The Viking Queen

Despite their reputation in horror films, Hammer Studios did make other kinds of movies, including quite a few crime thrillers and dramas, they only made a few ventures into genuine adventure films – mostly in the form of some fun but minor pirate movies (The Pirates of Blood River) – and this one, their sole effort at the so-called “Sword & Sandal” picture, which was rather popular at the time, and would seem to have been a good move for them.

Released in 1967, The Viking Queen has nothing whatever to do with vikings, being a rather loosely-based retelling of the Iceni revolt around AD 60, when there were no proper Vikings to be found anywhere. There is a hint in the film that the titular Salina is the daughter of some kind of Nordic princess married to the Briton king Priam, but that’s the only reasoning you get for the name.

We open with Roman Britain, and the Iceni have been placed under Imperial rule. Dying King Priam agrees to a treaty that leaves equal power to both the Roman Emperor and his chosen successor, his daughter Salina, passing over his other two daughters in a kind of reverse-Lear move. One of his daughters is power-hungry and pissed off and wants to revolt against the Romans, and the chief of the druids, Maelgan (played with wonderful overacted fanaticism by Donald Houston) also wants a rebellion.

The crux of the movie is that Salina is in love with the Roman governor, Justinian, and they both want a peaceful coexistence, while seemingly no one else does. Salina’s sister conspires with the druids to whip up rebellions, while Justinian’s second-in command, Octavian, seemingly wants nothing more than to rape and pillage everything in sight. Octavian is the real villain of the piece, portrayed with wonderfully oily contempt by Andrew Keir, who went on to memorable turns in Quatermass and the Pit and Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb.

Things predictably go south rapidly, and Queen Salina is accused of treason and flogged in a brutal scene that is still kind of hard to watch. Then we have a full-blown uprising, with horse charges, chariots, and a final, tragic ending.

Directed competently by Don Chaffey (One Million Years BC, Pete’s Dragon) the movie didn’t do well in the box office and seems to have snuffed out forever the idea of Hammer making more like it. You can see why it failed, as while it has some good parts, it is overall very slow, with almost the entire first half taken up with political maneuvering and the forced love story, which doesn’t work at all. The whole film was marketed as a brutal, savage adventure, while the script is leaning much harder on the doomed love story. But the actors don’t have any chemistry at all, and when they are supposed to be mooning at each other and talking about how in love they are, it just comes across as tremendously awkward.

Once the revolt gets swinging, things pick up, and you get some genuinely good charioteering scenes, which for once manage to make chariots look fun and cool. The battle scenes are okay, nothing amazing, and there is very little blood to be seen. The Roman armoring and costuming is solid, but the look of the Britons is just kind of vague and uninteresting.

The acting is a mixed bag. Finnish model Carita is surprisingly good as the central character, but Don Murray as Justinian is just miscast. Patrick Troughton is here in a supporting role (apparently he got the call to play Doctor Who while he was filming this movie), and the lovely Nicola Pagett gets to ride around on a chariot and stab people, quite a change from her more numerous drawing-room roles. There will be quite a few familiar faces in the background if you are at all a fan of Hammer films, and overall the performances are neither better nor worse than one usually gets in the movies from this period.

You would think that this kind of barbarian epic, with its casual near-nudity and violence, would have been a good fit for a studio like Hammer, who were using a similar formula over on the horror side to great success. I think this movie was just overall not lurid enough to live up to the sensational promises of the poster. I wish we had gotten more, better films in this vein from Hammer, and I wonder what would have happened if they had decided to adapt some Howard stories, or even do some Solomon Kane movies. I mean can you imagine? That would have been amazing.

Island of the Gods

In the lands of Ashem the Nahar river spread wide over the fallow fields, inundating the lowlands with the seasonal flood that brought life. Even in the dry season the river was wide here, forming a long, jagged lake that shone blue beneath the pale skies and the noontide stars. At the center of lake Sedem was the high, rocky island of Mannat, and on it stood the polished stone palace of the Kings of High Ashem and the vaulting dome of the temple of Hadad, the Father of the Sun.

The palace was of bright stone smoothed and whitewashed with lime, then painted with intricate designs and inlaid with polished stones of a thousand bright colors. The walls were engraved and illuminated with the stories of the gods. Of Uannan the Wise, who brought fire to mankind and taught him to plant and to harvest. Of Slud, the powerful spirit of the river itself, who brought life or withheld it at his whim. Over all was the bright golden sun of Hadad himself, the one who created light and all life, the one who ruled the heavens.

The roof of the throne hall was covered in bright gold, and so even as the day faded and the sun streamed red through the high windows and crimson curtains, the gold threw back the light and washed the entire chamber. It turned the bronze of the guards’ armor and spearpoints to gold, it shone on the gleaming floor, and it lit the crown upon the brow of Khumu, King of High Ashem, thirteenth of his dynasty, third of his name.

The Beastmaster

Released in 1982, this movie was a complete flop and only became well-known, and something of a cult classic, when it became ubiquitous on cable throughout the 80s. To kids of my generation, this was one of their early experiences with Sword & Sorcery, and maybe the very first. It established in a lot of kid’s minds what the genre was supposed to be, and it still inspires a lot of affection to this day.

Bizarrely, this is actually based on a novel by Andre Norton, though is is “loosely-based” in the sense of “having almost nothing to do with it.” The novel is an SF work about a future Navajo who communicates with animals, and Norton apparently asked that her name not be associated with the film in any way. A pretty good call on her part, as while I don’t think the credit would be completely embarrassing, I don’t think she would have wanted to be well-known for this.

