THOR THE CONQUEROR (1983)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

I know, I know, I've said before that I'd found the absolute worst sword-and-sorcery movie. "This time for sure!"

Even with a lot of bad S&S films, I've sometimes been able to give the filmmakers a slight benefit of the doubt. I've sometimes been able to look at how the writers or directors incorporated some nugget of myth or magic from much better stories into their cheapjack, done-for-dough operations. But not here, not in this pasta tomfoolery from director Tonino Ricci (of the far more enjoyable STORY OF KARATE, FISTS, AND BEANS) and writer Tito Carpi (of several much better spaghetti westerns). Since these two men weren't utter incompetents, I have to assume they had little to no interest in the barbarian warrior genre and just did the absolute least they could get away with.

So when Thor is a child (though we don't see him as a child), his barbarian father is killed by rival barbarians commanded by a nebulous chief named Gnut. We barely even see Gnut enough to get time to boo him, and though we see the father killed we're mostly told about the situation through a narrator. Said narrator is also the wizard Etna, who takes charge of Thor and raises him offscreen until he's old enough to be played by Conrad Nichols (despite the name, also Italian, like the rest of the cast). 

We don't know anything about the wizard Etna, except that he likes to sit in trees, where he sometimes changes himself into an owl when the camera's off him. Etna claims to know the will of the supreme god Teisha, who has decreed that Thor has some great destiny to be a leader of men. Thor must find the hidden sword of his father (why didn't the father have it with him when he died?), and with that maybe-magic blade, Thor can kill his father's killer and bring peace to the land, Oh, and there's something about "golden seeds," which I think were just ordinary seeds that were going to foster the practice of agriculture in the primitive world.

This very basic setup might have been pardonable had any of Thor's fights with bad barbarians been even a little bit bracing. But they're all clumsy and poorly shot. Also, when there's some bit of barely explained magic-- some opponent somehow uses magic to blind Thor-- Etna, who barely aids Thor at any other time, shows up to cure the hero's eyes before he even has time to cope with his disadvantage. It also doesn't help that the sword Thor finds-- actually a double-bladed axe-- has more acting-ability than Conrad Nichols does.

Wrapping up as quickly as possible, Thor also perpetrates two rapes of defenseless women, both with the full approval of Etna. One female is a slave woman liberated after Thor kills the bad barbarians who hold her prisoner. Thor takes her back to his cave, and despite Etna's advice that he can do anything he wants to a slave, it's Thor's first time and he's relatively restrained before the camera cuts away. The slave girl is then never seen again. On Etna's advice Thor then trespasses into the local Amazon territory, so that he's attacked by some very short, delicate-looking swordswomen. Thor kills a couple of them and rapes a third, Ino, whom he takes back to his cave to become the mother of his children. For no particular reason, Ino falls in love with Thor and helps him in his climactic confrontation with Gnut. The validation of rape, without even the hint of a Stockholm syndrome as an excuse, is a stupid reason for any film to stand out, but that's the only aspect of THOR worth noting.