Deathstalker II / Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans (1987) -½
Deathstalker II, I think, marks the moment when Jim Wynorski first ascended to become JIM WYNORSKI. It was the final product of a five-picture deal between Roger Corman’s Concorde-New Horizons firm and Argentine producer Héctor Olivera, capitalizing on an experimental foray into Argentine co-production made during Corman’s New World Pictures days. It was also the first sequel among the Corman Conan Cash-Ins, and at least in its initial conception, it would have been a conventional follow-up to the original Deathstalker. Wynorski decided that he hated the script, though, after he accepted the job of directing Deathstalker II. His main objection was that the screenplay as written was impossibly self-serious for a fantasy sword-fighting movie budgeted at just $400,000. He reckoned that any such film was doomed to be cheesy no matter what, so he might as well lean into the cheesiness and have a sense of humor about it. That was in keeping with the sensibility of the director’s debut feature, The Lost Empire, which very definitely leaned into cheesiness and kept a sense of humor. Also, one of my favorite things about Deathstalker is that it doesn’t shy away from its absurdity, even as it includes almost nothing that I can confidently identify as a joke. There was consequently sound precedent from that angle as well. But subtlety just isn’t Wynorski’s style— not even such limited subtlety as Deathstalker can lay claim to. He’s the kind of guy who never merely winks when he can stick out his tongue, wiggle his eyebrows, and make exaggerated gestures with a clownishly oversized cigar. His operative theory for fixing Deathstalker II boiled down, in his own words, to “what if Deathstalker was Bugs Bunny?” I’ll grant there there’s merit to that screwy idea, but there are two prerequisites for doing it right. First of all, “what if Deathstalker was Bugs Bunny?” is a premise for a standalone film about an original character, not a sequel to the actual Deahstalker. But more importantly, if you’re going to invoke the spirit of Loony Tuns, then you’d better for damned sure be at least half as funny as Chuck Jones or Friz Freling. Jim Wynoski isn’t even as funny as the Ritz Brothers most days, and Deathstalker II captures him at his most uninhibitedly witless.
The one respect in which this movie ever feels authentically Loony Tunes is that has no compunctions about building a gag around anything and everything, regardless of whether or not it has any organic connection to the ostensible subject matter. If Wynorski had been able to afford an elephant socking the main villain upside the head while parroting an old Joe Besser catchphrase, he’d have put one in here, no doubt about it. Deathstalker II establishes that right up front with a weak-shit riff on Raiders of the Lost Ark’s Amazonia sequence, in which Deathstalker (now played by John Terlesky, from Chopping Mall and Cerberus) sneaks into a stock-footage castle recycled from The Terror to steal a treasure belonging to a nonspecifically evil noblewoman called Sultana (Toni Naples, of Sorority House Massacre II and Dinosaur Island). As the thief absconds with her property across the opening credits, Sultana snarls woodenly to her minions, “I’ll have my revenge— and Deathstalker, too!” Her last words there are timed to coincide with the appearance of the homonymous main title display. That’s as good as the jokes get, folks— and they won’t get that good again very often!
Later, outside the citadel wall of a fortified village that I surprisingly don’t recognize from some previous Corman factory production, the seer-princess Evie (Monique Gabrielle, of Emmanuelle 5 and Chained Heat) is being tossed out on her ass by soldiers working for the local potentate. Evidently his highness was not pleased with her latest prophecy, foretelling that his wife would soon be with child, but not by him. The girl isn’t going quietly, though, and eventually she annoys the soldiers into teaching her a lesson in obedience. Alas for them, Deathstalker picks that moment to amble by, and while he professes to have no aversion to beating up a woman per se, three against one offends his sense of fairness. Mind you, those same odds aren’t exactly to the royal mooks’ advantage when the one is Deathstalker himself. But lest Evie get the wrong idea, the outlaw swordsman follows up the rescue by ditching her immediately, and proceeding to the nearest tavern to carouse away the remainder of the night with a couple of whores.
