Doing a quick survey of Yahoo, Google, and the external reviews linked to from the Internet Movie Database will turn up a body of reviews almost unanimous in their disdain for this movie. Yor, The Hunter from the Future certainly isn’t an unknown movie, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a single person out there, even among aficionados of bad movies, who doesn’t feel that it probably should be an unknown movie. Sometimes it seems like the lone voice in post-apocalyptic wilderness is the guy who writes for www.antoniomargheriti.com, though even the film’s own director has publicly stated that the film is awful. Given that I am apparently one of the two members of the Yor fanclub, it behooves me to write a decent defense and review of this maligned slice of early eighties Italian exploitation.

The words “favorite” and “Yor” have, to my knowledge, never been uttered together before, not even on the internet where all things perverse and profane flourish. In a medium where you can probably find a website with pictures of people masturbating with donkey hoofs while a Nazi shoves live eels up their butt, you can’t find many people who will say anything positive about Yor, The Hunter from the Future. But unlike almost every other critic and film fan in the world, I come not to bury Yor, but to praise him — at least mildly. My initiation into the strange and exclusive cult of Yor came in the eighties, when a film like this would actually get released to theaters with a considerable degree of fanfare. Conan the Barbarian had just stormed on to screens, and the Italians apparently possess a magical ability to forecast which movies will ignite remarkable trends, then rush out scores of imitations mere days after the original inspiration is released. I suppose it has a little something to do with business acumen, and a lot to do with the fact that most of these movies had production schedules that closely resembled the gestation period of a fruit fly.

These were heady days for young men with very little sense of decency in their cinematic taste. In a drunken run that began more or less with the release of The Black Hole and TRON, youngsters of the era were subjected to a seemingly endless parade of generally delightful genre films that was only made all the more intoxicating the day a friend got cable television. Whenever people bemoan the sad state of modern movies and complain about how much junk is getting dumped on the market, I feel I should recommend they take a step back and re-examine previous years. The problem with movie hindsight is that it is terribly myopic. Decades removed from any given year, we tend to only remember the exceptionally good (and in a few rare instances, exceptionally atrocious) films, thus giving that year an inflated position. Living in a year, however, we’re exposed to every piece of crap that rolls out of the factory, and so the poor quality of our current time is much fresher and more evident than that of years past. It’s the same phenomenon that makes it look like foreign countries make better movies than we do. Since we’re only exposed to a select few foreign films every year, we tend to get the cream of the crop. But as anyone who lives in one of these countries can tell you, they manage to make just as many wretched offerings as we do. We just get filtered content.

The big difference between now and then is the budget. It used to be that rotten films were confined to the ghetto of low-budget quickie productions, while films with a larger budget invested in them had shown some degree of merit. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, and just because a studio and critics thought a big-budget film might be good doesn’t mean it actually was. Things reversed sometime in the nineties though, and most of the good films had smaller budgets while the big-budget movies reeked of bloat, excess, and slapdash craftsmanship. Now we live in an era where people dump millions into films that previously would have been made on a shoestring. To tie this all together into a poorly wrapped package, the grandfather of providing A-list financing for B-list concepts was Dino De Laurentiis. It started for him in the sixties, working as a producer for cheap “sword and sandal” peplum films. Although Dino’s films probably weren’t budgeted any higher than their contemporaries, most of the ones that bear his name look and play much better than the rest of the pack. In 1968, he lavished French director Roger Vadim with a sizeable budget for the piece of psychedelic cheesecake sci-fi pop art known as Barbarella, and thus began the producer’s long love affair with throwing tons of money at silly concepts.

Now, what ties this in with Yor, The Hunter from the Future is the fact that De Laurentiis produced Conan the Barbarian. So yes, Italian moviemakers have a knack for latching onto a big trend and draining it mercilessly of its precious lifeblood. At the same time, most of the trends upon which they hop — Westerns, peplum, zombies — also have significant ties to Italy in the first place. A Fistful of Dollars may have starred Clint Eastwood, but it was an Italian film. Ditto Steve Reeves and Hercules. George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead sparked the glut of Italian zombie films that shambled through the eighties, but it was made possible by the financial graces of Italian director/producer Dario Argento. And Conan was the fevered brainchild of Oliver Stone, John Milius, and a whole bunch of pot (one assumes), but an Italian made it happen. So in some twisted way, the Italians deserve to be able to rip these films off. Or, you know, something like that.

