In the 1980’s, fantasy movies meant speedos and fur bikinis. The only sensible way to fight evil is with your wang out. No exceptions. I really have no idea how this happened, and it seems like a really arbitrary decision in regards to prehistoric clothing. 

But they all did it.

Everyone just went with this fantasy fashion advice until Willow, and in the meantime we got a lot more boobs in 80s fantasy films than in all the years that would follow… COMBINED. Game of Thrones has since tried to even the score, but it would take a team of thirteen year olds, masturbating around the clock, to script as many bare boobies as 80s fantasy movies had. Dammit it just might work. 

Beastmaster is movie is about Dar, a farmboy who sets off on a grand adventure when the Empire kills his foster parents.

Oops. Wrong movie. Our hero looks like this.

Dar commands animals with his brain and probably does crunches when he takes a shit. He looks a little like the twin that tried to eat John Denver in the womb. 

Dar will have his revenge and you will not ask too may questions, alright? This thing wasn’t directed by Iñárritu and you need to lower your expectations. 

Is it fun?

Yes. And it was even more fun when it came out in 1982. Was it just Star Wars? Of course. Everything was, and is, always just Star Wars. But it was Star Wars in loin cloths and it had ferrets and a panther. It was awesome. 

Beastmaster was one of those movies that your parents wouldn’t let you watch, but you’d essentially see the entire thing by turning the channel when they left the room and watching it in 15-minute increments. It’s such a classic piece of what-the-hell over the top movie making, that Pierce uses it for his costume on Community. “I never saw Beastmaster,” admits Pierce in a moment of vulnerability. “I just wanted to be cool.” That sums up Beastmaster better than anything I’m going to write. Review over.

Are the characters…gewd?

They… are… not…bad? Dar was deliberately cast as jacked Luke Skywalker. This is clear. He is the most stoic of all 35 year old orphans.  Also the bad guy is Rip Torn. RIP TORN!!!

We’re not hosting an international kegger down here! Heh. Zed.

The actors are trying. But this was the 80s. You could be a bad actor and still… be an actor. Back then you just showed up for work and someone with a clipboard pointed at you and said “film director” and that was your job til you retired. That guy in Empire Strikes Back who goes, “Two transports against a Star Destroyer?” probably has a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild named after him. 

Does it hate women?

I cannot stress this enough. Every fantasy/sword & sorcery movie made before 1988 hated women passionately.  The female characters range from “evil sorceress,” to “one of the girls who gets raped.” 80s movies were pretty chill about rape. They’re like, “Ya but what can ya do? [shrug]. Rub some dirt on it.”

If you are a named female character in Beastmaster, you are not a character in Beast Master. Alright, that’s not totally true. Tanya Roberts is awesome in this movie and her character totally has a name. It’s Kerry, or something. But I’ll admit that I’m smiling thinking about her because she is an all-timer, and she’s mostly to fully nude in this film at all times. I’m not trying to be a pig. I did not make the movie. Nor did I get offended when a nude Tanya Roberts appeared repeatedly in said movie. In fact I’m still not offended. Geez I’m brave. 

Good lord.

Also I think it’s fair to say that she does a pretty decent job of acting, I mean for what they give her. She’s essentially the plot equivalent of buying a condom from 7-11. It’s just that for every time she fights off a bad guy with her bo-staff, there are three other women who either get raped, or tortured, or raped again. Heck, even Dar tries to rape Tanya Roberts when he first meets her. Not like that. In a FUN way. Don’t be such a prude.

This movie was rated PG. Hahaha. Those wacky 1980’s.

Also I think they kill Tanya Roberts off in the sequels so Dar can bang other chicks. Harsh. I would gladly keep it in my pants to lock down Tanya Roberts. I would write Tanya Roberts poems and work mid-level management at a furniture store to let her afford all the nice things she wants in life. But then, I’m not the Beastmaster. 

Is there more?

Ya. But not the sequels. Bleh. Forget about those. The story of Beastmaster is fun in part because it tries to add just a tiny bit more. There’s this snake cult that Dar meets during a random encounter, and the GM totally brings them back at the end to fight off the villain.

And you’re never really sure what they are, but… they’re kind of spooky, then they eat the bad guys, then they vanish. It’d be like If Obi Wan saved Luke from the Sand People and then never showed up again. Might actually be cooler, right?

Is it worth watching?

Yes. And you can only find it on Youtube, for free, which is so sad. Someone at least hook this movie up with a Tubi contract. For the cost of a cup of coffee, these guys could be getting an embarrassingly small royalty check each month. And even though some of the cast members are gettin old, the subject line on the check would still say “Beastmaster.” That’s gotta make you feel young again. “I’m going to the bank to cash this Beastmaster royalty check…with my penis!”

But do watch it. Someone should. You should. Movies don’t have to be excellent or impactful. Some of them can just be fun and mindless and have surprisingly little to do with labor inequality or social justice. I know, that’s dangerous thinking. The point of entertainment is to always remind each other to feel bad, the same way that the point of work is to always be reminded of not working. But once upon a time, bad movies were just called “movies” and half of them starred Brenan Frasier and we still watched every fucking one of them. Can movies be more than this? Yes, but not all movies, and certainly not this movie.