The Sword and the Sorcerer

Having raised (and disposed of) an ancient sorcerer to capture a kingdom, medieval tyrant Cromwell (Lynch) naturally finds himself plagued by revolts. Director Pyun apparently trained under Kurosawa, and one might have expected some of the Master’s empathy with myth and legend to have rubbed off; but there’s only a clumsy amalgam of sci-fi special effects and old-style blood and thunder, with a mind-numbing thickie of a hero and a scrawny underage heroine. There are compensations, though: the real baddie, born-again sorcerer Xusia (Moll), makes a splendidly bad-tempered villain, and there are nice cameos from a bald-headed torturer, a Rastafarian pirate, and a sex-mad python; and editor Marshall Harvey stitches the messy pieces together with considerable panache.