Outlaw of Gor (1988)

Indeed this is not a masterpiece, but which sequel is? After all, each and every sequel, prequel, remake and reboot is made for the sole purpose of getting the suckers to pay up for the privilege of watching an inferior product. What does surprise is that Gor I had enough of an audience to warrant a second go-around.With all of that said, I enjoyed Gor II. Firstly, I love the fantasy aspects of films with swords and dragons. There were no dragons here, but there were plenty of swords, fighting and intrigue. Moreover, I am a man and therefore happily pay to see women who are thin, flaunting, have long hair, etc. Gor II had sweet eye candy all over the place. In fact, I thought the slave girl was hawt (sorry fat ladies, it is what it is). Astoundingly, in an act of Christian fidelity, our hero refuses the quick in-n-out owing to the fact that he is in love with another woman (and of course the other woman is super slender so worth it).Throw in the a dwarf (aha!), palace, catfight and sand dunes and this was well worth my time.

There is a rebel uprising kind of thing on sword and sandal slave planet Gor.Stuff a synopsis, this "European with token American" nonsense doesn't merit it. It has come in for a fair amount of criticism and, for the most part, it deserves it.Yet it has some production value - there are many extras, there are costumes over which some care has been taken (they still look naff, though), there is some decent gymnastic skill showed in some of the fight sequences, and much of the scenery is attractive. So what if the script is ropey and the cast can't act? I have seen worse. But don't get the impression that means that this is good - it isn't.

The smelly hands of dilettantes can be found all over this amazingly inept Z-movie, starting from the moronic plot-twists, moronic characters, and moronic costumes all the way to action sequences so badly choreographed they might rank this turkey in the "Top 5 Most Awful MST3K Fight Scenes".The Evil-Bitch Queen - or "bitch in heat" as Jack Palance so hilariously calls her - is such a bad mastermind coup-maker that one has to wonder just how stupid her kingdom's subjects must be to let her get away with it all. I think they must be even thicker than the medieval dirt-faced mob in the "burn-the-witch" skit from "Monty Python & The Holy Grail". She kills two key political figures (old geezers) in her kingdom within an hour - the second one in front of a dozen witnesses - and then a few days later actually stabs Palance, out of the blue, in the gut in front of the ENTIRE populace. So dumb it really has to be seen to be believed. Just minutes later, her "cold-blooded" Bobba-Fett-like mercenary turns against her - for absolutely no reason at all - and kills her from a distance with a spear. He then looks on with the face of a man much bewildered, not unlike Leatherface after a successful bludgeoning. Not as bewildered as the viewers though.The MST3K team riffs the movie well; there are some big laughs, including a proper drubbing of Palance who looks positively stupid and highly embarrassed in his goofy "space" costume. We mustn't forget his elaborate clown-hat, either, which prevented him from doing spontaneous push-ups. Bored, too; his face reeks of desperation, and one can almost read the impatience on his face to finish a scene and just go back to his trailer – where I presume many bottles of hard liquor awaited to drown out the pain of doing low-budget stinkers such as this. His character has nothing at all to do with the plot in the first hour, aside from following his Evil Queen around like a piece of furniture on legs.

My theory: The producers of this film first made the movie "Gor". It only took them four days. Then someone noticed that they still had three days left on their equipment rentals, so they decided to film a second movie. Someone put together a script while on a potty break. They used the same sets, the same props, and much the same cast. The end result was "Outlaw of Gor".Jack Palance must have been hard-up for money to do this. It ranks up there with the biggest wastes of talent in movie history, right next to Max von Sydow in "Strange Brew" and Sir Lawrence Olivier in "Clash of the Titans".