Anyway, none of us kids got to see Conan in the theaters, though there were few who didn’t catch it on cable in between showings of Beastmaster. But we did get to see various, more family-friendly knock-offs, back in a time when family-friendly films didn’t have to include spunky children but could include cannibalistic mummies and loincloth-clad women. Among those was Yor, The Hunter from the Future. Undoubtedly still reeling from the time she took us to the drive-in to see Treasure of the Four Crowns, my mom wasn’t up for the challenge of taking a carload of kids to see Yor. I don’t remember whose mom got suckered into Yor duty, but I’m sure she curses us to this day, assuming she hasn’t completely blocked the memory. You know what, though? We loved it. We loved it more than modern kids love Harry Potter and Catch that Kid. You may have those movies, but we got to watch shit like Yor and Treasure of the Four Crowns, where people flew around on giant bats and had melting faces. Of course, we also had to endure our parents taking us to more acceptable kid-friendly movies, like that one where the kid from E.T. uses his BMX bike to evade trained KBG agents while soliciting cloak and dagger advice from Dabny Coleman. What was that movie called? Oh yeah, Cloak and Dagger. Actually, that was pretty good, I think.

Yor, the Hunter from the Future is by far the most ambitious, and thus goofy, of all the Conan knock-offs. It’s the only one with the audacity to rip off its shock revelation from Planet of the Apes while also ripping off the inferior Apes sequel Beneath the Planet of the Apes, with just as dash of Conquerors of Atlantis and Star Wars thrown in for good measure. You got a hero in a loin cloth, some technologically advanced mutant humans hiding away from the primitives, and a surprise ending (well, midway point anyway) in which we learn that the ancient land of cavemen and dinosaurs we’re seeing is not the ancient past or another planet, but is in fact a post-nuke Earth. Not surprisingly, star Reb Brown is no Charlton Heston and Yor, The Hunter from the Future is no Planet of the Apes. It’s barely even Goin’ Ape.

Yor begins as every movie should begin: with a peroxide blonde caveman bounding across a rocky terrain while synth-heavy prog rock screams madly in the background. Imagine how much better every movie would be with this opening. Kate and Leopold? Why not start it with a barbarian and thunderous prog rock, then move into the thing about the guy from Napoleonic times romancing Meg Ryan on the eve of her officially becoming a has-been? All those quirky indy romance movies films? Sure they’re cute, but who can argue the fact that these shoegazing coming-of-age soap operas would be more palatable to everyone if they included a couple shots of a oily barbarian with Flash Gordon hair fighting dinosaurs while unintelligible prog-rock anthems roared on gloriously in the background? The whole movie doesn’t have to be about that, because we already have that movie and it’s called Yor, the Hunter from the Future. But maybe they could do something where, say, Amy Adams is sitting in a malt shop (kids still go to malt shops, right?) or a quaint upper west side coffee shop talking about relationships, and then she goes, “Well, will you look at that?” And then we cut to a few minutes of a caveman using a giant bat as a hang glider or something, and then we can go back to the plot about finding romance and meaning in today’s hurried modern world.

I think it would fit thematically, because it illustrates how in earlier, more barbarous times, life had so much more significance because times were so tough. We had to live full and hearty lives filled with adventure and passion and synth-rock orchestration, because we never knew when a monkey-man mummy was going to leap down from a perch in the woods and hit us in the face with a rough-hewn stone axe. Removed from that sort of immediacy, Amy Adams’ life is less vital, less passionate, and thus she has a hard time forging a meaningful relationship with modern men who are too wrapped up in banking or computer programming to ever take time out of their busy schedule to love a woman or shoot arrows into a rampaging dinosaur’s eye. But as the cavewoman Ka-Laa notices as she watches Yor bound mightily from boulder to boulder one fine, sunny day, Yor is not like other men.

