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Released by: Scorpion Releasing
Released on: May, 2019.
Directed by: Alfonso Brescia
Cast: Miles O'Keeffe, Savina Gersak, Elisabeth Kaza, Iris Peynado, Tim Lane, Franco Daddi
Year: 1987
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Iron Warrior - Movie Review:
A sequel to Joe D'Amato's 1982 film Ator The Fighting Eagle and its follow up, 1982's Blade Master, Alfonso Brescia's 1987 film Iron Warrior once again stars Miles O'Keefe as Italy's favorite Conan The Barbarian wannabe.
The story, such as it is, begins when an evil sorceress named Phaedra (Elisabeth Kaza) is being held accountable by a tribunal of some sort for her part in kidnapping a boy named Trogar (Conrad Borg) and refusing to relinquish him. She's banished for two decades or so and in that time and under her tutelage, Trogar grows from a meek boy into a powerful telekinetic war machine (now played by Franco Daddi), complete with a shiny silver skull mask, a rad red scarf, a white belt and a black cape! He makes for quite the site to see, and he's also pretty handy with a sword.
The new and improved Trogar makes his debut when Phaedra decides to appear and destroy a celebration being held for the beautiful Princess Janna (Savina Gersak) - in fact, Phaedra even goes so far as to put a curse on the poor woman, for reasons never sufficiently explained. Just roll with it. After this, Janna winds up joining Ator on his quest to… wander around a lot and fight random people before then heading into some caves where the cold, hard truth about his connection to Phaedra and Trogar will be revealed!
Iron Warrior is just as dumb as it sounds but if you're a fan of Italian sword and sorcery pictures you probably knew that already. Logic is frequently tossed out the window quite violently in favor of some good, and not so good, action set pieces. There's a lot of sword fighting here and some pretty neat stunt work featured throughout. Even when it fails to convince us of its realism, it's still fun to watch. Clearly made on a low budget, the film is nevertheless reasonably well-paced, even if our hero does quite literally wander around a lot. Still, we get a bit of nudity and a bit of bloodshed and man oh man, is Trogar ever an awesome looking bad guy. Anytime he's on screen, running about making like difficult for our heroes and sporting his super fucking cool silver skull mask, you can't help but love the movie.
If the movie is really only connected to the other Ator films by the name of its leading man, that hardly matters. Continuity isn't a strongpoint in these movies, it's all about the babes and the barbarians and Iron Warrior has enough of both to please fans of this type of picture. The cinematography is decent, the costumes are creative and weird and the sets work surprisingly well. The synth-heavy score is goofy enough to work and overall, for the less discerning cult movie fan/Euro trash film aficionado, this should scratch more than a few of your itches.
Iron Warrior - Blu-ray Review:
Iron Warrior arrives on a 25GB Blu-ray disc from Scorpion Releasing in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed at 1.78.1 widescreen and looking really good. This is a garish, colorful film and that's reproduced very nicely here. There's some mild print damage here and there, mostly just small white specks, but they never prove to be distracting while detail, depth and texture are all very solid (save for a few shots heavy on fog, but that's to be expected) and at times, genuinely impressive. The disc shows no evidence of compression artifacts and the transfer is free of obvious noise reduction or edge enhancement, retaining a proper filmic appearance throughout.
Audio chores are handled by a perfectly solid DTS-HD 2.0 Stereo track. Clarity is good, no problems here with any hiss or distortion to note. The dialogue is clean and clear and the track is perfectly well-balanced.
Extras are limited to a trailer for the feature as well as bonus trailers for Sword Of The Valiant, Deep Space, Land Of Doom and The Curse III: Panga. Menus and chapter selection are also provided.
Iron Warrior - The Final Word:
Iron Warrior is high level goofiness from start to finish but if you've got an appreciation for Italian sword and sorcery films and Conan knock offs, well, you already know you need it in your life. If it's unlikely to appeal to people outside of that demographic, so be it, we don't need your approval anyway! Scorpion's Blu-ray release is light on extras but it does look and sound quite nice. Fans will appreciate this one.
Click on the images below for full sized Iron Warrior Blu-ray screen caps!
