridge made from whatever they had to hand, and with it his entire force could cross in a day, perhaps two.

Once they were on the bridge, he knew his men would be terribly vulnerable – easily spilled off into the waters to be scattered and drowned. Perhaps the emperor waited to attack when they were strung out and at their weakest. That would be the best plan, and so he feared it.

Kull the Conqueror

Is this the worst adaptation of a Howard character? The argument could be made, although Conan the Destroyer was pretty fucking bad too, and Red Sonja was no masterpiece, although one could say that one only sort of counts as a Howard character. The so-called Kull the Conqueror represents the pernicious influence of the De Laurentiis family taken to its logical extreme.

In retrospect, it really seems that the effectiveness of the original Conan was kind of a fluke, brought about by the vision of John Milius and his refusal to compromise it. He may not have been that faithful to the original character, but at least he had guts. The sequel displays more of the De Laurentiis’ desire to dumb the stories down, make them bloodless and family-friendly, and pay almost no attention to the source material. And here, with no one to stop her, Rafaella De Laurentiis finally got her way and produced this piece of crap.

This movie started life as the intended third Schwarzenegger film, to be an adaptation of The Hour of the Dragon and to be titled Conan the Conqueror. However, after the whole debacle of Red Sonja, Schwarzenegger was disgusted with the mishandling of the franchise and refused to come back, as his contract was up. Rather than recast the iconic role, the De Laurentiis camp simply had the script rewritten to become a Kull story. That’s something that could actually have been done well, as the stories about Kull and Conan dealing with life on the throne and plots to depose them are kind of similar.

It’s not done well here. As usual, there is almost no resemblance to any actual Howard story except for a few bits here and there. There are some plot points borrowed from “A Witch Shall Be Born” and Hour of the Dragon. The main villain, Akivasha, shares a name with the undead princess Conan encounters in Hour, but nothing else about them is the same. Mostly the script is just a pile of half-assed cliches and stupid, declarative dialogue tying together a standard fantasy quest story where Kull has to go to point A to get plot item B and thus overcome the poorly-defined villain.

The look of the movie could certainly be worse. Shot on locations in Slovakia and Croatia, they took advantage of some nice-looking castles to add a good bit of production value, and some of the matte paintings and miniatures are not half-bad. The costuming is significantly better than what we got in the 2011 Conan, though the wigs are not better, and so almost everyone looks ridiculous with bad, poofy hair all over the place.

The casting is pretty much a disaster, and a lot of it is because the director, John Nicolella, was a TV guy and so he cast TV-level talent. Sorbo was well-known at the time for the Hercules TV series, and he plays pretty much the same character here, with his stupid SoCal accent and smirking expression. Native rapper Litefoot is bland in a bland part, and Karina Lombard is blank and boring as ever. We also have to discuss the fact that Harvey Fierstein shows up for really no reason. The only person who seems to be having any fun here is Tia Carrere as the villainous Akivasha. In an outrageous red wig and some over-the-top outfits she preens and prowls her way through every scene, chewing the set like it was made of cookies. She’s honestly the best part of the movie.

The real problem, besides the bad script, is that the director is a TV director, and he shoots this like it was a TV movie. The fight scenes are a disgrace, and he was actually proud of the fact that there is no blood to be seen. Zero. The pacing is sluggish, the “action” is dull, and the dialogue is embarrassing. The really sad part is that even considering that this cost $20 million to make, it does not look appreciably worse than the 2011 movie, which cost north of $90 million.

So this movie represents what Raffaella De Laurentiis always wanted a Conan movie to be: broad, filled with slapstick humor and with zero blood or gore to be seen. They already tried this crap on Conan the Destroyer and the movie made less than a third of the original’s $100 million take, now this movie was even more family-friendly and made only $22 million worldwide. You would think that people would wake up after that and realize that to make a successful Howard movie you have to commit to grit and gore and violence, and you have to adhere to the damned source material. And yet here we are, decades later, and Hollywood still can’t figure it out.