I hadn’t seen this movie for many, many years, so a return viewing revealed a lot of things I had forgotten or not noticed. For one, this is definitely a cut above other bargain-basement fare like Amazon Queen or Quest for the Mighty Sword. The sets look pretty good, the weapon props are solid, and the miniature work is not bad at all. The outdoor vistas were shot in California, but they manage not to look like it, and I was thinking they might have filmed in Spain or Italy. Even the score, by veteran Lee Holdridge (Splash, Moment by Moment) is pretty decent.

Another thing that surprised me was the amount of grit there is in this. It’s true that there is very little blood on screen, and the action is choreographed so all the gore would not show on camera – probably as a cost-saving measure as much as anything else – but what is implied is still pretty intense. At the beginning one of the evil witch-women (swimsuit models with repulsive old-age makeup on their faces) paralyzes the king and queen in their bed while she cuts out the queen’s unborn fetus. Nothing is shown, no blood at all, but the way the scene is framed lets us see the horror in the victim’s eyes as they watch, and it makes the scene gruesome regardless.

Then you have other touches, like the road to the city lined with people impaled on stakes, guards in spiked leather driven mad by torture and brain damage, and children sacrificed by throwing them into a roaring fire, and you have a movie that manages to be pretty hardcore despite the lack of overt blood and guts. Then there’s the race of bat-people who eat by wrapping their wings around their prey and digesting them into a pile of bones and green goo. Add in some brief nudity and I am startled this movie got a PG rating – there’s no way this would pass for even PG-13 now.

Marc Singer isn’t really much of an actor, but that’s okay, as he is mostly asked to be sinewy and mostly naked for this movie – this is one of those fantasy kingdoms where nobody ever wears pants. He handles the action scenes well enough, and he seems genuinely at ease with the animals he is working with. That’s good, as they are obviously not super well-trained. The tiger (painted black with Clairol) is kind of surly, the ferrets were unmanageable and had to be bribed with food, and the eagle was so famously difficult they apparently had to get the high-flying shots by dropping it out of a hot air balloon.

The villains are pretty good here as well, with the silent, brutish chief of the Jun Horde looking like Lord Humungous with bat wings on his helmet, and Rip Torn having an absolutely great time chewing the scenery as the fanatical, child-sacrificing evil priest Maax (pronounced MAY-axe, of course.) Having two villains helps keep the ending of the film from feeling flat, as just after the big throwdown with Maax, the good guys then have to turn right around and deal with the bestial Jun Horde. That battle scene – with masked warriors riding through fire, then hacking and slashing while they are still ON fire – makes for an exciting and visually spectacular climax, just when a less ambitious movie would be winding down.

The Beastmaster is not a great film by any real standard, but for what it was trying to do, it did really well. This is just an amped-up version of classic Saturday-afternoon fare like Goliath and the Dragon, or Hercules in the Haunted World. The script is not great, but it’s not painful. The storytelling is workmanlike and competent, and the production value is actually pretty good, certainly for a movie this cheap. Director Don Coscarelli wanted to make maybe the ultimate fantasy movie for weekend afternoons when nothing good is on, and he nailed it.

Kingdom of the Bones

Shedjia knelt on the cold stone, waiting for the touch of night. The western sky was burning, and the dark was coming in, creeping in to fill the empty places, whispering among the flowers of the garden in the hollow places of the palace. The air smelled sweet, and she tasted smoke and the hint of fine incense. Soon. He would be here soon.

The songs of the nightingales fell silent, and the breeze blew cold, and she knew the time was come. The sky went deep with stars, and then the darkness unfolded and he stood there amidst the glorious banks of fading flowers, under the arbor of poisoned vines. Unmoving statues of gods and kings looked down from their places as Utuzan, The Black Flame, took his place on the skin of the world and looked down at her. The Heart of Anatu pulsed with crimson light in his left hand.

Shedjia bowed low, pressing her face to the stone, and she opened her robe and let it fall, so that she was naked before him. “I have awaited you, my lord.”

“You failed me,” he said, and his voice made her tremble. “I sent you to kill a man. Not a devil, not a demigod, but a man. He escaped you, wounded my champion, and withdrew his army from my grasp. Now the king of High Ashem will be alerted, and will gather more forces to his banner. Now more blood will run when I move to take that land from those who possess it.”

“Yes, my lord,” she said. She did not raise her eyes, she did not look at him.

“You think that I will kill you now?” he said. “Is that what you believe?”

“I do not know,” she said. “I welcome it. Whatever punishment must come. I shall welcome it.”

“You will not,” he said. “If the small powers I have granted you are not enough, then I must make you greater than you have been. Rise.”

She stood, unclothed and with her eyes cast downward. On her arms were the scars of her nomadic life, and the marks that looked like painted daggers and would become real if she wished. She wondered if death was coming to her now, and she hoped it was. Shedjia had never loved anyone in her life, but she had chosen to love Utuzan. If he meant to have her life, she wanted him to take it with his own hand.

He gestured, and her robe slid upwards into his grasp, and he drew it around her shoulders. “We shall travel, you and I,” he said. “Tonight we shall cross an empty land to a darkened place that none who live have ever looked upon. I know the world has changed greatly since I was imprisoned, but there is one who will remain, for even death could not still him.”