Sorceress (1982)

     In certain circles Roger Corman is held in very high esteem.  Working almost entirely in the b-movie genre for decades he’s directed some well-regarded movies such as ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ and ‘X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes.’  He’s produced many more like 1960’s ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’ and ‘The Valentine Day Massacre.’  He’s given a leg up to such figures as Francis Ford Coppola (‘Dementia 13’), Peter Bogdanovich (‘Targets’), Martin Scorsese (‘Boxcar Bertha’), and numerous others.  He’s seen as almost the ultimate producer, having reportedly only ever lost money on one film, 1962’s ‘The Intruder,’ a socially-conscious movie about racial integration featuring William Shatner in his first starring role.  He has been involved, at some level of directing or producing, on over three-hundred and eighty movies.  For the past sixty years below a certain level of budget he’s been omnipresent.

    Which is a very polite way of saying that almost everything he’s made has been complete dogshit.  The old adage is generally stated as: good, fast, or cheap, pick any two.  Corman always picks the last two and if the first ends up happening it’s a lucky accident.  That Roger Corman’s name is in any way associated with quality is survivor’s bias, we only remember the handful of good ones and let the dreck drop through the sieve of our memories.  You’ll hear people defend 1959’s ‘Bucket of Blood’ as an underappreciated classic, but that same year he also produced ‘T-Bird Gang,’ ‘Beast from Haunted Cave,’ and directed ‘I Mobster.’   For every James Cameron he’s helped there’s a Jim Wynorski, for every Johnathan Demme there’s a Cirio H. Santiago.

    There’s also Jack Hill, and there’s also the movie ‘Sorceress.’  Jack Hill was part of the Corman stable of writers and directors during the 60’s and 70’s.  These days he’s most well-known for directing ‘Jackie Brown’ and ‘Coffy,’ both starring Pam Grier, and ‘Switchblade Sisters,’ long championed by Quentin Tarantino as a grindhouse classic.  There’s also the 1967 film ‘Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told,’ thought lost for years but remastered and redistributed in 1994 to some cult notoriety.  It should be noted that Roger Corman was involved in none of these films.  The films Jack Hill made with Corman included ‘Pit Stop,’ ‘The Big Doll House,’ and ‘The Big Bird Cage.’  1982’s ‘Sorceress’ was the last movie he made with Corman and, as it turned out, the last movie he ever made.

    The pre-production history of the film is something of an encapsulation of the entire Corman process.  To copy directly from the Wikipedia article:

‘According to Hill, Corman wanted to make the film in the Philippines, then got a deal to do it in Portugal. Hill visited that country and found out they did not have the facilities. Corman was then going to make it in Italy, which Hill thought would be ideal. Then two weeks before filming Corman told Hill he had arranged a better deal in Mexico, and that is where the film was shot.’

    Per a 2012 interview, during which Hill still sounds pretty bitter, he claims that the original title of the movie was ‘The Barbarian Women,’ which would be more appropriate (the title ‘Sorceress’ was apparently picked from a list by students from a nearby high school), that Sid Haig was originally cast in a pivotal role but Corman wouldn’t pay his fee, and that the special effects were nothing like the quality originally promised.  He also lists a number of production problems including bad weather, an explosion at a film vault, and interference from other film crews working in the area.  The finished movie is a very persuasive argument for the importance of planning and logistics in film production.  In the end Hill took his name off of the finished product as both writer and director and Corman recut the movie to his own liking.  Despite all of this the movie did end making a profit for Corman and his streak since 1962 remained unbroken.

As illustrated, apes are always funny.

    This is not to say that this is a potentially great or even good movie ruined by a low-rent version of studio interference, even the parts of the movie which show the least amount of budgetary compromise are embarrassing for everyone involved.  The acting is awful across the board, the dialogue is functional at the best of times, and while it’s hard to judge a story knowing that whole chunks of it must have been excised from the original script unless Corman chopped an entire reel out of the thing none of the protagonists ever actually do anything and more-or-less win by accident.

    Hill stated he based the story on ‘The Corsican Brothers,’ by which he meant he stole the idea of twins sharing a psychic connection.  There would be some interesting ideas in the premise of the film if they were explored even a half-step further than they are in the movie.  An evil wizard has promised to sacrifice his firstborn to a god for power, but then his wife gives birth to twins.  Before he can determine which is which he’s sent twenty years into the future, where he attempts to relocate his children and fulfill his promise.  The twins are girls but are raised from birth in hiding as boys, and after soldiers from the returned wizard kill their adopted family they set off on a quest for vengeance with the allies they make along the way.

Just, y'know, rolling dice in front of your evil wizard king.

    There are possibilities here.  The idea that the wizard has to kill their firstborn but isn’t sure which twin is which is fairly clever.  The mother is killed and thus it could be a complete stalemate as no one really knows.  This is undermined in three different ways: it’s never stated explicitly that the sacrifice will fail if he kills the wrong twin first so he could theoretically kill them both to be sure, just under halfway through the movie the firstborn twin is easily identified and separated from her sister, and in the end the ceremony is completed with another unrelated woman and it works just fine.

