Sorceress (1982), a raunchy 80s fantasy movie featuring naked twin barbarian women, a floating manticore God and the dumbest magical prophecy ever.

MY CALL: This ranks pretty low even if you enjoy bad 80s R-rated fantasy. There’s nudity, raunchiness, dumb dialogue, one scene with a neat monster, stupid magic spells and a satyr peeping Tom. If that sentence doesn’t make you want to see this, then you don’t want to see this. MORE MOVIES LIKE Sorceress: Do you like this 80s badness?  How about Flash Gordon (1980), Kull the Conqueror (1997), Krull (1983), Conquest (1983), Deathstalker (1983), The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984) and Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans (1987).  All of these movies are better than Barbarian Queen (1985) in every possible way except for amply breast-filled minutes of screen time. Like all the fantasy but don’t care for all the “bad”?  Let’s try Legend (1985), Beastmaster (1982), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Conan the Destroyer (1984) or Willow (1988) on for size.  ALTERNTATE TITLE: The Barbarian Women.

This movie is so bad that even IMDB totally phoned in the synopsis, which reads as follows: “Sword and sorcery story of the cosmic struggle between white magic and black magic.” I’m pretty sure this just described every movie featuring magic ever made. Thanks for the clarification, IMDB. <<Drops the mic and walks away>>

“Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagic!  I’m spelling you!!!!!”

The story is shaky at best–but this should come as no surprise from a campy 80s genre best known for even having its strong lead female protagonists get naked (e.g., Barbarian Queen). Some evil wizard needs to sacrifice some woman’s first born child to summon some sort of monstrous demon thing. There’s just one problem, the woman had twins and the evill wizard needs to know which twin was first. With me so far…sort of? Good.

Like a fairy godfather, Krona (Martin LaSalle) the good wizard bestows unto these twin girls the powers of sword and sorcery. It’s about as easy as Neo uploading kung fu in The Matrix (1999), but without the HDMI ports in the back of the head. The twins, Mira (Leigh Harris) and Mara (Lynette Harris), are so clueless into their early 20s that they don’t realize there is a difference between boys and girls and, as such, don’t think to hide their lady parts from the opposite sex. They don’t even understand what sex is. This is really convenient for this kind of semi-smutty movie and the campiness that ensues is barely tolerable.

Meet the twins “disguised” as very leggy boys.  Pretty legit costumes.
I totally bought that they were boys.

They “glow” with magical power!

And kick really high.

The action is laughable in an awesomely bad way. A guy catches a spear and throws it back, Mara catches an arrow bare-handed, and all combat seems to be a fumbling tumble of silliness. Unfortunately the action falls short in all ways compared to even other bad 80s sword and sorcery films–leaving this movie very low among their ranks for overall entertainment value.

Just a random, VERY misleading movie poster.  The women don’t have those physiques or fight in string bikinis, no clue what’s going on with the floating planet or jaguars there, and the badass Norse God-lookin’ dude turns out to be really lame!

The manifestations of magic are a tribute to low budget early 80s fantasy. That is to say, they look awful! LMAO. Don’t worry, you should enjoy it.

And another misleading poster/cover having nothing to do with the actual movie.  There is no dragon, there is no woman in a 3-horned helmet and there is no warrior woman in a battle thong.  This…THIS…is how they get us to watch these movies.  LIES.  SORCERY!!!!!

Written by Jim Wynorski (Chopping Mall, Deathstalker II, The Haunting of Morella–don’t be fooled, these three movies are much better than Sorceress) and directed by grindhouse champion Jack Hill (under the pseudonym Brian Stuart; Coffy, Foxy Brown, Switchblade Sisters), this exploitation fantasy filth leaves no raunchy stone unturned–seizing every opportunity for breasty sophomoric thrills. A woman’s panties must be revealed (on-screen) before disemboweling her (off-screen), breast-feeding prefaced with commentary of “how full” her breasts are, our naked twin heroines skinny dipping in a river who naively try to figure out what “that thing hanging between his legs” is before kicking their voyeur’s ass, peasant women are raped, there’s a threat of death by anal impalement, and Mara learns what it means to be a woman…yeah, it’s all pretty classy over here.

Yeah, so here’s the most skeazy-looking satyr EVER and the Norse God-looking guy from that lying movie poster.  Talk about buyers’ remorse.

The evil wizard Traigon (Roberto Ballesteros) evidently has three lives and self-resurrects at a predestined location if killed (kind of like FPS games), his scantily clad ally (Ana De Sade; Caveman) has a servant in an evil gorilla suit, an awkward satyr incessantly “baahs”, the town bazaar boasts what seems to be an outdoor strip club, there’s a gorilla assault, and for the finale there’s an undead army

In the end, simply uttering a magic word dispels some enchantments and summons a pretty spiffy looking good manticore God (basically a giant floating lion with bat wings) which snarls and spews lightning at this disembodied head of an ugly disfigured evil woman god. This is accompanied by a large scale melee of sword fighting that is yawnably awful. Just pure shit.

Meet the Manticore God thing…he’s a good guy….clearly!

Manticore God meets floating ugly witch face.

Pew, Pew, Pew!!!!!

The sword and sorcery genre peppered bad movies throughout the 80s, but this is easily one of the least pleasurable installments even for lovers of campy, dumb movies. This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it at all. But I’ll probably never watch it again and prefer pretty much all other such films of the decade above this one.

Happy ending for this guy!