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Beastmaster – That Musclebound Dr. Dolittle
By swenson | April 28, 2009
Chaz Wood writes…a personal view.
I do remember seeing The Beastmaster (hereafter referred to simply as BM) as a young teenager but could remember absolutely nothing about it, apart from a scene where the lead actress crawled around wearing not very much.
So coming back to it 20 years later, I was expecting wobbly sets, laugh-inducing dialogue and maybe the occasional half-decent sword fight. I was certainly glad to be proved very wrong, and even rather moved by it all, ultimately. Here’s why…
A rousing score kicks off over still images of wild animals and as the film opens, we realise very quickly that we’re not in typical hack-and-slash territory (in terms of film directing and editing, at least). There’s some simple but effective artistic symmetry at work in the opening pyramid scene, and throughout the rest of the picture, enough to make me look up the director, Don Coscarelli, online. The only other film he’s directed which I’ve seen was the low-budget Phantasm, which I remember involved people holding silver balls to their foreheads while they dribbled blood a lot.
In the BM preamble, High Priest bad boy Rip Torn (still surely one of the silliest names in Hollywood), in a kind of King Herod mode, demands the death of an unborn child who, it is prophesied by his three hoary soothsayers, will end his life. Like MacBeth, he decides to take matters into his own hands and deal with this threat in the most villainous method imaginable.
Banished by his King for fanatical heathenism, the fundamentalist would-be infanticide also wears some bizarre eyebrows and a false nose, looking a little like a Japanese Tengu, and has henchmen who, usefully, hang themselves at the drop of a hat with ninja-style grapples. Torn’s pagan nutcase Maax (pronounced May-Ax) then sets off to do his dastardly deed, only to be foiled by fate.
The newborn baby is rescued in a sequence told almost without dialogue by a brave peasant farmer, who also turns out to be not too bad with a sword, and other weapons. He raises the boy and names him Dar (pronounced Dar), which probably means something bold and heroic in his native tongue.
Dar shows himself to have unnatural powers over animals by taming the least scary-looking bear in cinema history while still a young boy, but it impresses his adoptive father no end. He also owns a cute white dog who resembles ‘Dief’ from Due South, which, it turns out, is also possessed of almost supernatural strength and resilience.
Into the midst of this village idyll come the marauding horde of men in fancy pointy helmets, in a very moving scene where Dar’s village is razed to the ground. Now fully-grown, Dar (played now by Marc Singer, of TV’s big-budget miniseries V), is the only survivor and his life of high adventure begins to unfold…
Epic landscapes abound on his travels and while no Schwarzenegger (how can anyone compete with a 7-times Mr. Olympia, and a Mr. Universe title at age 20?), the young Singer nonetheless gets to show off an impressively-toned physique.
He fills the part well, with just enough humanity, humour and depth to raise the role of Dar above mere comic-book cliché. For sure, not all the cast seem quite up to the task – Torn is undoubtedly slumming it but at least seems to relish his part as a child-murdering megalomaniac.
Tanya Roberts as Kiri (though she makes it sound like Queerie, at least on my poor VHS copy), on the other hand, looks good, with mascara that never smears or drips, but actually seems out of her depth in a couple of scenes. But then, we don’t usually get to see actresses of the quality of, say, Helen Mirren in fantasy movies very often, so the eye candy tends to be just that. And who’s really complaining?
Some nice sweeping aerial camera shots do great justice to the craggy rocks and deserts of the barbarian lands and instill a sense of primal wonder. Having lost his adoptive family and home, Dar gains a eagle, a black tiger (?) and a couple of fun-loving raccoons (or are they mongooses – or ferrets? – I’m not too good with exotic rodents) – as well as an epic destiny, linked to the mark of the gods burned into the palm of his hand.
Dar’s trinity of animal helpers embody the hero’s own attributes: the eagle is his eyes, the ferrets (or polecats – or weasels?) are his cunning, and the tiger, his strength. They also embody aspects of the hero’s own psyche, symbols of the subconscious and the Shadow which, for the most part, are positive manifestations.
Animals existed before man, and are nearer the source of life and therefore, universal truth (the fact that Dar is considered a ‘freak’ shows that even in this primitive society, man has begun to lose his connection with the positive side of his race’s primitive instincts and is destined for disaster on some level, sooner or later, if he is unable to reconcile this).
As such, Dar represents primal man, at one with nature and the world around him to the point where he and his beasts share each others’ thoughts and vision – a symbol of a time, now all but lost, when humans and animals were one with the world.