Teeth of the Storm

The sky was dark by day, tormented with storms and lit from above by the red blaze of the dying sun. Tathar led his riders into the teeth of the wind, keeping high above the heaviest of it. He had not been this way for many years, and he wanted them to escape notice, for they were very close, now, to the heart of the black imperial power that stretched forth an iron hand over the smoldering earth.

They were not a wing of hunters or warriors, they were a tribe upon the move. Sixteen eagles, each with both rider and passengers seated behind them. Children clung to the leather harnesses, or to their mothers, faces covered against the cold winds. The birds flew slowly, carrying greater weight, and that was another weakness that Tathar feared. If they were caught by the new riders of the emperor on their winged beasts, they would not easily be able to escape.

That was why he flew without anyone to burden him. Zakai was the keenest hunter in the flight, and Tathar the most experienced warrior. If they were found, it would be on him to defend them, to hold back pursuit with the claws of his bird and his thunderlance.

It was that lance that led them onward. He possessed his own, and they had two more taken from slain enemies, but it would not be enough. To be a potent force in a true battle, they must have more. The art of their crafting had been lost, or so Tathar had always believed. Now it seemed there were more than there had been. He knew of one place where there might be some untended, and now he led his people there and hoped he did not lead them to their dooms.

They fought through the gusting winds, and below them the storm grumbled and flashed with sullen lightning. He knew they were close. Before they entered the storm he had taken a sighting and glimpsed the rolling black waves of the sea to their right. The peak he sought was tall enough it would pierce the clouds, and even in the dark Zakai could likely take him there – it was where he had been born.

CENTVRION

This movie almost counts as a lost classic, because it didn’t make much impression when it was released, and has not had the distinction of becoming a cult film, but it really, absolutely deserves to be. It especially should be appreciated by fans of Sword & Sorcery and Howard, because this is, without doubt, the most Howardian movie ever made.

Directed by British filmmaker Neil Marshall in 2010, Centurion is the story of the historical 9^th Legion, which vanished sometime in the 2^nd century and has long been thought to have been destroyed in some unrecorded military disaster in northern Britain. Since we don’t know for sure what happened, it has been fertile ground for imaginings, with numerous books and films happy to fill in the details history has not left us.

Marshall, director of such gleeful slices of mayhem as Doomsday and The Descent, turns this into a bloody, savage tale of revenge, survival, and treachery laced with gruesome violence and gorgeous cinematography. Shot on location in remote corners of Scotland like Badenoch and Strathspey, the film is filled with desolate vistas of the cold, forbidding Scottish highlands – lands which have remained largely unchanged in the 1800 years since the time depicted in the movie, and still retain their brooding, prehistoric aspect. This lends the look of the film a tremendous authenticity and atmosphere that it otherwise would not have had.

The cast is similarly on-point. Micheal Fassbender gives a commanding, dynamic performance as hero Quintus Dias, and he is joined by a list of fine actors who are all on their game, including several who would go on to greater notoriety. Dominic West is massively charismatic in his role as General Virilus, and former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko is mesmerizing as the Pictish huntress Etain. Liam Cunningham (pre-Game of Thrones) turns up, as do Riz Ahmed, Noel Clarke, and Imogen Poots. The characters are sketched out quickly but sharply, mostly showing who they are rather than telling, and everyone is doing good work.

The action scenes are symphonies of violence, not shying away from blood to get a PG-13 nor wallowing in fake-looking CGI gore. The effects are practical, and the battles are a litany of decapitations, slit throats, hacked limbs, and impalements. So many of the fight scenes can be paused at any point you like to reveal a tableau that would stand up as a cover for any given collection of stories about the Romans in Britain. The music, by the great Ilan Eshkeri, deserves special mention, as it is sweeping and dramatic, elevating everything to another level entirely.

