From the opening strains of Yor’s insanely memorable and equally insanely indecipherable theme song where Yor is prancing around various penis-shaped rocks to the very end when he’s flying off into the sunset in a spaceship while a narrator informs us that Yor is going to try to help his people prevent the mistakes of the past, but isn’t sure whether he will be successful, you are in for the absolutely greatest movie of all time that cross-pollinates the cheesy Italian barbarian movie with the cheesy Italian sci-fi movie!
Antonio Margheriti was preparing for this movie his entire career, honing his craft by directing such sword and sandal epics as Hercules, Prisoner of Evil and Devil of the Desert Against the Son of Hercules when he wasn’t busy unleashing outer space fare with titles like Assignment: Outer Space, War Between the Planets, and Wild, Wild Planet. His Cannibal Apocalypse and The Ark Of The Sun God showed he was equally at home giving us a modern dose of gore and adventure! And his expertise in using silly-looking models as props is put to good use as well!
But no matter how much Antonio had trained for this project, it all would have been for naught if he couldn’t find just the right smooth-chested, greased-up hunk from the future to fill out Yor’s abominable blonde wig. Enter Reb Brown!
If you thought that Reb’s death matches with the Big Russian in Strike Commando were earth shattering, if you thought his showdown with Robowar in Robowar was cataclysmic, they aren’t anything but your Aunt Petunia’s church social compared to when Yor fights a triceratops single-handedly and wins!
Or when he takes on a stegosaurus and gets his faced licked by its big nasty tongue and wins! Or when he fights an army of savage cave people bent on killing him and making his woman theirs and wins! Or when he takes on soulless desert people and goes to town on them with their own fire sword and wins! There’s much more of course, but I was getting the vapors from all that primo Yor battle action!
Just what in the heck has Reb gotten himself into this time? He’s a blonde wig-wearing hunter without any other body hair in a world of dark-haired and quite hirsute savages and the only key to his past is the ugly medallion he wears.
After saving some villagers from an attack by ape-like men, Yor teams up with a woman and the old coot named Pag who watches out for her. Together, their journey in search of the secret behind Yor’s pimp medallion takes them from one deadly adventure to another.
As luck would have it, the only thing more destructive than all the villainous forces they encounter is Yor himself! It’s almost like no one bothered to tell him the apocalypse happened centuries ago so there’s no reason to go and try to destroy the world again. But you know Yor!
The icky ape-men who kidnapped his old lady? They live in a cave that for some reason has a dam inside of it. Guess who busts that dam wide open and causes a slow motion flood the likes of which haven’t been seen since a dude named Noah decided to take up sailing? But even better than that, guess who shoots a pterodactyl down out of the sky with an arrow and then flies it glider-style into the ape-men’s cave in the first place? Well, that was actually a model of Yor and the pterodactyl that did that, but you know what I mean.
After about an hour of owning various savages and dinosaurs, Yor hits warp factor nine when he gets captured by space men that turn out to be his own people! His medallion was actually a record of his past and we learn that Yor was just a kid when his old man’s spaceship got shot down!
The world had been destroyed years ago by atomic weapons and his people live underground on an island. Their ruler is the evil Overlord. We know he’s evil because he wears a black cloak with a hood perpetually over his head, has metal gloves, and prattles on and on about how he’s going to use Yor’s seed to create a master race of androids. And also because his name is Overlord.
The last half hour of the movie finds Yor and his companions in the basement of a power plant. It’s put to good use with an emphasis on laser blaster battles between Yor’s forces and Overlords black-clad androids. You’ll be glad to know that Yor is just as handy with a laser blaster as he is with a stone axe and he is immediately rolling around shooting with perfect aim.
Yor hits all the action-hero notes we expect as we see him swinging across a great chasm in an effort to destroy the atomic pile in the underground hideout of Overlord. He also goes one on one with Overlord, disdainfully tossing aside his laser blaster so that he can flush this space turd with his bare hands!
This movie is such an action-juggernaut that even a decrepit old timer like Pag gets a spectacular stunt! It’s a scene that will leave even the most jaded Reb Brown fan gasping for breath. Yor is trapped at the far end of the atomic pile, the power cord he swung over on is out of reach! There’s no escape – he’ll have to die when the pile goes up!
But wait! Old man Pag grabs the cord and swings over to save Yor and in mid-flight, he somehow flips around so that his legs are wrapped up in the cord leaving his arms free to grasp Yor! To say it all this was accomplished with some more of Antonio’s models doesn’t lessen the implausible splendor of it all.
A winner from the top of Yor’s bad wig down to the toes of his ugly fur boots, one simple scene in the film sticks out that really tells you what a hellacious hunk Yor is in this one. One of the ape-men chucks poor old Yor off a cliff and he lands in heap on the rocks below. After laying there awhile, guess what Yor does? Shakes his head, gets up and wanders off to fight more dinosaurs and mutants! Heck, in a world where geezers double as accomplished trapeze artists, a young blonde barbarian space stud better be able to shrug off a little tumble down a cliff!
© 2014 MonsterHunter