Yor lives in “Barbarian Times,” and comes from “the high mountains.” I have a feeling Antonio Margheriti was pretty high in the mountains himself when he co-wrote this script. Yor spends his days scrambling over rocks and saving some cockeyed Jack Elam looking guy named Pag (Luciano Pigozii) and sexy cavewoman Ka-Laa from screaming, roaring, huffing, house-size dinosaurs that somehow manage to sneak up behind people in the woods. Most people can’t sneak up behind other people in the woods without at least stepping on a twig, but what do I know? I’ve never been stalked by a dinosaur. Thankful for blond, loincloth-clad Yor’s randomly showing up and saving them from a dinosaur (shades of Fire Monster Against the Son of Hercules), Pag and Ka-Laa invite Yor back to their village to eat “the choice meats” and watch women drape themselves in cargo nets and spin around. The difference between Yor and the rest of the inhabitants of this primal world is immediately evident. He has mastered hair bleaching and body-waxing; they possess tangled brown hair. He is clean-shaven while the rest of the men sport scraggly Mujahadeen beards. Only Ka-Laa’s grooming prowess and hair teasing ability rivals Yor’s. It is obvious he is “not like the others.”

Unfortunately for Yor’s new friends, everyone is a musical theater critic, and a neighboring, even more primitive tribe of hairy blue cavemen pillage the village and put an end to the twilrling rope dress dance, fulfilling the basic requirement of any sword and sorcery film that someone’s village get pillaged, preferably fairly early in the film. It’s likely that Pag’s tribe was slaughtered on account of their phenomenally stupid “twirling rope dress” dance, but even if not, there’s no arguing with the notion that the world was better off minus a tribe full of people who were continuously sneaked up on by snorting, stomping, bellowing dinosaurs.

Only Yor, Pag, and Ka-Laa survive the slaughter. Yor decides he wants to find out the origin of the strange metal medallion he wears, and thus discover the mystery of his own past. Pag and his big-haired daughter join Yor on his quest. What else are they going to do? Their village was just destroyed. Along the way, they’ll fight more dinosaurs, some monkey men, and Yor will grab a giant hairy bat-monster and use it to hang glide through a cave while the prog rock music screams out in joyous ovation to his heroics. Whenever Yor does something especially heroic, like hang onto a giant bat, we’re treated to a thunderous explosion of prog rock glory that would be very much at home on Rick Wakeman’s Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the ice ballet for which was considerably less corny than Yor.

Yor eventually discovers a blonde woman living amongst the diseased primitives of the wasteland, and he is shocked to see that she possesses the same funky medallion as him. In her cave are other people, frozen in ice, and more clues to Yor’s origins. As they quest about the prehistoric future, they slowly unravel the mystery of the disco medallion Yor wears, and they discover a group of advanced humans living in a space-age facility on an island. What mystery is this? As Yor draws closer to the truth, your mouth will be agape at the final, shocking revelation. These aren’t prehistoric times at all! This is…the future! But who are these strange men in Ming the Merciless cloaks, and what manner of magic weapon do they possess that can issue forth a slow-moving neon pink dollop of light that can kill a man? Gods, such sorcery! It turns out these are the last remaining survivors of a once-proud and technologically advanced civilization that was destroyed by nuclear war. All the pieces fall into place when Yor’s medallion is revealed to be a recording of his family history. Why is Yor not like the other men? Because he is the child of one of the advanced survivors, a group of rebels who sought to overthrow the “Overlord” and were victims of a spaceship crash that left young Yor and that other blonde woman stranded in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. But Yor survived yet, and grew strong and heroic, and where his father failed, Yor shall lead another band of advanced survivor rebels in another bid to overthrow the Darth Vaderish Overlord, who seeks to obliterate all life and replace it with a new race — half-android, half-Yor.