Evie has need of more heroics than just that one intervention, however. Although it’s true that she’s a princess, she’s a princess in exile, for her kingdom was stolen out from under her family by Jarek (John Lazar, from Night of the Scarecrow and Supervixens), who inconveniently for his enemies is both a wizard and a warrior. The thing about usurpations, though, is that they tend to go better when the usurper can borrow legitimacy by, say, marrying the daughter of the king he just overthrew. Evie isn’t Jarek’s type any more than he is hers, but that’s where the sorcery comes in. He’s in the process of replacing her with a magical doppelganger more to his liking (also Monique Gabrielle, naturally), although the synthetic princess still has a few bugs to work out. For starters, she requires regular infusions of other people’s vital essence in order to keep from evaporating, and she’s also bound to the real Evie in such a way that any injury befalling the original will affect the double as well. Still, Jarek is working on a magic potion that should solve both of those problems, and the true princess is about to become more useful to him dead than alive. Evie therefore follows Deathstalker to his hangout, introduces herself as Reena the prophetess, and informs him that he is destined to win undying fame and all the riches he can handle. He could even be as legendary as Conan! All he has to do is to rescue a certain princess from a certain swordsman-sorcerer so that she can claim her rightful throne. That’s a pitch that even a lout like Deathstalker can’t refuse— especially since Evie takes pains to ensure that he doesn’t prematurely figure out that she’s engaged him to help her.
Evie— excuse me, Reena— also prophesies that Deathstalker’s quest will be a perilous one, on which he’ll face dangers including but not limited to witches, dragons, and ogres. After all, it wouldn’t make much of a legend if he could just mosey into Jarek’s kingdom unopposed. Witches, dragons, and ogres cost a lot more than 400 grand, however, even in 1987, so don’t go in expecting any of that. The only monstrous foes interposing themselves between Deathstalker and Evie’s restoration to the throne will be a cemetery full of zombies, which even Todd Sheets could afford. Otherwise, the perils of the quest come solely in human form. Obviously Deathstalker will have to deal with Jarek and his men as the climactic encounter. But before he can even pick that fight, he’ll face a team of criminal assassins hired by Chin the Buccaneer (Marcos Woinsky, of Amazons and Barbarian Queen); an Amazon queen (Maria Socas, from Wizards of the Lost Kingdom and The Warrior and the Sorceress) who seeks to punish him for his infamous record of womanizing and caddishness; and Sultana, who turns out to be an old ally of Jarek’s, even if it would be stretching the point a great deal to call them friends today.
I have a long history of detesting comedy sequels to movies that weren’t comedies, so none of you should be surprised that I loathe Deathstalker II. It might have been just barely tolerable, though, if Wynorski had stuck to making fun of sword and sorcery movies specifically. Heaven knows the genre offers plenty to mock, even at its best— and although I love Deathstalker dearly, it isn’t for being a notably good example of the form. But Wynorski won’t just sit still and do that, instead deriving at least half of the film’s ostensible humor from a succession of irrelevant shiny objects that seized his attention while he was rewriting each new shooting day’s script pages. Chin the Buccaneer has that name (which you really wouldn’t expect from a whitish guy in a Western-inflected fantasy world) solely for the sake of a “Hawaii Five-O” dialogue reference, of all things. He introduces his squad of evil subcontractors via the kind of “meet the rogues’ gallery” lineup that I confess to recognizing only from other, much funnier, attempts to parody it. (Top Secret, for example, uses the format twice, first when Nick Rivers is handed over to the Stasi-but-also-Nazi interrogators, and then again when he meets the fighters in the Resistance cell.) Deathstalker’s sojourn among the Amazons pits him in what’s supposed to be a duel to the death against the royal champion (GLOW wrestler Dee “Queen Kong” Booher, whose other film roles include Lust for Freedom and Slashdance), which riffs distractedly on both pro wrestling and Rocky. The trial by combat even begins with unseen Amazon trumpeters playing the latter movie’s main title fanfare as Deathstalker is dragged to the ring!
