Monday, December 06, 2010

California Country

The Beastmaster (1982)
directed by Don Coscarelli
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults

Had I seen The Beastmaster at thirteen, I would still argue that it was the greatest movie ever made. But I was somewhere between Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in 1993, and it wasn't until my mid-twenties that I experienced "The Don" Coscarelli's breathtaking adventure for the first time. It only gets better with age, and while Marc Singer is no Errol Flynn, Coscarelli is the same class act that Michael Curtiz was, and Dar is Don's prince of Sherwood by way of a missing Snowflake the Dolphin, stripped to the waist and set in a wilderness of sandstone bluffs.

The Beastmaster makes Coscarelli kin to Mario Bava, too, and directors who dream like cinematographers, and dwell among windswept courtyards and beautiful dancing girls with 100-year-old faces. It's another thing that makes you love makeup instead of CGI: no matter how grotesque the visage, that 13-year-old inside of you knows there's clearly a knockout of a woman wearing the mask. Maax kills the hero's dog, whose last act is to drag his unconscious owner to safety; Dar buries the loyal pet and Dar's adopted father together, not because the dog and the shepherd shared any particular bond, but because the Beastmaster loved them both with the same youthful heart. The way Dar brandishes his sword is the same way an adolescent would, with plenty of twirling and hacking at the air.

That's an actual tiger beside Dar the whole time, and an actual eagle that alights on Dar's gauntlet. Dar uses his friends as wingmen to hit on bathing slave girls. But just when you expect him to slash his way out of an ominous position, he is smart enough to at least see mysterious and eerie strangers eye to eye, and forge the uneasy alliance with no blood spilled that may serve his needs in the future.

Kiri isn't just a slave girl, she's a secret member of an ancient warrior sect. To enact justice, Dar makes a deal with the devil; one can guess that the winged creatures do not disappear forever in the wake of their marauders feast. Dar's real father, the king, is reduced to a pathetic figure, too blinded by revenge to recognize his first son for who he is. Dar does not reclaim him, and when given the choice to lead his freed people into the future, Dar sets off alone for a desert near Death Valley. Kiri joins him, like sunlight, and the prince abdicates his crown to live in open spaces with his red-headed love and his animal friends. That's heaven.