Ator, an amazon, and a bear walk into a bar. Is that the opening line to perhaps the greatest joke ever told in the ancient world? Or is it merely one of about fifty great moments in the film biography of the greatest warrior to never have lived?
Let’s let it play out and then make the call. The amazon tries to steal some money for horses and gets into a confrontation with the bar patrons (calling it a bar fight would be much too generous), Ator sees a guy he knows and wanders away, and the bear just continues to eat. So it was both the greatest joke ever and one of Ator’s greatest adventures! Those ancients were tricky devils!
Those who sign up for this, Ator’s freshman year class (successful students will graduate to Ator’s other courses entitled The Blade Master, Iron Warrior, and Quest For The Mighty Sword), will finish the year with a newfound knowledge of how things operated in a land plagued by shadow! The eight-legged shadow of a monster spider to be exact!
For 1000 years, no one could stand against the Spider King and his hideous god! No one at least until Ator showed up with his super terrific sword and his magic shield! And after the way he settled that bloated-up bug’s hash and left it leaking a steaming stream of spider piss, it’s a wonder that there isn’t a bug spray on the market today called “Extra Strength Ator!”
Ator’s life isn’t just glamorous fights with giant spider puppets (I kept wondering why he just didn’t cut the strings working the thing’s legs. After all, if I could see them, couldn’t Ator?) or hanging out in bars with his multi-species posse. There are also moments of great drama and torment!
Like when Ator whined to his father that he wanted to marry his sister! Lest you get the wrong idea and think that this film should’ve been called Ator the Fighting Appalachian, his sister was not his biological sister! As Ator’s adoptive dad said in much too graphic detail, “you both sucked the same breast, but we are not his parents.”
So you can see that Ator isn’t the kinkiest barbarian to ever strap on the fur-lined boots! Except for the fact that he was demanding to marry this woman when he actually thought she was his sister!
And so it came to pass that Ator and his non-biological sister were to be married! The ceremony was a glorious one that provided the viewer ample opportunity for a restroom break due to an extra-long scene of native dancing. Credit must be given to Ator for respecting the ways of the even more ancient heroes of the 1960s such as Hercules and Maciste since a tedious dance scene was a traditional way to pad out a film to a solid 90 minutes. And those truly familiar with the ways of the old Gods know that just as soon as the dancing is finished, the bad guys will attack, burn the village and kidnap our hero’s lady!
But we can always learn something new and so it was that during the kidnapping we discover that barabarian babes wear black panties on their wedding day! The Empire of the Spider may be hideously evil, but even it realizes the necessity of sexy bridal lingerie!
Ator must rescue his wife and as we know from the overly detailed voice over at the beginning of the movie (did I really have to hear about how Ator’s dad “cast his seed upon the wind”?), Ator is prophesied to defeat the Spider King which is a really lucky break for Ator’s wife since that’s who captured her.
Ator’s life then becomes one familiar to those who have seen any number of these sorts of films. He meanaders around the countryside running into a catalog of minor league villains and monsters before finally squaring off against the main enemy.
There is the tribe of Amazons who capture him and hold a contest to see which one will be inseminated by him before he is killed. There are the zombie soldiers that he has to run away from. There is the beautiful sorceress who is hiding an ugly secret. He even has to rub leaves on himself so the blind soldiers that live in the Volcano of Shadows where the magic shield is located don’t smell him! It wouldn’t do much for your reputation as the baddest assed barbarian around if some blind guys killed you because you forgot to put on your Speed Stick when you got up in the morning!
It should be noted that all of this is accomplished with as little action as possible. The few times fight scenes did occur, they weren’t terribly intense and Ator’s sword work wasn’t going to make Errol Flynn do anything but giggle. In fact, Ator’s best sword battle was when he was literally fighting a shadow! The fact that the Spider King somehow was able to keep the land under his eight hairy thumbs with only ten guys certainly allowed Ator to get by with a minimal amount of effort. And even then, the Amazon did must of the work while Ator was somewhere else pushing the Spider King into a big spider web!
Miles O’Keefe as Ator is exactly what you want your barbarian messiah to be – an impossibly perfect muscled up pretty boy who looks like a member of rock supergroup Europe. As soon as I saw the leather headband with metal studs he was wearing, I relaxed, content in the knowledge that we were in good (and quite manly) hands.
Director Joe D’Amato (Beyond the Darkness, Antropophagus) takes a breather from his work on gory flicks and porno films to knock out this Conan knock-off and he does a serviceable job if you can forgive the lack of action. He keeps Ator moving from low wattage task to low wattage task and uses a variety of interesting locations such as caves, temples, and amphitheaters. Joe manages to ingratiate himself with the audience by getting frequent Black Emmanualle Laura Gemser to appear as the sexy soceress and more importantly giving Ator’s pet bear, Keeock, a main role in the film.
The furry little dude helped Ator and his Amazon friend out of jams more than once! And Joe knew we would love little Keeock because he never got tired of scenes of him chasing after Ator on their way to their next adventure! You’ll have no problem chasing Ator to his next adventure either after enjoying this entirely borderline competent low budget Italian barbarian nonsense! Still not sold? The Spider King lets a tartantula crawl around on his bald head! And he wears eyeshadow!
© 2025 MonsterHunter
Glad to see you back! Ator is one of the “classics”, for all the wrong reasons. Yes, he nearly does nothing. The amazon saved him from the “shadow” warriors, saved his ass from the witch, and also had his back with the blind guys. And he “won” the fight with the Spider King purely by accident.
I think even the screenwriter realized how useless he was. In the scene where the amazon throws an arrow that uncovers the mirror and makes the witch “age” badly, she curses Ator even if he did NOTHING. It was like someone was trying to give Ator some credit and make us believe he had something to do with defeating the witch, contrary to all the evidence.