As any fule kno, the success of Conan the Barbarian spawned a small cottage industry of sword-and-sorcery movies which were almost, but not entirely, completely unlike Conan. Enterprising filmmakers realised that they didn’t need good acting, a decent script, passable special effects or anything else to make a good fantasy film - they just had to make sure there were plenty of swords and bare flesh onscreen at all times and make sure the poster is painted by someone who can do a decent impersonation of Boris Vajello’s style. So tempting was the simplicity of this formula that even Conan sequel Conan the Destroyer and Conan pseudo-sequel Red Sonja succumbed to it, rather than actually retaining the finer qualities of John Milius and Oliver Stone’s original.

But the true masters of this horrifying development in the fantasy genre were the low-budget studios who cranked out crap like Deathstalker, famous mainly for having a scene where an orc beats a man to death with his own arm, Barbarian Queen, famous mainly for starring that actress that Phil Spector murdered,... and The Warrior and the Sorceress, famous mainly for giving a job to a quite out of shape and quite probably drunk David Carradine.

In fact, The Warrior and the Sorceress was co-produced by Hector Olivera, who had co-produced Deathstalker the previous year (along with Roger Corman) and would reunite with Corman the next year to produce Barbarian Queen (which he also directed). All three films were made in Olivera’s native Argentina, and appear to recycle a lot of resources - I spotted a few sets from Deathstalker making another appearance in The Warrior and the Sorceress, and I think they also reused some of the music.

The Warrior and the Sorceress sets itself apart from these other two by being, to a great extent, the work of an auteur - albeit a really schlocky auteur - that being John Broderick, who co-produced, directed, and co-wrote the script with William Stout. Broderick clearly had big ideas for the project, because he chooses to make a sword-and-sorcery remake of Yojimbo, just as A Fistful of Dollars was Sergio Leone’s remake of Kurosawa’s original. Carradine, obviously, is playing the Toshiro Mifune/Clint Eastwood character this time around; specifically, he’s the wandering swordsman Kain, who it’s implied was some sort of paladin working for the priesthood before some unspecified apocalypse overturned the social order on the world of Ura, a setting notable mainly for having two suns.

Kain comes to the town of Yam-A-Tar, a town consisting of a courtyard, some walls, and the different headquarters of the two gangs who are fighting it out for control of the town’s well. One gang is led by Zeg the Tyrant (Lew Askew), a warrior who actually dresses like a warrior and is by and large permitted to have some dignity. The other is led by Bal Caz (William Marin), a chubby bald guy dressed in a fisherman’s net whose lizardy pet/vizier is blatantly a glove puppet.

It transpires that Kain has come here at the behest of Bludge the Prelate (Harry Townes), a member of Kain’s order, who wants Kain to liberate the village and rescue his daughter Naja (Maria Socas), a multiclass priestess/blacksmith - Zeg has kidnapped her in order to force her to make for him a longsword +1 - the mystic Sword of Ura, an artefact of legend. Why does anyone know what this sword's name is or why it's so important if it's not been made yet? Presumably they've read the Dungeon Master's Guide and saw it on the magic items table. Complicating the issue is a nearby band of nomadic slavers (who I think are meant to be orcs or something), who are powerful enough that Zeg and Bal Caz must set their feud aside when they come around to avoid being pressganged - but not so powerful that Bal Caz and Zeg are above manipulating them to further their aims.

If you’ve seen any of the lower-tier barbarian flicks of the 80s, you know more or less what to expect here - shoddy and inconsistent costuming, unconvincing sets, crappy special effects, lots of sword fights and loads of bare breasts. Naja literally spends all of her ontime screen topless - even after she’s been freed from captivity and given a nice fresh change of rags - and there’s one bit where Zeg manages to capture Kain by entertaining him with a four-breasted stripper with a tranquilising stinger that shoots out of her crotch on a little tentacle. No, I am not fucking making that up. See for yourself. (Link is NSFW, obviously.) Carradine looks about as unimpressed with that whole scene as I was.

My local HMV misfiled this one under the martial arts films, presumably because of Carradine’s presence. The idea of actually combining an 80s barbarian flick with the conventions of a martial arts film, and casting characters capable of pulling off decent fight scenes, really isn’t a terrible one - the standards of fight choreography in sword and sorcery films of this vintage is generally atrocious, so bringing in people who know what they’re doing and making the fight scenes technically competent would have been a really smart move. Unfortunately, Carradine is just plain slow and sluggish in this film. At first, I thought this was due to none of the other actors being any good at kung fu, forcing Carradine to slow down his moves to match their ineptitude. Later, it became apparent that Carradine at this point in his career couldn’t even pull off a convincing high-kick.

The movie was made at a time when Carradine was a full-blown alcoholic, of course, which couldn’t have helped. I don’t think he was the only drunk person on-set for this one. Nobody makes much of an effort to act, half the lines come out sort of slurred, even the camera seems wobbly in some scenes. It’s like every single person involved with making this movie was drunk throughout the entire process, the incompetence is that ubiquitous.

I have this mental image of Broderick and Stout sitting down with Olivera in a bar in Buenos Aires to pitch their idea of the film to him. They’ve already got a few shots down his neck to soften him up, and he’s been spiking their drinks with lousy homebrewed vodka to get them to agree to put more tits in the film. The night crawls on. By the time the bar owner throws them out, it’s 3 am, their livers are screaming at them, and they’ve already written half the script. They roll to Olivera’s place to keep drinking, and when morning comes around they head down to the studio to start making a few calls and have a hair of the dog.

As cast and crew assemble, they are greeted by Olivera, who presses a contract into their left hand and a full tumbler of scotch into their right. The party continues for weeks, scenes being filmed as and when the personnel required emerge from unconsciousness. Bottles and hipflasks are concealed about the set so people can take a crafty swig when the camera is off them. Everyone is in good spirits and they start playing a drinking game where they take a shot every time the four-breasted stripper’s lower pair fail to jiggle when the top pair jiggles. Eventually, the alcohol runs out and the assembled mass of pickled humanity lies unconscious on the floor, vomit running down their ragged costumes.

They wake up with no memory of what they have been doing for the past month or so. An empty film can lies on Broderick’s desk. To his confusion, there’s a title written on it - The Warrior and the Sorceress. Wasn’t that the name of the film he and Stout were going to pitch to Olivera yesterday evening? The one which was going to be a shot in the arm for the already-ailing barbarian genre? Why is the can empty? Olivera, Carradine, and the rest all regain consciousness. Nobody remembers what was in the film cannister. They assume it must have been a film, but where have the reels gone? Nobody remembers.

Eventually, Olivera hits on the idea of phoning his secretary, who doesn’t usually spend much time on his film sets because she’s a teetotaller. “Oh, that!” she says. “I FedExed it to the distributors yesterday like you asked me to, sir.”

"Wait," says Carradine. "You mean we actually filmed all that?"