“And tell him I don’t work cheap.”

Drake’s rating: Also known as, “Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal: The Movie”

Drake’s review: William Stout may not be a name you’re familiar with, but he’s been involved in quite a few movies that you’ve likely seen. As an artist, he’s worked on storyboards for films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and First Blood, as well as creating the posters for Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards and Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, and those are really just the tip of the iceberg. He was also the production designer on The Return of the Living Dead and Cannon’s Masters of the Universe, has done album covers and comic books, is well known for his dinosaur-related art, and in between all that, he has occasionally found the time to work on a screenplay or two.

Which is where The Warrior and the Sorceress comes in, as Stout was working on a sword & sorcery project with director John Broderick that eventually became this film. Originally hired as an artist, Stout was then tasked with writing a script based on Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Broderick did some rewrites, shopped it around for a few years, and then ended up with Roger Corman just as the legendary schlockmeister was starting to churn out sword & sorcery flicks after the success of Conan the Barbarian.

Which was, coincidentally, another film Stout worked on.

So there’s this little village in the middle of the desert, and the only thing of value seems to be the well. Since that’s the only source of water for this dry town, it’s fought over with some regularity by the local warlords. Zeg (Luke Askew, Easy Rider) currently controls it, thanks in large part to his enforcer Kief (Anthony De Longis, The Sword and the Sorcerer). But Zeg’s rival Bal Caz isn’t the type to just give up easily, so the strife over the water is ongoing.

Besides, Bal Caz’s chief advisor is a lizard, so he’s not necessarily getting the best advice.

Into all of this conflict walks Kain (David Carradine, Deathsport), a mysterious if laconic swordsman who immediately sizes up the situation and then spends the rest of the film playing one side against the other. You know, kind of like what Toshiro Mafune’s character does in Yojimbo. Because if you’ve seen that movie, or even Sergio Leone’s own homage/ripoff A Fistful of Dollars, then you’ve already seen The Warrior and the Sorceress. Even William Stout was a bit nonplussed at the resemblance, as Broderick had evidently rewritten the script to even more closely resemble Kurosawa’s work.

Now, granted, neither Kurosawa nor Leone had their lead actresses running around their films wearing nothing but a G-string for the entire runtime, but I’m really not sure that was enough to differentiate The Warrior and the Sorceress from its source material. Still, Broderick and Corman (and possibly Stout) lucked out, as Kurosawa did not engage in a lawsuit with them, as he had successfully done over A Fistful of Dollars. But to be fair, Leone’s film had premiered a short three years after Yojimbo while The Warrior and the Sorceress came out over 20 years later — and to much less fanfare.

The Warrior and the Sorceress kind of fell through the cracks, as a matter of fact. It hit the theaters in September of ‘84, barely got noticed, and then sat on the shelf of many a Mom-and-Pop video store courtesy of Vestron Video. It’s not a horrible flick, and not even the worst of the Conan-clones that would be coming out like clockwork over the next few years, but there’s really very little that’s memorable here.

David Carradine does a passable job as Kain, although he’s still relying on his faux martial arts skills and pretending that slow kicks are somehow unblockable. Anthony De Longis, who was also the stunt coordinator, no doubt had the lion’s share of the workload trying to make the fight scenes look at least passable. And the rest of the cast is fine as well, but there’s very little here to recommend The Warrior and the Sorceress over any other flick of its type. It’s kind of a drab looking film,* with lots of neutral colors and none of the visual pizzazz that was front & center in the Conan movies, or even some of Corman’s other sword & sorcery flicks.

The good news is, you probably won’t get bored watching this one. It’s a fairly brisk movie, coming in at around 80 minutes, so it goes by without any serious lag in the action. And the antics of Kain are just entertaining enough to keep the forward momentum going, so the action bits do make sense as the film progresses.

Sure, that might sound like faint praise, but this is a cheapie Corman flick made on the backs of much better movies. The fact that it’s not just plain abysmal is really an achievement in and of itself.

*They should have hired Stout to do production design. As it was, he had to get a lawyer involved to get paid and get his screen credit on the film.

Intermission!

• A mysterious swordsman walks into town…
• The “town” being a few buildings in the desert swiftly thrown together by the production crew.
• I dunno. If you take advice from a lizard, don’t be surprised when things don’t go your way.
• Lizardnapping!
• A four-breasted dancer? Are we on Mars?
• Kain’s part of an ancient mystical order. But totally NOT a Jedi!
• The “sorceress” never really does much in the way of magic, aside from making Kain a cool sword. Which I’m pretty sure you need a blacksmith for, not a sorceress.
• Carradine moving as slowly as ever, because dodging in a sloth-like fashion makes you harder to hit, somehow.