BONUS! Watch a Roger Corman movie to celebrate his 100th birthday!
Was Roger Corman in the David Carradine business? Because almost every movie in the 80s and 90s by either person seems connected. And hey, why pay for new footage when you can just dig up old Corman cinematic corpses, dust them off and drop them into a blender with a completely different plot?
Directed and written by Charles B. Griffith—the legendary mind behind The Little Shop of Horrors and Death Race 2000, in what would be his final feature film credit—this is less a traditional sequel and more of an Argentine-American recycling plant. If you thought the first Wizards of the Lost Kingdom left any burning questions or untapped past scenes to recycle, well, Corman had some more stock footage from Deathstalker, Barbarian Queen, Amazons and The Warrior and the Sorceress that desperately wanted to live again. Entire battle scenes are unceremoniously spliced in, redubbed and shown, proving that if you squint hard enough, a totally unrelated movie can look like a brand-new adventure.
The story? Oh, it’s a grand epic of nonsense. The aging, utterly incompetent wizard Caedmon (Mel Welles) is ordered by Grand-Wizard Vanir (Wayne Grace) to transform a young farmhand named Tyor (Robert Jayne, credited as Bobby Jacoby) into shape. Why? Because Tyor is the Chosen One, obviously, tasked with freeing three separate kingdoms from three delightfully evil sorcerers using three magical objects: an amulet, a sword and a chalice. What is this, the Atari 2600 game series SwordQuest?
First up, Tyor and Caedmon bounce over to the first kingdom to help Prince Erman spark an uprising against Loki (Edward Blackoff), who is holding three maidens hostage with the power of the Amulet of Light. Naturally, Tyor disarms Loki and turns him to stone with his own toy.
Next, they team up with Princess Amathea—played by B-movie royalty and future Phil Spector victim Lana Clarkson—to liberate her home kingdom of Venir from Donar, played by Sid Haig. Tyor must face Donar alone to grab the magical Sword of Justice, but not before nearly being waylaid by the sultry magic of Donar’s mistress, Freya (Diana Barton). He resists, gets the sword and helps Amathea launch an attack on Donar’s coliseum, though Donar slips away to the third kingdom.
Along the road to kingdom number three, our heroes bump into the Dark One—played with absolute deadpan majesty by David Carradine, wearing the exact same costume and swinging the exact same sword he used in The Warrior and the Sorceress. Carradine’s Dark One makes short work of the monster guarding evil sorcerer Zarz’s castle, though Tyor, Caedmon and the Dark One’s wife, Idun (Susan Lee Hoffman), still get captured. Eventually, the Dark One hands the Sword of Justice back to Tyor, who uses his newly unlocked magical muscles to hurl the blade straight through Zarz.
Vanir shows up at the end to clean house, the Dark One picks Erman and Amathea to rule the united kingdoms and Tyor—now hauling around the sword, chalice and amulet all at once—gets promoted to Grand-Wizard. His first assignment? Training Caedmon. Meanwhile, the Dark One casually wanders back to his inn.
As Ed Naha (writer of the first film) once recalled after running into Roger Corman at a wedding, Corman just grinned and said, “Oh, y’know, that did very well in video. We filmed a sequel!”
It’s less a sequel than a remix, but whatever. Are any of these characters continuations of their past footage? Is this even a true sequel to the first movie? Thinking about this gives me a headache.