If you think a mad scheme like that is going to cause Yor to have to do all sorts of crazy shit that demands prog-rock synth ovations, then you’ve been paying closer attention to this movie than most people. Amid it all, various people get on the space-age facilitiy’s loudspeaker and wax philosophic at great lengths on assorted points pertaining to topics such as the folly of man, the worth of man, the future of man, and overloading the atomic reactor. Yor’s “message” is, needless to say, half-baked and completely ludicrous, but heck. How many other sword and sorcery movies from the time even made an attempt at having a message, however cliche it may have been? You know, I was all for nuclear proliferation, brinksmanship, and the whole arms race until Yor, The Hunter from the Future opened my eyes and really made me think about how man harbors a tendency to abuse power he doesn’t fully comprehend.

Athough Yor isn’t a time-traveling barbarian movie in the strictest sense of how the intellectuals and academics of the world define “time-traveling barbarian,” it’s close enough to lump it in with the little sub-genre that erupted in its wake. Hard to believe that Yor could start a trend within a trend, but as one of the early entries in the sword and sorcery genre, it gets the dubious credit of having inspired the other time-warp barbarians like Beastmaster II and the dreary Time Barbarians. Ancient warriors traversing the fold of the space-time continuum in much the same way Conan trod the sands of the earth beneath his sandaled feet may be historically questionable (it’s more historically viable to have barbarians traveling into space, like in the Gor movies or the second Lou Ferrigno Hercules movie. Or was it the first one? Whichever one where he goes to the moon), but it made good financial sense. Most of the cheap barbarian movies that came out in the 1980s required little more than some fake swords, fake armor, and only a couple locations: usually, a forest, a rocky desert, and at least one castle chamber that could probably be rented cheap from Roger Corman. But you could save even more money by sending your barbarian forward in time, almost exclusively to modern-day Los Angeles. Then you only needed a few barbarian outfits and probably only one or two forest shots before you could throw a goofy “time portal” effect up on screen and spend the remainder of the film simply following your muscleman around the parking garages of LA.

And there in lies the truly admirable — and I use that term loosely — thing about Yor. It isn’t happy living within its means. Time Barbarians was cheap, and they knew better than to do much other than have some barbarians in the woods and then stage a fight in a rented warehouse. Yor, on the other hand, has dinosaurs, monkey monsters, bat hang-gliding, a city of tomorrow, mutants, messages about the folly of man, the twirling rope dress dance, laser battles, a robot army — basically, enough stuff for the entire Star Wars series, all crammed into one cut-rate Italian fantasy/sci-fi action film. Almost none of these things are realized well. The dinosaurs are OK so long as they don’t have to do much beyond swing their head back and forth. The fight choreography is sluggish and seems designed to maximize the number of times Reb Brown is shot from a low angle, jumping through the air to allow his loincloth to flap up and give the world a cheeky show. The city of the future (actually the past, I suppose) is about on par with the cut-rate “future city of the past” from the cheapskate Battle for the Planet of the Apes, which means there’s some matte paintings, and then the whole thing was filmed in a pump factory somewhere, with some red and blue blinking lights attached to the pipes and metal railing. And don’t even mention the laser effects, which result in an animated beam that moves about as fast as someone walking across a room.

But that doesn’t stop Yor, which was based on a comic strip I assume looked a lot like a comic out of Heavy Metal magazine, from pulling out all stops and attempting to serve up a visual extravaganza that is far beyond its hope of ever successfully achieving. It’s a naive movie on many levels. Though Margheriti obviously knew he was making something bad (the original version of Yor is a four-part mini-series that rarely, if ever, aired), the film itself doesn’t seem aware of this, and it never seems to think it’s doing anything other than telling one of the most important stories of all time. The lack of wink-and-nudge self-awareness is refreshing from today’s standpoint, seeing as how we’re buried under an avalanche of self-referential “ironic” movies that think they’re the first ones to ever be so clever. But Yor plods along with a blissful earnestness that makes it charming in a weird way. It’s also naive in that it really is fairly kid-friendly. There is no nudity, unless you count the disturbingly frequent Reb Brown buffalo shots (I am not a man who is afraid of male nudity, but that angle just isn’t appealing no matter how buff you are). There’s a lot of killing but very little bloodshed. And Yor is a decidedly classical hero — well, respective to the standards set by this film. Let’s just say he’s a nice guy who does the right thing, as opposed to the grittier, lustier anti-heroes that populated saltier barbarian fare.