These early parts of the film weave a mythical tapestry by relying on well-conceived camerawork, strong set-pieces and simple emotion rather than needless narration or soggy dialogue. In some ways the reliance on visuals, and lack of dialogue, help reinforce the primal universal symbols and folkloric elements which abound in the film.
BM seems subconsciously familiar to the viewer because its story motifs are common across heroic legend the world over – from Sigurd in the Nibelunglied to Momotaro of Japanese folktales (also unnaturally begotten, and again, assisted on his adventures by three animals – a dog, a monkey and a pheasant, in a similar tactical balance to that of Dar’s allies).
The ‘helpful beast’ motif recurs throughout European folklore, and the cunning rodent is of course a stock trickster character in legend and ‘just-so’ stories of many tribes and cultures. It’s the polecats (or weasels? or raccoons?) who are the most mercurial of Dar’s companions and these little creatures (whatever the hell they really are) almost steal the show in many of their scenes.
Generally, the animals in this picture get a pretty good deal. They are majestically filmed, and their scenes never look cheap or exploitative (though the shots where the eagle allegedly carries away a fully-grown child is amusingly unconvincing – thankfully, most of the other effects are better than this), and the gut-level power of the tiger (or is it supposed to be a panther?) is magnificent.
While Torn continues to hold cruel sacrifices to appease the gods and hold the peasants in thrall, Dar & his menagerie meet a warrior pilgrim, and his young charge, who exhibit Asian monk-like fighting skills. Moving in to the second half of the movie, comparisons with Conan the Barbarian may become obvious – the climactic battle on a sacrificial step pyramid is very reminiscent of John Milius, and Singer gets to show off his heroic poses with much style and sword-flashing – although the timeline and release dates of the two films are actually very close indeed. It would be needless to make further comparisons.
Both films are separate and quite distinct takes on the same genre – while Conan is a dark, brooding and violent conqueror, a primordial fascist personification of Nietzsche’s superman, Dar makes a far more likable protagonist. Conan punches camels’ lights out, while Dar treats his animal companions with utmost respect – another Nietzschian ideal – and fights for the good of others, rather than for himself (even the vengeance motif is very understated).
All in all, BM takes itself more seriously than some of its kind, which also helps to make it a winner. While a second rate fantasy film which makes fun of its own shortcomings can be mindlessly entertaining for a while, it’s always nice to see an effort which treats the genre, and the audience, with some respect.
Overall, BM sticks in the mind with the resonance of a true myth having unfolded in front of your eyes. Which, in some ways, it has. And if a simple movie can make a viewer like me recognise and admire the essential unity of man and nature, then it’s surely worth much more than the price of admission.
For all the wonders of science and technology, it can often be the simplest things which we often take for granted, which we discover are the most vital to our very beings, by touching that primal, subconscious nerve that lies buried in that tangled bundle of wires at the top of our spines.
A couple of half-hearted sequels followed, both of which are probably disposable unless you have a perverse taste for very cheezy low-budget nonsense, starring actors old enough to know better – the Hollywood-inflicted disease of sequel-itis, otherwise known as the most graphic illustration of the Law of Diminishing Returns.
The ultimate sequel to any sequence of movie sequels being, of course, that most dreaded of things – the TV spin-off series. Being “politically correct”, according to one online review, is probably a good enough reason not to bother with this small-screen re-interpretation (or “reimagining” as today’s hacks might put it, as though it were a post-modernist staging of a Wagnerian opera).
After all, barbarian movies are supposed to be about virile strongmen, buxom chicks, blood, swords, and testosterone – the visual equivalent of a Manowar LP. If that’s a problem for today’s sensitive viewers, then I’d suggest they go watch Erin Brockovich.
Now, with the 21st century now well on the way to laying bare almost the bones of the universe, I would happily pay to see some new and serious attempts at cinema fantasy. Anyone up for a filmic version of Fritz Lieber’s Swords series? Zelazney’s Amber ? Or just about anything by the British master of wizardry himself, Michael Moorcock? Then we may be able to return to the days of innocent movies that were just “fun”, free from cynical sarcasm and “in” jokes.
Aye, and on that day I’ll be down the front row of the cinema with a bong in one hand and a copy of Heavy Metal in the other, and Satan will be ski-ing to work. Until then, there’s always DVDs of movies like this. Except that currently, it seems to be out of print. Oh, well…
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