Gor (1987) Notes
Directed by Fritz Kiersch, best known for Children of the Corn, and produced in the Cannon/Golan-Globus orbit with Harry Alan Towers and Avi Lerner involved. Towers also co-wrote the screenplay under his usual pseudonym, Peter Welbeck.
The movie stars Urbano Barberini as Tarl Cabot, Rebecca Ferratti as Talena, Oliver Reed as Sarm, Jack Palance as Xenos and Arnold Vosloo as Norman, the smug Earthbound rival who more or less steals Cabot’s girlfriend.
And yes: Arnold Vosloo has hair.
The biggest problem: it is unbelievably boring
That is the central problem with Gor.
This is an action-adventure fantasy with sword fights, warlords, horses, captures, escapes, mystical objects, scantily clad warriors and quicksand, yet it somehow generates almost no excitement.
The pacing is awful. Scenes happen, but they rarely build on one another. There is very little escalation or momentum, and the movie never develops that sense of adventure where one sequence naturally pushes you into the next.
The screenplay feels like the primary culprit. The basic story should work: a mild-mannered professor is transported to a barbarian world, joins a rebellion and gradually becomes a hero. But Tarl’s transformation never really lands. He mostly feels like someone being shuffled from one plot point to another.
Performances
Most of the performances have a weird imitation quality, as if the actors have watched a lot of sword-and-sorcery movies and are reproducing what they think fantasy acting is supposed to look like.
Urbano Barberini has the hardest job because he has to carry the film, and he just doesn’t have enough charisma to sell Tarl’s transformation into a hero.
Rebecca Ferratti plays Talena. She became Playboy’s Miss June 1986, and apparently Playboy noticed her through production photos from Gor, which is far more interesting than simply assuming Cannon hired a Playmate.
And Gor really does seem determined to contain as much exposed skin as possible without technically containing nudity.
That makes more sense once you know the source material.
The source material
Gor is based on John Norman’s 1966 novel Tarnsman of Gor. Norman is the pen name of philosophy professor John Lange, who went on to write dozens of Gor novels.
The books became notorious for their sexual politics, especially themes of male dominance, female submission and slavery.
The movie sands down a lot of that material, but you can absolutely still see where it came from.
Oliver Reed and Jack Palance
Oliver Reed is easily the most entertaining person in the movie.
He plays Sarm, the villain, and at least he seems to understand that if you’re going to be in a ridiculous sword-and-sorcery movie, you might as well give the audience something. He has presence, menace and actual energy.
Then there is Jack Palance, because apparently this wasn’t sufficiently Cannon Films until somebody put Jack Palance in it.
Palance plays Xenos, a mentor figure, and his presence gives the movie another marquee name to add to the cast list. And that’s it.
Arnold Vosloo
Years before The Mummy, Arnold Vosloo appears as Norman during the Earth sequences.
If you know him primarily as Imhotep, it is very funny seeing this imposing future supernatural villain with a full head of hair playing essentially:
Some Dick From Work.
Fritz Kiersch
Kiersch is interesting because Gor looks like such a strange career move after Children of the Corn, but the progression actually makes sense.
He directed:
- Children of the Corn — 1984
- Tuff Turf — 1985
- Winners Take All — 1987
- Gor — 1987
He came out of commercials and had already demonstrated that he could make genre movies on limited budgets and find production value where he could.
From Cannon’s perspective, that is almost the ideal résumé.
But Gor feels oddly disinterested. The action has very little personality, and the direction often feels like somebody reconstructing other fantasy movies from memory.
There is a strong “I have seen Conan” quality to it, and maybe an even stronger “I have seen Krull.”
The quicksand sequence in particular feels remarkably similar to material in Krull.
Which also raises the important question:
Why was quicksand such a huge problem in ’80s fantasy movies?
Krull. The NeverEnding Story. Gor.
Even the Sarlacc Pit is basically quicksand with teeth.
Movies of that era seriously misrepresented the amount of quicksand I would encounter later in life.