Much like Fury Road, Centurion is really one long chase, with the heroes seemingly pursued from one end of Scotland to the other by revenge-driven Pictish warriors. Kurylenko is especially intimidating in her role as the mute huntress who will stop at nothing to catch and destroy her enemies, and who kills and savages men ferally and fearlessly. The script does not slow down much for any philosophizing or brooding, but is instead a steel-edged spear driving straight ahead. It’s a simple setup of men who will do anything to survive pitted against others who will go to any lengths to kill them. It expertly cranks up the tension and largely keeps it cranked. Fassbender as Quintus starts out as a man trying to do his duty and ends up just trying to survive against pitiless odds.

Given how much Howard loved the Picts and how much he wrote about them, this is like a movie he could have written himself. It is very much in the spirit of classic tales like “Worms of the Earth” or “Kings of the Night”, lacking only an overt supernatural element. If it had that, then Centurion would easily be the best Sword & Sorcery movie ever made. Lacking that, it is still the kind of movie Howard himself would have loved, and there is more of his spirit in it than in any movie based on anything he wrote.

Sadly, the film didn’t do much business – mostly due to a lack of marketing and bad reviews by weak-kneed critics who couldn’t handle all the violence. It lost money and caused a major slowdown of Marshall’s directing career, as he wouldn’t helm another film until this year’s Hellboy. Nevertheless, I think Centurion is his best work to date. It’s tight, focused, well-acted, and gorgeous to look at – it’s amazing to me he made a movie that looks this good for just $12 million, when films like the 2011 Conan spent more than seven times that much and came out as bloated crap. If you haven’t seen Centurion, then you should.

The Jewel of the Sea

Ashari rose before the dawn, and she went through the rituals of awakening. She bathed and allowed her slaves to oil her copper skin, she polished her horns and her hooves until they shone. She ate a meal of raw meats and sliced fruits, drank deep of honeyed wine, and then she decked herself for battle. Servants brought her golden armor and adorned her with steel and polished bronze. She donned a helm fitted to her rising horns and she buckled on her slender, curved sword.

The sun climbed over the mountains in the east and sent red fire lancing across the sky to touch the towers of Irdru with fire and the color of blood. Ashari left her chambers and went out into the clean air, smelling smoke and the bright taste of the salt sea. She looked out to the north and saw the endless waves rolling and falling in on themselves. There lay horizons no one had transgressed, and unknown lands far from the threat of war.

Then she turned south and looked out over the beautiful city she had found and taken and polished until it gleamed like a jewel on the edge of the waters. Over the gleaming black streets and the slender, delicate towers. She looked over temples and domes and the brilliant white walls to the shadows of the savannah beyond, and on that golden grassland there spread a black shadow growing ever closer. She gave a sign and horns pealed through the dawn quiet, calling out over the city, summoning all to defend their home.

The harbor was strangely still, as every merchant who could travel had loaded their goods aboard whatever ship there was to hand and sailed away. Ashari herself had provided ship after ship to carry away the people and whatever they could carry with them. Part of this was mercy, but part was also her wish to have as few mouths to feed as was possible, in case they were besieged.

And there was a part of her, even in the fires of her defiance, that did not believe they could win this battle. Word had come from her riders and her scouts that the enemy had gathered more strength to him, and now perhaps a hundred thousand marched for Irdru beneath a banner of death, dragging a train of prisoners and engines of destruction. It was an army forged by hatred and the will to dominate, and it came to extinguish the city like a candle flame.

Solomon Kane

This is probably the best film ever adapted from a Howard character, which makes it all the more surprising that it made so little impact – both in the fandom and on the world at large. Kane is very much one of Howard’s best-known creations, and yet he is, to the wider public, almost unknown. The rights for the character were bought up on 1997, but the film did not go into production until 2008 – more than a decade afterward.

I can remember hearing news about this, and even following director M. J. Bassett’s blog detailing the struggle to get the movie made and then the even greater struggle to get it released. The film was made independently, and it was unable to secure a wide distribution deal for years, so that the release came out in dribs and drabs from late 2009 to the final North American theatrical run in 2012. The strung-out release schedule and lack of marketing surely hurt the film’s ability to build momentum, and it ended up losing money and all but vanishing.

