YOR: THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE (1983)
(Originally printed in Knights of the Dinner Table #140) A review by Noah Antwiler |
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I haven't been to the movies in four months. It shocks me that there hasn't been a single thing worth seeing in the theater since In Bruges, and even that hasn't had a wide release yet. I can't remember a time we've been in a cinematic doldrums this bad in my life, but weekends fly past one after another as I glancedispiritedly at the Friday movie listings in the newspaper, decide not to go out after all and catch up on The Wire on DVD instead. By the time you read this, I'll probably have been tempted out of my cave to go see Martin Scorcese's Rolling Stones concert film or Iron Man, but it shocks me how little there is to look forward to lately. The best fantasy epic movie that's come out in about a year was 10,000 B.C., and that movie was so bad they should have distributed cyanide capsules with every ticket. I'd rather be taped to a chair and forced to watch SNL's "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" sketches on a constant loop for six months than watch that movie again.
My default response to boredom is to either watch something from my extensive and weird DVD collection, or to venture out and add to it. Often these trips become long, meandering and very quixotic quests to find some hopelessly obscure film like Jackie Chan's Wheels on Meals or Dragonslayer. My latest scavenger hunt ended in total failure. I wasn't shocked to learn that fantasy titans like the Deathstalker movies or Beastmaster 2 and 3 were never put on DVD (gasp!), but most grievous of all, neither was Yor: The Hunter from the Future. You can barely find it on VHS! Has the world gone so culturally bankrupt that we've all forgotten the glory that is Yor? This movie should be in every family's collection as the most ass-kickingest motion picture ever made. Gaming groups should be mandated by law to have Yor playing in the background during any RPG of any genre. Yor did to movies what Bill Brasky did to booze. It is both everything and nothing that movies have ever been, a singular indefinable experience that rips off so many movie clichés it passes infinity, curves back around and becomes something wholly original again. It is, in a word, transcendent.
The movie is about a blindingly blond loincloth-wearing lunkhead named Yor who trundles around the wilderness with his trusty stone greataxe, accompanied by a hilarious-but-catchy Flash Gordon-like theme song. One day he saves an upsettingly hairy old guy and his comely adopted daughter from a stegosaurus/triceratops dinosaur thing that looks like something straight out of a 1950s Roger Corman movie. After burying his axe in the papier-mâché beast's skull, Yor is very disapponted to discover that the dino is not, in fact, filled with candy like other piñatas, but contents himself on drinking its blood since drinking the blood of your enemies makes you stronger. I demand that this become a class requirement for barbarians in the new edition of Hackmaster. You could turn this into a whole new talent. Although it would put a dent in their already-atrocious table manners...
By way of thanks, the rescued family helps Yor carve out the choice meats and takes him back to their village for a feast. Unfortunately, that's exactly when a rival tribe of cro-magnons who look almost exactly like the Geico Cavemen attack and exterminate nearly everyone in the village. They're meant to be militant ape-people, but they really just look like swarthy people painted purple. Raise your hand if you're shocked that a barbarian movie begins with a peaceful village being annihilated by a roving horde so that the hero can spend the rest of the movie seeking revenge. Actually, it's a plot device so nice they use it about three times in the course of the movie, but I'll get back to that in a second.
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"Hey, you stupid aliens! Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough! |
You'll notice that I've been very careful not to use the word "prehistoric" anywhere in my review, despite the fact that everyone in this movie wears furs, speaks monosyllabically, and fights dinosaurs that look cheaper than the animation on the Hanna-Barbara Moby Dick and the Mighty Mightor cartoon. That's because this movie takes place in the bombed-out post-historic future-- a plot twist that the movie guards jealously until much later. You might think that I just spoiled this movie big-time, but I'm fairly confident you would have unlocked this particular secret if you were clever and, y'know, looked at the box. Look carefully for the hidden clue in the title: it's called Yor: The Hunter From the Future, and the cover of the box features him standing on a spire of rock roaring a challenge at a group of giant flying saucers, armed only with a hand axe. I'll repeat: the dude on the cover is yelling at a bunch of UFOs for all the pansy aliens inside to beam down and fight him. And you thought Battlefield: Earth was crazy. It reminds me of when Planet of the Apes got re-released, and the biggest thing on the cover was the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Way to ruin the surprise.
The movie is filmed in Turkey, which is a good choice if you're looking for a barren miserable wasteland that looks like it's been nuked to rubble 5,000 years ago. Canny cinephiles may also spot Aytekin Akkaya's name in the opening credits: one of the stars of what some consider to be the worst movie ever made: The Man Who Saved the World, better known in the U.S. as Turkish Star Wars! Look it up, if you have the courage. I'm not trying to scare you off, though. I'm just trying to give you an idea of all the wild and zany influences that come together in Yor, and if you're not sold on tracking this movie down yet, you will be once I tell you who plays the character of Yor: Reb Brown.
