‘Iron Warrior’ or — Art-House Conan?
Despite having watched literally hundreds of Italian movies over the last few years I can honestly say I’ve never encountered one that was irredeemably unwatchable. Sure, there’s been a couple of rather dull Westerns, the occasional routinely plotted Giallo and a few shoddy zombie horrors but nothing entirely devoid of some element of interest or fun.
I was fully prepared for all that to change last night when I settled down to watch Alfonso Brescia’s ‘Iron Warrior’ (1987), the third in the Ator series of films, a franchise clearly created to exploit the success of the Conan movies. It looked cheap, boring and awful. Yep, this was going to be the one that would genuinely suck and destroy the reputation of Italian cinema for me.
Oh, how wrong I was. Deeply, deeply wrong.
Ator (Miles O’Keeffe) and the beautiful Princess Janna (Savina Gersak) set out to find a mysterious object that’s hidden in a sunken kingdom in order to stop the evil witch Phoedra. However, Phoedra has sent a terrifying half-machine/half-human masked warrior to stop them so she can claim the kingdom for herself… or something like that. Who the bloody hell knows?
What Brescia knows, however, is that he has neither the budget nor the resources for large scale mayhem, epic battles or spectacular set-pieces so compensates for this by blasting events along at a furious rate of knots. So the actual action itself might not be very well handled — speeded-up footage, an almost total disregard for continuity, the parked cars of the cast and crew clearly visible behind the actors during a swordfight — but the film is never anything other than actively engaging.
For example — there’s a moment when Princess Janna is chased through a labyrinth by not one but TWO of the massive stone balls from ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ (1981) and when these two stone balls inevitably collide we know exactly what they’re going to do — and that’s explode. It makes no sense, is profoundly stupid but is also precisely what we want to see, and that’s things exploding for no logical reason.
Yet Brescia’s biggest coup is his decision to create a fantasy world on a tiny budget by going all art-house on our asses, and the effect is frequently mind-blowing. “How the hell can a piece of shit like this look so astonishingly good?!” I kept muttering to myself as Brescia kept conjuring up one phenomenal shot after another.
Nearly all optical effects are abandoned with Brescia achieving the dream-like feel of a sword and sorcery world purely through his use of landscapes, rock formations, coloured lighting, fabric and make-up and the effect is like watching ‘Hawk the Slayer’ (1980) directed by Jean Rollin… and doesn’t that sound like the greatest movie ever made?! And ‘Iron Warrior’ is as good as that sounds.
If you’re after the hyper-masculine, po-faced Nietzschean bollocks of Milius and Schwarzenegger then ‘Iron Warrior’ could leave you somewhat cold. If, on the other hand, you like your bollocks artsy, colourful and exploding then this is the movie you’ve been waiting for. I certainly know which one I prefer.
