Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Deathstalker IV: Match of Titans (1990)

I decided to watch all the four Deathstalker-movies that has been produced, and starts of course with Deathstalker IV: Match of Titans. Shot in Bulgaria, which is less exotic than Argentina or the Philippines, but still... Deathstalker is Deathstalker. This time Rick Hill is back on the horse (not so much actually), and swings his big sword both against half-naked women and bad guys dressed like lions. 

Deathstalker (Rick Hill) switched swords by mistake with a good friend, and now he's looking for him and every track leads to a tournament in a very crappy castle ruin. On his way there he meets Dionara (Maria Ford), a young lady that wants to fight in the tournament - but why? She has secrets of course. The evil queen... or daughter of the evil king, I'm not sure, has evil, evil, evil plans and wants to lure Deathstalker there so they can get the secret to his magic sword... or something. And then there's a lot of boobs and lame sword fights.

To be honest, it's not a boring movie. Rick Hill is (yes, really) great as Deathstalker and handles the oneliners and most of the action quite well. He looks cool and knows how to treat the ladies. Maria Ford is not bad either, but that's about it. The evil king has a bad comb over-haircut and the rest of the people is dubbed Bulgarian actors trying to make a living. The fights is extremely lame. I've never seen such weak fights before. Ford and Hill tries to make them more exciting, but with zombies opponents there's not much excitement going on. The best action is stock footage from, I guess, the first movie, with some gore and scenes with more than twenty people in the background. 

But in the end, I wasn't bored and a film with both a handsome half-naked man and a lot of naked women can't be bad and offers something to almost everyone. The locations are okey, but feels more like a typical medieval setting than fantasy - not to mention the flat and cheap interiors that look cheaper than a whole episode of The Bold and the Beautiful. It's just far from the typical DTV-masterpiece from New Concorde.

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