Yor: Hunter from the Future (1983)

It was 27 years ago today, since Yor: Hunter from the Future came here to stay. It went up on 1425 theaters, played for a week and earned Paramount 2,810,199 dollars! Not bad, really. Yor was a co-production between Italy, France and Turkey – and it’s Turkey the movie is shot in (at least the exteriors). It might now win any Oscars, but it’s a helluva entertaining, silly and wacky adventure with a lot of cheese!

Reb Brown IS Yor, a handsome warrior with nice blond hair (he reminds me of Steve Oedekerk somehow too…) who comes to saves the day when a Ka-Laa (Corinne Clery) and her guardian Pag (Luciano Pigozzi) is attacked by huge dinosaur when they’re trying to catch themselves a Pigosaurus (it looks like a little pig with a dinosaur-outfit). Ka-Laa falls in love directly and everything is fine… until they village is attacked by something that looks like cavemen! Yor, Ka-Lee and Pag escapes! After some adventures – and the immortal line “Damn talking box!” – they meets a bunch of alien Stanko Molnar-clones and the evil Overlord (John Steiner), who wants to rule the world!

Something like that. The story is quite straight forward (it was cut down from being a mini-series to a 90 minute long feature) and aims for action and adventure all the time. Director Antonio Margheriti is mostly known for his excellent work with gothic horrors and modern action, so this is a departure from his normal line of work. But as usual he handles the direction very well, and it’s stylish and competently told. He knows how to point the camera and makes everything – except some sets and the dinosaurs – look big and expensive. He really uses the Turkish exteriors in an excellent way.

Like all of Margheriti’s work he offers a lot of well made and cool miniatures that most of the times gets blown to pieces or destroyed in some other way. Here he had help from his son Edoardo and daughter Antonella. Most of the effects look great, and I’m especially impressed by the spaceship that flies away at the end. Could it be a real remote controlled miniature plane made to look like a spaceship?

I’m not kidding above, Reb Brown IS Yor. No one else than him could have done this role so perfect. Always a twinkle in the eye, a huge blonde wig, a fit body and doing mighty fine in the action sequences. Corinne Clery is lovely and Pigozzi do what he do best, playing himself. John Steiner is also in it, as the Overlord, but don’t have so much to do really, except looking evil under his hood.

Yor is a very fine and cheesy Barbarian/Sci-Fi/Adventure-movie from the master of miniatures. It fully deserves it’s legendary status and one day, I hope and pray, it will arrive on glorious Blu-ray in it’s full complete form.