What the movie actually does well
This is where Gor becomes frustrating, because it actually looks pretty good.
The cinematographer was Hans Kühle Jr., a South African DP who had previously worked as a cameraman on Cannon’s King Solomon’s Mines and later shot films including Laser Mission.
And he shoots Gor like he genuinely believes he is making an epic fantasy.
There are strong widescreen compositions, big landscapes and a surprising amount of visual polish.
The production design, by Hans Nel, is also much better than the finished movie deserves. There are real sets, costumes, horses, extras and large locations. The film was shot largely in South Africa, and the physical production gives it more scale than you would expect.
So this is not one of those fantasy movies where six guys are running around in a quarry.
There is actual production value here.
Why that makes the movie worse
That is probably the most interesting thing about Gor.
You can see the better movie that could have existed.
The cinematography is there. The locations are there. The production design is there. Oliver Reed is there.
The movie has the ingredients.
It simply cannot make them exciting.
That makes Gor more frustrating than a truly cheap fantasy movie, because it keeps showing you glimpses of what it could have been.
The simplest way to put it is:
Gor has production value without entertainment value.
Production oddities
One wonderful bit of Cannon insanity: the sequel, Outlaw of Gor, was apparently shot concurrently with this movie.
So somebody looked at what they were making and decided:
Whatever this is, make two.
Fritz Kiersch did not return for the sequel. John “Bud” Cardos directed that one instead.
There was also a genuine tragedy during production. A large wooden castle set near Johannesburg was burned for a sequence, and production transport manager Martin Wenzel and his 19-year-old son Conrad were killed in the fire.
That is obviously not comedy material, but it does underline how substantial the physical production actually was.
Overall
Gor is not fascinating because it is simply a bad fantasy movie.
It is fascinating because it has almost everything required to make an entertainingly trashy ’80s fantasy movie:
Sword fights. Barbarians. Oliver Reed. Jack Palance. Huge landscapes. Beautiful people wearing very little clothing. An evil warlord. An alien planet. Mystical bullshit.
And somehow, against all odds, it is boring.
That is Gor’s real achievement.
Bottom Five Epics
So, once I’d selected Gor for this episode, there was really only one direction I could go with this week’s Bottom Five.
Because if Gor is anything, it’s epic.
Or, more accurately, it desperately, desperately wants to be epic.
This is a movie with kingdoms and castles and armies and sword fights and evil warlords and beautiful women and Oliver Reed and ten seconds of Jack Palance, all wrapped around a story about an ordinary man transported to another world where he’s apparently destined to become some kind of great warrior.
Those are the ingredients of an epic.
Unfortunately, having all the ingredients doesn’t mean you know how to fucking cook.
And that got me thinking about the epic as a particular kind of cinematic swing. These are movies that don’t want to tell you a little story. They want scale. Hundreds of extras. Giant sets. Sweeping landscapes. Wars. Civilizations rising and falling. Monumental romances. Big ideas. Sometimes enormous budgets and usually a running time that suggests the filmmaker believes whatever they’re doing is very, very important.
And when an epic works, you get some of the greatest movies ever made.
But when it doesn’t?
You get Gor.
So for this Bottom Five, I’m looking at movies that reached for that kind of grandeur and, for one reason or another, completely lost me. Some were enormous financial failures. Some were creative disasters. Some are movies I can recognize as extraordinary technical achievements while still absolutely fucking hating them. And at least one is a movie I don’t even entirely dislike—which somehow makes what it did wrong even more frustrating.
What was your approach to this list, Mike?
GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)
I waited a very long time to finally see Gone with the Wind, because this is one of the Hollywood epics. And the frustrating thing is, for probably the first half, I understood the reputation.
From a filmmaking standpoint, this thing is a fucking monument. Victor Fleming ultimately got the directing credit on David O. Selznick’s famously chaotic production, Ernest Haller and Ray Rennahan’s Technicolor cinematography is astonishing, and Max Steiner’s score is deservedly iconic. Nearly ninety years later, there are images in this movie that are still breathtaking.
