Sometimes I stumble across a film that truly taxes my limited reviewing repertoire when it comes to expressing its unique brilliance: the Indonesian fantasy flick The Devil's Sword is just such a beast.
At its heart, it's the story of errant warrior Mandala (Barry Prima), tasked by his guru to retrieve the powerful Devil's Sword (a sparkling, snake-bladed Kris) and use it to overthrow the shapeshifting Crocodile Queen, who is seeking world domination as a side dish to satisfying her carnal cravings. Her main activities appear to be ordering her servants to kidnap local unmarried men and hypnotising them into becoming her sex slaves, rather than concentrating on global conquest.
Now, don't get excited, what passes for sex in The Devil's Sword (a metaphor for the male member?) is very coy, clothed and frankly quite ridiculous, taking place on comfy sofas, in firepits and even underwater and never really progressing beyond kissing and cuddling.I think (but it's never explained, unsurprisingly) The Crocodile Queen may be draining her sex slaves of their youth to prolong her own life, but equally I might have just made that up from a couple of random lines of dialogue.
Although there are also a number of evil warriors after the magical MacGuffin (who end up killing each other after initially working together), Mandala's main opponent is his old training classmate Banyunjaga (Advent Bangun), a master of the menacing cackle.Along the way, we are treated to: amputations; decapitations; mushrooms that fight back; flying rocks; enchanted umbrellas; long meaningful looks; skeletal boatmen; a genuine dungeoncrawl complete with traps, secret doors and a Cyclopean mud monster; an indecipherable treasure map; an outbreak of unexplained laser-hands; an arsenal of imaginative weaponry; an interpretative dance number; and blood, lots of blood (although all very unconvincing).
While being its own unique brand of entertaining, madcap sword and sorcery, there are certainly traces of Zu: Warriors Of The Magic Mountain, Monkey!, Deathstalker (sans the gratuitous nudity) and Hawk The Slayer to be found in The Devil's Sword.
This is a very special 101 minutes of game-inspiring, retro, martial mayhem that should be in the Appendix N of all budding gamesmasters.
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