YOR; The Hunter from the Future
This is a film about a barbarian named Yor with a stone axe and a metal pendant. He blunders around a stone-aged world full of round boulders perched atop cylindrical spires of rock, encountering various groups of people, and mostly leads to their deaths. He saves a person or two in a civilization here and there, but I'm pretty sure it was by accident. He has a blond wig that would stand stalwart and unflinching in the face of hurricane-strength winds. Somehow, he is irresistible to women. All women in the movie want him, and men push their daughters and extra wives towards him. Science tells us this is because it is based on a barbarian novel that it took not one, but two males to write. In the first civilization he meets, he befriends an old, befuddled man with a bow and arrows, and a young nubile woman. They attend a local dance where the dancers wear nets with rocks tied to the ends. A tribe of unshaven purple people attack and trap the dancers with their dresses. Yor hides with the nubile woman for a while, sending the elderly gentleman back to the village they deserted during the fight, to check for survivors. Yor floods the caves of the purple people.
They wander around, meet a woman with a metal pendant like Yor's, who rules a colony of extras from the leper scene in Jesus Christ, Superstar. Yor kills these people, and the woman comes with them. She and Yor have implied sex off-screen, so the first woman fights with her a little bit. They are attacked by purple people, the woman with the pendant takes a gentle club upside the head and obligingly dies; the survivors move on. They meet a fishing village, and see a radio that "a man who came out of a big silver bird that fell from the sky dropped," which Yor activates accidentally. More "silver birds" (they're really flying ships! Not birds! No, really! The primitive tribes just thought they were silver birds, because they hadn't seen futuristic attack ships before! Get it? See?) destroy the village, and Yor, archer-guy and nubile-lady sail off to the island where the "silver birds" come from. They get involved in some incredibly sissy still-high-tech people, their stupid politic-y struggles, and an evil war-lord who forgot to put on the mean face-piece of his Darth Vader costume. They beat up on his robot army, find that operating complex laser weapons is just as simple as shooting a bow, engage in some minor high-wire acrobatics, and Yor resolves the situation by throwing a giant candy cane through the elevator the evil warlord is escaping in. And you probably think I'm kidding.
REDEEMING FEATURES:
Lines women say about Yor, without appearing to be sarcastic: "Why is he like no other men?", "Take me with you, handsome stranger!", "You've got something in your teeth, mighty hunter"...ok, I made that last one up.
In case you missed it before, every civilization Yor encounters undergoes some sort of catastrophe that kills almost everyone shortly after Yor encounters them. About half the time, it's a Yor-initiated disaster.
Ok, those of you who've seen Ator: The Fighting Eagle, or any film made mostly out of footage from that film (there are several different titles about Ator which are basically the same film, or so I've heard), will appreciate the sequence where Yor kills a giant moth (or "creature of the night," as they call it) and then hang-glides to the attack on its corpse. AERODYNAMICS: not just a good idea--it's the law.
When one of those hair purple barbarians grumbles "Die! Die you bastard!" to our pec-ful hero during a heated tussle in a tiny little alcove by a waterfall.
Yor's stone axe goes "BIFF" sometimes when he hits people in the face with it. The same sound effect most movies use for punching. Yup.
The old archer guy's explanation of their [recently extinct] tribe's laws: "They took our women from us, they are their women now." With a judicial code like that, I guess you can't solely blame Yor for that civilization's death.
Yor's heart-monkeywrenching reaction to going back to find the radio giving reports of the "silver bird" attack, after the fishing village is bombed to hell: "DAMN TALKING BOX!"
Take me with you, handsome stranger..
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