    The wizard being sent twenty years in the future can also be made interesting.  He’s shown to have some power base at the opening of the movie and suddenly disappearing for twenty years is going to have some pretty big consequences.  Did that base simply evaporate, in which case he’s got to start from scratch, or did it evolve and change in the decades his people waited for his return, so he has to deal with the political consequences that arose in his absence?  Is the old guard still in power, barely suppressing the youthful acolytes who were recruited while he was gone and have different ideas of what his return will mean than he intended?  Or has a new generation used him as a figurehead and his actual return is rather inconvenient for them?  Instead he just reappears, still has a bunch of soldiers, and a random princess who apparently just waited the intervening twenty years since she was maybe five is fine resuming the same deal they presumably had back then.  The only actual reason for the time skip is so the babies could grow up and get naked on camera.

It only makes slightly more sense in context.

    If you really wanted to dig into some interesting ideas there’s the fact that for the first twenty years of their lives it was drilled into the twins’ heads that they needed to present as masculine to the outside world.  The level of society as presented in the film is barely above agrarian, essentially ancient Greek on a budget.  Twenty years is a long time in that society and they would have long since been expected to take part in the family trade, begin families of their own, become fully integrated adults.  The trans and gender implications are basically woven into the text by default.  Maybe one of the twins has fully internalized a male identity, maybe the other chafes under the restrictions, as they are forced to leave their homes and travel more broadly their reactions to the gender norms of the time would vary wildly from their companions and some very interesting explorations could take place.  Instead they’re introduced as adults frolicking naked in a pond and being confused by a goat man’s erect penis.  Later on they’re bewildered when it’s pointed out they’re not men, despite having been raised with both a mother and a sister.

    The movie itself is not worth anyone’s time.  The twins are not actual characters, they are vehicles for shots of their breasts and asses.  The locations are either existing sets already built for something else or random shots of a forest.  The editing is mostly just cuts between static shots, there’s maybe a half dozen times the camera moves over the course of eighty minutes.  It meets the technical definition of a movie without in any way being an actual movie.

    In a way it’s useful as an anti-example.  There are exactly two instances of set-up and pay-off in the movie and they end up intertwining.  About a third of the way through the movie one of the characters points out that their sword is made of steel, new for the time, and it’s superior to the swords of everyone else.  This never comes up again until near the climax, when an ape grabs it.  Said ape is the hench-animal of the evil wizard’s right-hand princess, a relationship that’s never really elaborated upon.  At one point the ape is promised whichever twin ends up being not the firstborn to do with as he wishes, and it’s made very clear what that means.  Later on the wizard buries that twin alive to the ape’s frustration so he grabs the sword from where it’s fallen on the ground and gives it to one of the twins’ companions, who later on gives it to another companion in the middle of the climactic fight, where he uses it to fight slightly better than before.  The ape is never seen again and the sword is briefly useful again in killing the main henchman of the wizard, but then the wizard takes it away from him before dying to some arrows in the back.  For every other scene in the movie a concept is introduced in the same scene it becomes relevant.

This scene focuses on this creature's penis.

    Another good example is the character of Pando the satyr.  He’s introduced by peeping on the twins while they’re swimming around naked and is constantly in the background for no particular reason.  He travels with the twins and their allies even though it’s never established who he is or why he’s coming along with them.  He has no lines and aside from the above mentioned sword delivery never has an impact on the plot or other characters.  The makeup is not particularly good and the intelligence of the character varies depending on the needs of the scene, ranging from barnyard animal to almost intelligent enough to speak.  He’s also involved in a frankly bizarre part of the climax where the sight of him holding the steel sword and riding a horse causes some nearby shepherds and their flocks to join in the final battle for reasons the movie never even pretends to justify.  This is the role meant for Sid Haig.

    The ending is entirely anti-climactic.  Twenty minutes into the movie a character says a single line about invoking the name of a protective god.  He then walks into a fire.  For the first half of the movie the evil wizard keeps dropping proper names and insisting on performing a sacrifice to some evil god.  It’s not until fifty-two minutes into the movie, in a scene involving two secondary characters where they say it in passing, that it’s even established that this sacrifice is supposed to grant the wizard power to restore a previous golden age.  During said sacrifice one of the twins randomly remembers to say the name of the protective god which summons a kind of puppet manticore to appear in the sky and vaguely look menacing.  This then causes the wizard to complete the ceremony by throwing the nearest person into a fire, which summons an angry sky face.  This is turn summons about fifteen zombies from an underground crypt.  How this will re-establish a golden age is left unclear.  After some pointless pyrotechnics the manticore projects some bad special effects at the angry sky face which explodes.  The zombies are just kind of not there anymore and the wizard runs away.  The manticore reverses his special effect and disappears and the twins shoot the wizard in the back.  It ends on a line about how one of their male companions is going to now have a three-way with the twins and then the stolen theme from ‘Battle Beyond the Stars’ plays over the end credits.    

'Sup, sky face.

    When all is said and done this movie is a product lashed together with the least amount of money in the least amount of time that checked just enough boxes to get distributed into theaters and projected onto enough screens that in the end they made more money than they spent.  Every decision made had dollar signs as the deciding factor and any creative decision that wasn’t directly tied to the finances was frankly a waste of time.  I wanted to find something of use in this movie, I really did, and I can at least recognize the professionalism that went into actually making a movie that clearly no one involved with cared the least bit about, but that doesn’t make it worth watching.  In many ways ‘A Distant Thunder’ was a worse movie (although not nearly as many as you’d think) but I never for a second doubted that the people who made that were sincere in their efforts.  Those people yearned for that movie to be made and seen.  The makers of ‘Sorceress’ were doing a job that they didn’t like, and it very much shows.