Not familiar to you? You never heard of Reb Brown? Then maybe you've heard of a little movie called Space Mutiny, hmm? That's right! He was Dave Ryder, the blond beefcake with the shrill girly battle cry. If you've never seen Space Mutiny, you need to put the magazine down immediately and go purchase as many DVD sets of Mystery Science Theater 3000 as you can find. That's an order. Take my word for it: everything with Reb Brown in it is an instant classic. Now move, move, move!!!
Getting back to the movie, the cavemen kidnap Yor's new girlfriend, so he and his new sidekick decide to exact revenge on those damn dirty apes. Only problem is, they're not certain how best to attack since the odds are stacked against them. Suddenly, everyone shrinks away in horror as a large winged "beast of the night" (which looks like a mix between a bat and a moth) shrieks and starts circling overhead. Everyone reacts like the Nazgul were flying straight out of Mordor, but Yor casually takes a bow and snipes the monster out of the sky with one hit. What follows is the single greatest moment in any action movie: Yor grabs the beast's fallen carcass (which has instantly frozen stiff in rigor mortis), hefts it over his head, and uses it to hang-glide into the cave as his theme music trumpets gloriously at the sheer unadulterated majesty of this feat. It's the best laugh I've had in years, and it never gets old no matter how many times you watch it. Anyway, Yor rampages through the cave in a blood-frenzy, rupturing a nearby dam to flood the cave and drown every other man, woman, and child in the tribe.
The reunited party decides to travel together for a while to uncover Yor's mysterious past because he's already destroyed everything they've ever known. Their quest leads them to a valley inhabited by hostile sand-people (who Yor exterminates), and later to a village near the sea. The villagers helpfully tell Yor of a strange race of blond people like him, who have strange technology and flying craft on the Island of Storms beyond the sea. On cue, these flying craft appear and strafe the crap out of the village with their ray guns. You never really see these ships, but you hear a lot of roaring and see laser fire emanating just off-screen.
Seeing a pattern here? The body count in this movie is astronomical. Yor is a veritable humanoid typhoon, sort of like one of those Deadlands characters who took the Grim Servant O' Death hindrance: every place Yor goes he leaves a smoking ruin strewn with charred and mangled bodies. It's not always his fault, but let's put it this way: you do not want to be friends with this particular hunter from the future. The guy witnesses the destruction of four or five entire civilizations in the span of this movie alone.
Anyway, Yor commandeers the village chief's boat to seek his revenge for yet another town, but the voyage is not a smooth one and they swiftly sail straight into a storm that shipwrecks them. It seems obvious in hindsight when you're sailing to a place called the Island of Storms, but hey, Yor's a simple guy. They haven't figured out the finer points of sailing, like "don't build a boat out of wicker" and "bring food." The group washes up on the shore of their destination, but Yor is separated from the others and captured. He's taken to a lab, where he learns that the island is populated by a group of people who survived the global cataclysm and isolated themselves on an island, away from the harmful background radiation and the mutant monsters who arose from the toxic fallout. Yor is the descendant of a group of these people who crashed in their shuttle and were presumed dead.
The current administration of the space men is run by a guy called Overlord, who surprisingly turns out to be a massive jerk. He seemed so nice when they elected him. Overlord seeks to re-take the wasteland through force of arms, and for this purpose he's created a race of androids who look like Darth Vader mated with a Cylon. Even more diabolically, he says that his ultimate weapons are almost complete: soldiers that are half-robot/half-human, and to create them, he says he needs Yor's "generic seed." Eew. I think it's because Yor has developed some kind of natural resistance to the world's environmental hazards. My question is, when you've got phasers and long-range military aircraft, do you really need much more of a technological edge to kill mutants and apes with spears? This isn't the Civilization computer game. I don't think they'll put up much of a fight.
Yor's sidekicks, Pag and Ka-Laa contact the Overlord's opposition party and start a revolution in order to rescue our hero, and that means one very important thing: cavemen with laser rifles. Oh yes. They battle their way to the island's central computer/reactor room, slaughtering Darth Cylons along their way through the Space Mutiny set, and arm the island's self-destruct sequence. Remember kids, those self-destruct charges are for absolute mass-suicidal emergencies only. Keep that room locked, too; it's so easy to set those things off even a caveman could do it.
The hilarity continues as the cavemen kill their way to a shuttle bay, where Pag, the fifty-something overweight caveman demonstrates astounding ability on a trapeze and Yor impales Overlord with an inanimate carbon rod. Now that's entertainment! Makes you want to dust off those Gamma World books already, doesn't it?
Okay, maybe it's not that good. It only needs more Kalgon.
