Sorceress

Date: February 15^th, 2016

The first thing you should know about the 1982 film Sorceress is that there is no sorceress in it. There is a sorcerer, Valdar, who has promised to sacrifice his first born child to an ancient deity in return for power. His pregnant wife runs off and gives birth, but in the opening sequence the sorcerer catches her, only to discover that she has given birth to twin girls. When she refuses to tell him which was first born, he kills her, which is not very smart. A great warrior-wizard shows up and kills Valdar, but not before some exposition to the audience reveals that the sorcerer has multiple lives and will rise again some day. The warrior-wizard dude hands the twin babies off to some peasants and then takes off.

All this takes place in the first seven minutes. The script by Jim Wynorski is written very tightly – so tightly that some of the dialog is stilted and simply consists of blunt exposition. But there is a fair amount of action packed into the 80 minute run time, as well as the requisite nudity that one expects from a B-grade sword and sorcery flick. The twin girls grow up to be Playboy models Leigh and Lynette Harris, and we first see them going for a naked swim in a lake. After a fair amount of flesh exposure, they return to their village to find it under attack by forces of the now resurrected Valdar. I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying that the peasants who raised the twins are killed and that the twins go on a quest for vengeance. I think the majority of sword and sorcery flicks involve somebody's village getting torched by an evil warlord and the hero heading off for revenge.

I should mention that at this point the warrior-wizard dude, now wearing a fake-looking grey beard and wig because twenty years have passed, shows up too late to do anything except provide some background info to the twins so that they know who to kill in revenge. This guy showed up too late to save their mother, and too late to save their adoptive parents. Apparently realizing that he is pretty useless, he kills himself.

The rest of the film is pretty much what you would expect. The twins pick up some friendly barbarians to help them in their cause, they suffer some double-crosses and setbacks, get chased, etc., etc.; the usual formula. Oh, and the twins get naked once or twice more, of course, but only briefly.

I was annoyed by the fact that a lot of the filming took place at night, and the conditions were so dark I had a hard time seeing some of the action. I am guessing that in a low budget film like this, the backdrops were pretty crappy and filming at night made it easy to hide how crappy they were. The background music was quite good, but a little too loud in parts, thereby making dialog a little difficult to hear. At the end there were some truly cringe-inducing cheesy special effects depicting some gods hovering in the sky and fighting. Overall I was not very impressed. You might want to skip this one unless you are really into twins, in which case just fast-forward to the nudity.

IMDB link. Rated R.