Time Barbarians

• USA • 1990 • 96m •

• Directed by: Joseph John Barmettler. • Starring: Deron McBee, Joann Ayers, Daniel Martine, Louis Roth, H.S. Smith, Guy Fury, Timothy O'Sullivan, Ingrid Vold, Gary Moran, Jan Bryant, Sheila Young, Laura Bryant, Phil Jones. • Music by: Miriam Cutler.

When evil wizard Mandrak kills the wife of Doran, the warrior king, he immediately escapes through a time portal to modern day Los Angeles in an attempt to escape Doran's wrath. Doran follows him, however, and now the barbarian stalks Mandrak through a world that he does not understand. He will stop at nothing to have his revenge against the sorcerer, but who know what havoc he will wreck on the fragile city along the way.

Review:

My DVD cover for this movie claims it is "THE Epic Fantasy Unleashed". That's a pretty grandiose claim for this low budget fantasy time travel adventure. I should give a brief plot outline here, since it is somewhat difficult to follow in the film. Doran is the warrior king of the forest, who has some quarrel with Mandrak, an evil wizard. They get into a battle, and Lystra (Doran's wife) is killed. Doran is understandably angry and seeks revenge against the evil wizard who has escaped to modern day Los Angeles. Doran is aided by a strange lady who shows him a King Arthur like sword in the stone, which he pulls out and after stabbing a few baddies and breaking a few necks, appears in L.A. himself.

This film could be in the so bad it's good category-it's got lots of scantily clad and topless women, loin-cloth attired muscle men, a bit of gore, sword fighting, over the top camp acting, time travel...all great elements for a fun b-movie. But it failed for me. I think there are two main reasons for this: 1. the scenes were just too long-even the fight scenes tended to drag on longer than needed and longer than was interesting, and 2. the sound quality for the dialog was so awful that, while I heard the music well, it was impossible to hear a word the characters were saying. Now I know that this kind of movie isn't known for particularly intelligent dialog anyway, but it is really annoying when you can't hear it at all.

Overall, this is a low budget, action filled, sword and sorcery movie with a lot of loin cloths and bare breasts, but it didn't work for me.

Review by TheVid [IMDB 8 November 2002] from the Internet Movie Database.

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