Legend (Universal, 1985) The fantasy film boom of the Eighties mostly drew upon pulp sword and sorcery tales, but some harked back farther to earlier traditions of myth, fables, and fairy tales, often because the filmmakers had a more vividly enchanted look in mind. Whether hit or miss, these movies and their typically rich visuals provided a welcome diversion from the then-prevailing norm of mounted barbarians thundering across windswept steppes.

The Last Wolf (Knight Visions/Yellow Rose, December 12, 2020) Documentaries seem to be sort of a thing right now. And they can be absolutely fascinating when the subject is something you’re into. The ones I most enjoy tend to be about my favorite bands, albums, or movies. But I especially like documentaries about my favorite authors, particularly when those authors are on the verge of being forgotten. At Black Gate we often bemoan the neglect, or approaching neglect, of authors…

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Conan the Destroyer (Universal Pictures, 1984) Filmmakers jump on a hot new genre with alacrity if it looks like it can be reduced to an easily replicated formula. That was certainly the case with Eighties sword-and-sorcery films, which were happily adopted as a replacement for the dying genre of Westerns. Producers of formulaic genre and exploitation movies, such as the notorious Roger Corman, practically started an assembly line to produce quickie barbarian pictures. Following the heroic fantasy formula probably reached…

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Hawk the Slayer (1980) The Eighties Barbarian Boom didn’t start with Conan the Barbarian (1982), though its long pre-release hype train certainly primed the pump. In truth, the market was ripe for such films, and by mid-1981, a number of other sword-and-sorcery movies were in production or pre-production. The genre had been bubbling its way up in other mass media throughout the Seventies, Dungeons & Dragons co-designer Gary Gygax had come to Hollywood talking it up, and the largely heroic…

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Son of Sinbad (USA, 1955) Sinbad movies loom so large in the history of fantasy film that it’s remarkable there weren’t more of them — only six or seven live-action features from the Forties through the Seventies. Before the sword-and-sorcery boom of the Eighties, if you wanted to watch a film of heroic fantasy, the first thing you reached for probably had Sinbad in its title. We’ve already covered three of them in this series: Sinbad the Sailor (1947), The…

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