And initially, I was invested. Scarlett is watching her entire world disappear, the Civil War is swallowing everything around her and Rhett Butler keeps wandering into the story as this charming, seemingly brave rogue. I thought, Okay, I finally get Gone with the Wind.
Then the second half happens.
And everybody becomes fucking horrible.
Scarlett becomes increasingly impossible to sympathize with, Rhett goes from charming rogue to genuinely abusive and their relationship becomes this endless cycle of manipulation and misery. Instead of watching complicated characters tragically evolve, I felt like the movie was systematically destroying the people it had spent two hours getting me invested in.
And that’s unforgivable when your movie runs nearly four fucking hours.
Obviously there’s another enormous discussion surrounding the film’s portrayal of slavery and the antebellum South, but that’s actually not why it’s on my list.
Gone with the Wind won Best Picture. Fleming won Best Director. Vivien Leigh won Best Actress. Hattie McDaniel became the first Black performer ever to win an Academy Award. Haller and Rennahan won for that incredible cinematography. The movie received thirteen competitive Oscar nominations and won eight of them, plus two special awards. The American Film Institute still ranked it number six among the greatest American movies ever made in its 2007 list.
I understand the reputation.
I understand the achievement.
The achievement is part of why I’m so fucking pissed off at it.
CONAN THE DESTROYER (1984)
Until we started working on this list, I would have sworn Conan the Destroyer was made by Cannon Films.
It wasn’t! This was Dino De Laurentiis, Universal Pictures and director Richard Fleischer.
But holy shit does it look like Cannon.
Which becomes even stranger when you realize the cinematographer was Jack Cardiff, the Oscar-winning cinematographer of Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. Somehow one of the great cinematographers in movie history ended up photographing Wilt Chamberlain in animal skins, Grace Jones screaming at people and André the Giant underneath a rubber monster suit.
And here’s the thing: Conan the Destroyer is kinda fun.
That’s almost my problem with it.
John Milius treated Conan the Barbarian like an actual myth. It’s violent, sexual, philosophical and strangely beautiful. Basil Poledouris gives it this gigantic operatic score and, despite all the inherently ridiculous sword-and-sorcery shit happening, the movie itself never thinks it’s ridiculous.
Then the producers deliberately decided the sequel should reach a broader audience. The violence came down, the comedy went up and Conan went from an R-rated barbarian to a PG family attraction.
And you can feel it everywhere.
Suddenly we’ve got comic relief, a teenage princess and an adventuring party where half the movie seems to be played for laughs.
They even brought Poledouris back, so occasionally that enormous music starts swelling and reminds you of the mythological world this is supposed to inhabit…
…while you’re looking at something that appears to have been filmed behind a Mexican restaurant for Cannon Films.
So Conan the Destroyer makes my Bottom Five Epics not because it’s some miserable piece of shit.
It’s worse than that. It’s kinda fun.
It’s a perfectly enjoyable dumb fantasy adventure that took one of the strangest, boldest sword-and-sorcery epics of the early ’80s and sanded off practically everything that made it interesting.
John Milius gave us Conan the Barbarian.
Two years later, they gave us Conan the Saturday Morning Cartoon.
HEAVEN’S GATE (1980)
Heaven’s Gate is here for a slightly different reason, because it isn’t merely a movie that failed.
It’s one of the most legendary failures in Hollywood history.
Michael Cimino had just won Best Picture and Best Director for The Deer Hunter, so United Artists essentially handed him the keys to the kingdom.
And Cimino went fucking nuts.
The movie started with a budget around $11 or $12 million and eventually resulted in roughly a $44 million hit to United Artists. Stories about Cimino’s obsessive pursuit of perfection became legendary. Early in production he’d reportedly exposed roughly two hours of film to produce less than three minutes he actually approved.
But unlike Gor, the crazy thing is:
The money is on the fucking screen.
Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography is gorgeous. The thing is enormous. Cimino was genuinely trying to construct an entire world.