I first saw it on a bootleg DVD before the US release, and I remember being underwhelmed by it. Now you can just stream it on Netflix anytime you want, and I decided a close rewatch was in order, since I have been going through the high-profile Sword & Sorcery films and weighing them with a careful eye.

There’s a lot to like here, really. The cinematography is uniformly gorgeous, and the sets and locations look really good. Shot on location in Scotland and the Czech Republic, it makes great use of the sorts of wide, moody vistas you can only get in places like that. James Purefoy is a fantastic choice for Kane, as not only does he look great, but he can really act and gives the hero a lot of depth. He’s an accomplished rider and swordsman, and he radiates danger and handles the fight sequences with a dynamic charisma and flair.

Speaking of the fight choreography, it is actually really good – light years ahead of any of the Conan films besides maybe the first one. The violence is appropriately bloody and savage – no PG-13 nonsense here – and even the weapons look good, being both realistic and mostly accurate for the period. The costuming is good, and once Purefoy gets the whole ensemble together with the hat and the cape, he just looks like Solomon Kane is supposed to look.

The cast is really strong as well. Besides Purefoy, we have Pete Postelthwaite (in one of his last roles), Alice Krige, Max Von Sydow, and the lovely Rachel Hurd-Wood in a role that practically embodies the kind of virtuous maiden Kane was always trying to save. Jason Flemyng has a brief but memorable role as the evil sorcerer (with a fantastic look from costuming and makeup) and even a pre-Game of Thrones Rory McCann turns up in a background role.

So what’s wrong with it? Why does it incite antipathy from Howard fans and indifference from the wider world? Well, this movie had a problem, in that Solomon Kane is a cult character, and you can either stick hard to established storylines and make the cult fans happy, or you can try to make a movie that appeals to a wider audience and sell the idea of Solomon Kane to a public that doesn’t know who he is.

They went for option B, but the script is kind of weak. The dialogue is often bad, only partly saved by good performances, and after a fairly strong first act, the movie hits a real slump through the middle third, where the plot just does not seem to be moving forward. Once it finally does, things improve, and the climactic battle is solid. But when we finally reach the confrontation with the sorcerer Malachi, we start to have a problem of Too Many Elements. The evil wizard and his masked Vader make for a good final boss team, and could have worked well, but as it is, the movie rushes those confrontations to squeeze in a big, flaming demon for the final boss, and the CGI just is not up to the drill. It doesn’t look terrible, and the design is good, but the effects just look cheap. In fact, every time this movie tries to go for big effects it kind of looks silly, as the $40 million budget just could not afford the kind of stuff they tried to do.

So there’s a lot of good elements here, but the script just doesn’t come together, and has tonal issues and pacing problems that make you spend a lot of time waiting for things you know are going to happen, but the movie tries to pretend are big reveals. The script hammers down on its themes really hard, without anything in the way of subtlety, and gets kind of preachy in places as a result. One serious problem is that the movie made its metaphysical underpinnings literally true, and Kane’s quest to redeem himself from an evil life is not an inner struggle but an outer one. This removes all the maturity and nuance from his intentions. In the stories, Kane was a man trying to do good in an evil world because he was driven to by inner forces; here he is driven by an express threat that a huge, sword-wielding demon will drag his soul to hell if he does not do good. It fundamentally changes the nature of the character.

In the end, almost no one cared. Solomon Kane, the film, was probably doomed from the start by the fact that there was not a large, hungry audience waiting for it. The people who already know and love Solomon Kane as a character were always going to see it, even if it was terrible. Bassett’s job as screenwriter and director was to not just make a good movie, but to make one that would sell Kane to an audience who didn’t know him. The final movie has grit and is beautiful to look at, but it’s not tight enough and overall presents such a dark, unpleasant world that people didn’t see a reason to care. There were plans for two sequels that were never made, and this just highlights the old adage about doing a series: don’t save the good stuff for later, because you might not get to do it.