The Beastmaster

• Directed by Don Coscarelli
• August 20, 1982
• Based on the 1959 novel The Beast Master by Andre Norton (uncredited)

A man who can communicate with animals confronts an evil wizard and his army.

If you’ve seen one low budget 80s fantasy films then you’ve seen them all. That doesn’t mean that all necessarily are not worth seeing. Many have a little something that makes them equivalent to a frozen burrito late at night. They go down great but you feel a little bad after you eat it. Then once the memory of that discomfort has faded you go back again. The Beastmaster falls comfortably into frozen burrito territory.

This is extremely low budget. The costume designs are laughably cheap to the point you might think they bought most at a local costume shop. Lotsa cave bikinis. The sets are among the cheapest I have ever seen. This much Styrofoam had to of caused a dip in the global supply!

Mark Singer was AND is a bit of a cultural icon. I was a huge fan of the miniseries V and V the Final Battle back in the day. The TV show was okay but that’s a whole other thing here. Part of me has trouble understanding how he didn’t make a bigger impact in entertainment. The man certainly secured a place in pop culture, but he was not even a major B-movie star in the sense of Bruce Campbell and I think he should’ve been that at the minimum.

Mark Singer stars as our hero Dar who before birth is magically taken from his mother’s womb and put inside a cow and kidnapped. Yes. That’s what happened. I don’t even know what to say about such a set of events. Kudos on imagination but points lost because it felt like some weird riff on The Omen.

Singer gives his manliest man style performance with a dash of 80s likeable womanizer. At one point he uses his powers to put the moves on love interest Kari (Tanya Roberts). Yet it is all treated with a laugh. He does not set up a meet-cute. He outright tricks her in a way that borders if not goes well into sexual assault.

Rip Torn as the villainous wizard Maax who gives up good oral hygiene in later years. Maax was evil when we met him but clearly brushed his teeth. I guess as he got MORE evil he relinquished toothpaste. Torn’s performance is hammy in a John Colicos sort of way. Look him up if you do not know who I am talking about.

Both of those give extremely different performances in general style. Roberts herself does not really perform at all and just looks pretty. And occasionally nude AS WELL AS pretty. Singer gives the more appropriate style and tone in my opinion. My point though is that each actor in this from Torn to Singer to Roberts to John Amos as Seth to Josh Milrad as Tal and so on all give something very different creating an uneven tone to The Beastmaster overall.

Our villain Maax is all in a tizzy to kill Dar because of a prophecy that the firstborn son of a king will kill him. That’s the whole point of his evil. Long story short, Dar grows up in a village completely unaware of his heritage. And when his village is attacked, he begins a quest for revenge over that and not anything involving his real dad.

This is most certainly the poor man’s Conan the Barbarian. It does its best to have a hero’s journey but rather than being deep like Conan it is shallow and just good guy must kill bad guy because a higher power said so. And to get you past that lack of depth there are a couple of bare boob shots early on. Playboy spread aside (which was to promote this), if you ever wanted to see Tonya Roberts topless in a movie this is your chance. This is the scene where Dar gets creepy! Though that move does not work (can’t understand why) eventually she falls for him. Exactly when I’m not sure.

I knew very little about this movie going in and I assumed that John Amos’s Seth based on the moment you first see of him would be some kind of mentor to Mark Singer’s Dar but instead it’s some random guy who never gets developed. And Seth is just kind of there until he becomes the pal of Dar for, well, reasons.

The action is a little stiff. The directing is a bit flat. And the sets and some of the things they do like the sliding wall are laughably bad. Yet it has an unusual charm about it. It shouldn’t work but it does. Possibly because the great Don Coscarelli knew what The Beastmaster was and did not run from it. Coscarelli is a legend.

The one really bright spot, and I wish this film had a little more money to do better effects, were these weird creatures that are hero meets early on. They trap and eat people and they play a significant part in the finale. They were just cool and I wish they could’ve been maybe designed a little better. Their appearance was good but they lacked an ability to do much beyond stand.

Is The Beastmaster bad? No. Is it good? Also no yet something about it hooks you. Perhaps it is the strong effort given by the crew to make this. Perhaps it is Mark Singer in his heyday. It’s Mark Singer definitely with an assist by Coscarelli. This is a worthwhile movie. I may not watch it again soon, but I will watch it again because it’s just a good time.