Then the three-hour-and-forty-minute version premiered, critics absolutely murdered it, it was withdrawn after a week, heavily recut and ultimately earned only about $3.5 million domestically.
Heaven’s Gate stopped being a movie and became an adjective for filmmakers disappearing up their own asses with somebody else’s money. Cimino continued working, but he never again had anything approaching the power he’d had after The Deer Hunter.
Except here’s the fascinating part:
What if everybody was wrong?
The restored version has undergone a huge critical reassessment. Criterion released it. MoMA has called it Cimino’s masterpiece.
So I’m not even comfortable calling this one of the worst epics.
I’m calling it perhaps the greatest failed epic ever made.
A guy wins Best Director, gets almost unlimited freedom, blows tens of millions of dollars, becomes a symbol for the end of New Hollywood…
…and thirty years later everybody starts saying:
“You know what? It’s actually pretty fucking good.”
That’s epic.
PEARL HARBOR (2001)
Pearl Harbor feels like somebody watched Titanic and said:
“We should do that, but with more explosions.”
And I’m not even being unfair. Michael Bay explicitly compared the approach to Titanic: you take this enormous historical tragedy and put a fictional romance at its center.
The problem is James Cameron and Michael Bay are very different filmmakers.
I like Bay. Bad Boys, The Rock, even Armageddon—the guy can make shit move, make shit explode and make somebody walking toward a camera at sunset look like they’re personally defending Western civilization.
What I don’t think he’s particularly equipped for is a three-hour emotionally complicated historical romance.
Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale form the love triangle, and I just didn’t give a shit. Hartnett struck me as incredibly bland at that point in his career, and while I really like Affleck, he’s much better playing recognizable human beings than HEROIC EPIC LEADING MAN.
And ultimately I kept thinking:
Why am I spending this much time wondering which guy Kate Beckinsale is going to sleep with when Pearl Harbor is about to be fucking bombed?
The attack itself is technically impressive. This thing cost around $140 million, looks enormous and actually won an Oscar for Sound Editing.
But that’s the problem.
It’s an epic-sized production in search of epic-sized emotion.
It fundamentally misunderstands why Titanic works.
James Cameron used a fictional romance to make an enormous historical tragedy feel smaller and more human.
Michael Bay uses an enormous historical tragedy to make a fictional romance feel bigger and more important.
Those aren’t the same fucking thing.
ZARDOZ (1974)
We once did Bottom Five Follow-Ups on this show, and Zardoz might be one of the greatest Bottom Five Follow-Ups imaginable.
Because John Boorman followed Deliverance with this.
Deliverance gets nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, Hollywood presumably asks Boorman, “What do you want to do next?”
And apparently the answer was:
Sean Connery in a red diaper.
But reducing Zardoz to that outfit almost undersells how insane this thing is. Boorman is tackling immortality, sexuality, religion, class, social control, human evolution and civilization itself. There’s an immortal elite, Brutals, Exterminators, artificial intelligence and a giant flying stone head.
And everybody is taking this completely fucking seriously.
That’s what fascinates me.
This isn’t some hack accidentally wandering into metaphysics. Boorman wrote, produced and directed the thing. And the cinematographer was Geoffrey Unsworth, who shot 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There is extraordinary talent involved here.
And Boorman may have one of the strangest hit-to-miss ratios of any genuinely great filmmaker. This guy made Deliverance, Point Blank, Hope and Glory and one of my favorite movies, Excalibur.
He also made Zardoz.
And then made Exorcist II: The Heretic.
Who the fuck is John Boorman?
But I actually respect Zardoz. I’d rather watch an enormously talented filmmaker make a bizarre, self-indulgent mess because he’s desperately trying to say something than watch anonymous studio product.
It also connects perfectly back to Gor:
At some point, somebody had to believe everything we’re seeing was a good idea.
Except with Zardoz, that somebody was John Boorman every single time.
Writer: Boorman.
Producer: Boorman.
Director: Boorman.
There’s nobody else to blame.
And the movie John Boorman desperately wanted to make…
was Zardoz.