QUEST FOR THE MIGHTY SWORD (1990)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological*

I've not found time in the past ten years of this blog to review any of the four Italian-made ATOR films that arose like the success of 1982's CONAN THE BARBARIAN like so many vultures flitting around a fallen corpse. Yet it's not that I hold them in as much contempt as I do the really poor sword-and-sorcery outings, not least CONAN THE DESTROYER, which managed to do everything wrong that the first film did right. The ATOR films are cheerful Italian cheese for the most part, and they certainly do not drag along trying to burn up screen-time, as I recently found to be the case with THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER. 

Three of the four ATORs-- the first, second, and fourth-- were written and directed by best-known-for-porn raconteur Joe D'Amato. For the third, IRON WARRIOR, another director, Alfonsco Brecia, took over, and this may have sparked D'Amato to pull out all the stops with the fourth and last Ator flick, QUEST FOR THE MIGHTY SWORD. I can't say it's good, but it's certainly unusual, being sort of a mashup between bits and pieces of The Siegfried Saga and a lot of quasi-Freudian pop psychology.

The film opens with not one but two Ators: the father, who rules over an unspecified kingdom, and his identically named baby son. It's possible that the older Ator may even be the one from the first film (though none of the stories in the series are literally tied to one another). The only reason for thinking this is that Older Ator is married to a woman named Sunn, while in ATOR THE FIGHTING EAGLE the hero's beloved was named Sunya. (She was, incidentally, a woman First Ator was raised to believe was his sister, which didn't prevent their doing a little canoodling even before they found out that they weren't related. And yes, D'Amato does manage to top that bit of perversity here.)

In any case, Older Ator possesses a magical sword, apparently given him by the gods, and the king uses the blade to personally take on any challengers in a "trial by combat" if they dispute his judgments. On the same day that he does so, one of the gods, Thorn by name, appears in the court and demands the return of the sword. Older Ator refuses. An armor-clad goddess named Dejanira (Margaret Lenzey) also runs up, trying to persuade the merciless deity to let Older Ator keep the weapon. Thorn slays Older Ator with a spear, which somehow causes the sword to become broken, which may be the reason the spear-god leaves the weapon behind. Thorn condemns Dejanira to the fate of a "sleeping beauty," confined to an underground cave until such time as a strong man rescues her-- which is more or less the same curse that Odin pronounces upon Brunhilde in the story of Seigfried.

Sunn also decides to crib from the saga. Since she plans to kill herself now that her husband's dead, she takes both her infant and the pieces of the broken sword and entrusts both to a dwarvish type named Grindl (who appears in a troll costume very similar to that of Thorn's brief appearance in the opener). Grindl wants some sort of payback for raising Baby Ator and keeping custody of the shattered sword, so when Sunn begs him for a lethal poison, Grindl slips her an aphrodisiac mickey. Not only does Sunn have sex with the malignant dwarf, the overlord Thorn decides to wreak further vengeance on Sunn by transforming her into a woman obsessed with giving herself to any man who asks. This curse becomes important later.

Meanwhile, Baby Ator grows into Ator II (Eric Allan Kramer), and he quickly gets tired of his substitute father, who refuses to fix the broken sword of Ator's heritage and uses the young fellow as a handy slave. This sequence is plainly meant to mirror the fostering of Seigfried by the dwarf Mime. Nephele (Marisa Mell), a mysterious female who may be one of the gods, shows up to inform Ator that his mother is still alive and suffering her cursed fate. Ator makes a couple of attempts to kill the "bad father," and he finally succeeds when he manages to repair the broken sword-- also a bit derived from the Seigfried-Mime conflict. Once this is done, Nephele instructs Ator to go looking for Dejanira, even showing the young hero an image of the comely Amazon so that he'll be sufficiently motivated. Armed with the restored sword, Ator braves the cave and its protectors, a slime-covered dragon and what looks like a conjoined-twin soldier armed with sword and shield-- and possibly a robot conjoined-twin soldier, to boot. The doughty (or  is that dotty) hero triumphs over his foes and pulls Dejanira out of her trance, escaping the cave before everything goes boom.

Ator and Dejanira more or less pledge their love to another in the tradition of Seigfried and Brunhilde-- but unlike those two, they have to deal with an encounter with a "bad mother" as well as a "bad father." When the heroes take a few brewskis at a local tavern, they stumble across a put-upon but mature beauty, who's been a whore for several years now. Ator rescues the woman from a ruffian. She tries to repay him with a roll in the hay, but Ator shows her only pity-- which is exactly what is needed to dispel the curse upon the woman, who is none other than Sunn. Apparently all of her hard living immediately catches up with Ator's mom, for she ages quite a bit more than the twenty-something years it took Ator to grow to manhood, and perishes. Dejanira admits that she knew of Sunn's curse but could not speak of it, even though she's been made a mortal by Thorn.

The heroes, joined by a sidekick named Skiold, seek to flee to some shelter free from the designs of Thorn, but if the Odin-like divinity is still pulling any strings, we don't hear of it. Seigfriend and Brunhilde then encounter three more characters derived from the saga: crazed ruler Gunther, his scheming sorceress-sister Grimhild (eighties sex-bomb Laura Gemser), and Gunther's dwarvish servant Hagen. Without dwelling on the saga-equivalents too long, suffice to say that the original idea is that the brother and sister try to chisel in on the great romance of Seigfried and Brunhilde. Sure enough, Gunther and Grimhilde have the same agenda, though they go about it a lot differently. Grimhilde assumes the likeness of Dejanira so that Ator ends up sleeping with the wrong hot girl. As for Gunther, he's apparently decided to borrow a little from HOUSE OF WAX as well, for he plans to "wed" Dejanira by encasing her in plaster. Ator not only comes to the rescue and defeats Gunther, Hagen and several men, he also can conjure up a new weapon out of nothing, for he suddenly manifests a mini-crossbow on his wrist to kill two Gunther-minions. After the villains are all dead, the young lovers flee the castle-- but the film's last shot shows a laughing dwarf appear on the screen before the credits roll-- Thorn, possibly, exulting in some scheme to doom the duo, as they were undone in the saga.

I've occasionally found a high degree of mythicity in apparent sword-and-sorcery junkers like THE SCORPION KING 2. However, even though I believe D'Amato was pursuing some Freudian themes in his remix of the Seigfried narrative, I don't get the sense that he was doing so for any purpose but to keep the pot boiling, as it were. But at least it's a lively enough pot this time.