There’s also a running gag that might have been made to work if it were a load-bearing element of the film, and not just one more dumb thing among many. Although Deathstalker II is set in the sort of mythic past that has always been a staple of sword and sorcery tales, all of the American performers look and act exactly as if the setting were 1987 Los Angeles. John Terlesky plays Deathstalker as a Venice Beach surfer jock, and his Farrah Fawcett hairdo is so distracting that it’s hard to focus on anything else so long as he’s on the screen. Toni Naples as Sultana more rightly belongs in a shootout against the ladies of L.E.T.H.A.L. in some execrable Andy Sidaris clunker than in anything involving deposed princesses, magic clones, and tribes of Amazons. It’s hard to know what to make of Monique Gabrielle’s two horrendous anti-performances (I swear, it’s as if the girl were reading dialogue she’s never seen before off of barely legible cue cards), but the real Evie might perhaps be squeezed into a very stupid comedy about bikini girls washing custom vans for a good cause, while the fake one could be the number-two bitch at the evil sorority in the worst Animal House ripoff you’ve ever seen. The closest this “Hyborian Age, but make it 80’s” shtick ever comes to working is in John Lazar’s rendition of Jarek. Lazar is aiming for something similar to Duncan Regehr’s unforgettably strange tenure as primary villain Dirk Blackpool in the short-lived TV fantasy spoof, “Wizards and Warriors,” but Regehr did it both first and better.
So far I’ve been discussing Deathstalker II mainly as a failed comedy, but rest assured that it sucks just as much as a fantasy adventure movie. Previous Corman Conan Cash-Ins were notable for how much value they managed to wring out of their impoverished budgets, but this one looks even cheaper and junkier than it really was. You see it most starkly in those scenes (and there are a lot of them) that juxtapose stock footage from Deathstalker against newly shot material. Say what you want about the first film, but that was a damned good pig-man suit that John Carl Buechler made, and cinematographer Leonardo Rodríguez Solís knew how to shoot the thing so that it looked even more impressive than it was. Wynorski can be forgiven for wanting to reuse the pig’s solo scene here. But he also brings the pig suit (and its spare!) back so that Jarek can have his own version of Jabba the Hutt’s Gammorean guards, and I truly do not understand how the same special effect, shot by the same cameraman, can look so much shabbier and trashier the second time around. Even more incredibly, much the same can be said in comparison between the stock footage of mostly-naked girls from Munkar’s harem and the brand new mostly-naked girl that Wynorski has providing the entertainment at the tavern! Deathstalker II saves its worst non-comic failures for the action sequences, however. Stunt coordinator Arturo Noal did solid enough work on Barbarian Queen, but only in the climactic duel of swordsmanship between Deathstalker and Jarek does he show any sign of life here. Lamest of all is Deathstalker’s fight with Sultana, which inexcusably contains a cut at every single clash of swords, apparently in a desperate attempt to disguise the fact that Toni Naples had no idea on Earth how to wield a melee weapon.
Deathstalker II does have one faintly redeeming feature, however, and that’s Maria Socas. By 1987, she had risen to become an actress of some consequence in Argentina, and although she’s visibly uncomfortable delivering all her lines in English, she’s still operating on a whole other plane from her American costars. (For whatever this is worth, I’m uncertain whether the voice we hear in the finished film is really hers, or whether the same woman dubbed her in both Deathstalker II and The Warrior and the Sorceress.) Socas is unique among the cast in treating her character as an actual person with a real existence in this imaginary world. She behaves as if the action she’s a part of has consequences, both for her and for everyone else involved in it. She uses naturalistic facial expressions and body language while everybody around her mugs unconscionably or gazes with doltish immobility in the camera’s general direction. I cannot recommend Deathstalker II for even the most fanatical of barbarian cinema completists, but Socas’s arrival onscreen generally portends at least a brief respite from its tortures.
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