Wizards of the Demon Sword Reviews

Even for Troma Inc., the New York-based schlock distributor, WIZARDS OF THE DEMON SWORD is dreadful stuff, a tiresome, unfunny parody of the sword-and-sandal fantasy genre. The legendary Sword of Aktar, which has the power to unleash cataclysmic forces, is stolen by the evil Lord Khoura (Lyle Waggoner), who also kidnaps Ulric (Russ Tamblyn), the sword's keeper. Outraged, Ulric's daughter Malina (Heidi Paine) promptly recruits warrior and swordsman Thane (Blake Bahner), and later Damon (Dan Speaker), to defeat her enemy. Khoura, unfortunately, can't get the sword to work--even dousing it with hard-to-find virgin's blood doesn't help. Eventually he and his vulgar cohorts, Selena (Dawn Wildsmith) and Omar (Jay Richardson), are defeated by Thane and Damon, thus saving Ulric, the sword, and the world ... pretty much in that order. Despite a screenplay credited to Ernest Farino and Dan Golden, WIZARDS OF THE DEMON SWORD really seems, as in the old joke, to have been made up by the actors as they went along. Low-budget but prolific hack Fred Olen Ray (BIOHAZARD, ALIENATOR, INNER SANCTUM) clearly has no knack for comedy--or anything else, if judged on this one picture. Despite some surprisingly decent settings (perhaps constructed for another, more legitimate film), the movie is turgidly paced, with rudimentary special effects, the best being some OK stop-motion animation dinosaur sequences by Bret Mixon. With only the black-leather-clad villainess Dawn Wildsmith (an ex-Mrs. Fred Olen Ray) displaying some spirit and style, WIZARDS OF THE DEMON SWORD is very badly acted by some well-known, remarkably unembarrassed performers, including Russ Tamblyn (WEST SIDE STORY, HOW THE WEST WAS WON and TV's "Twin Peaks"); Lyle Waggoner (ROBO-C.H.I.C., DEAD WOMEN IN LINGERIE and TV's "The Carol Burnett Show"), who specializes in B-movie villainy; and the superb 1940s "tough guy" Lawrence Tierney (DILLINGER, SAN QUENTIN), who plays a slave master in a couple extraneous-to-the-plot scenes, the highlight of which is a rudely stolen joke: procurer Phil Silvers's "can't break up a set" line from A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM. Otherwise, the movie's only vaguely amusing bit involves a character name ("The Seer of Roebuck"), unless one counts that the titular sword is really an anemic-looking dagger. (Violence, profanity, nudity.)