The acting is pretty bad, and there’s a reason that Reb Brown never became a household name like Sam Jones. Still, it’s not as if Reb is a total unknown, at least among the sorts of people who who would refer to Sam Jones as a household name. I mean, Reb Brown may not be Sam Jones, but at least he’s not Dack Rambo. Reb starred in such direct-to-the-bargain-bin favorites as Strike Commando (yes, I own it), Roboforce (yes, I own it), and Space Mutiny (yes, I…oh, never mind). He appeared in another perennial sword and sorcery hit, Sword and the Sorcerer, though not in the lead. His brush with respectability came with an appearance in the film Uncommon Valor. He’s probably “best known” for his turns in a couple abysmal made-for-TV Captain America movies and the film Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, which, oddly enough, I don’t own even though it’s one of my favorite awful movies. His first film was, I believe, Sssss (give or take an “s”), and to tie this all in with Conan once again, he was in Conan director John Milius’ 1970s surfing movie, Big Wednesday. What’s really scary is that I am writing all this from memory, with no help from the imdb or any other source. So yes, with that amount of information, I believe I qualify as a Reb Brown biographer.

Reb has the sort of good looks you expect from a guy who isn’t too bright (whether or not he’s actually bright, I don’t know, but he has managed to sustain a career). He’s the good-hearted football player who falls for the cute, brainy girl with glasses and tries to impress her by making an earnest attempt to understand poetry (also an apt description of Yor the movie). He might never understand Longfellow, but he’ll valiantly defend the brainy girl’s honor against her nemesis, the mean football player with the catty cheerleader girlfriend. Since I mentioned the movie in passing earlier, allow me to once again make a connection only I would make: he’s a lot like fellow bleach-blond superior caveman Reg Lewis, star of the sixties caveman/Hercules peplum adventure Fire Monster Against the Son of Hercules. There’s a good-natured, everyman goofiness about him that takes the edge off the muscles.

He’s not an especially good actor, but he’s not required to do much more here than look muscular (but not bodybuilder muscular) and hang-glide on a giant bat, so that’s fine. His main squeeze Ka-Laa is played by one-time Bond girl Corrine Clery, who has a massive list of Italian film and television credits to her name (those, unlike Reb’s, I had to look up) but is best-known for her turn in Moonraker as “that woman who flies James Bond around in a helicopter then gets killed.” “Artful erotica” fans might remember seeing her naked in the title role of The Story of O, and less artful erotica fans might remember her from Lucio Fulci’s Devil’s Honey. It’s hard to judge her acting here since she’s dubbed, but she goes through most of the movie with a slightly dazed look, for which you can’t really blame her.

Completing the core cast is Luciano Pigozzi as Pag. For years, I thought this role was played by Jack Elam. Looking back, I realize that Pigozzi is more like Jack Elam crossed with Lucio Fulci. Whatever, he has more Italian genre credits than a sane man can count, including countless appearances in many of Margheriti’s other films, often under his Americanized name Alan Collins. Margheriti himself was rechristened Anthony Dawson whenever his films came to America. As if anyone cared whether or not the director of Yor was Italian. Pigozzi has his “stooped old man” bit down pretty good, but like everyone else, he’s dubbed and has pretty inane lines anyway, so judging acting is moot. At least he has more facial expressions than Reb and Corinne. Everyone else in the movie is either a caveman or a future man, and they’re primarily there to die, be menaced by dinosaurs, get shot by slow lasers, or make monotone speeches about the aforementioned folly of man.

The movie was made on location in Turkey, so there are quite a few Turkish performers sprinkled into the mix, including recognizable names like Aytekin Akkaya, who appeared in the beloved Turkish sci-fi kungfu extravaganza The Man Who Saved the World (aka “The Turkish Star Wars”) alongside Turkish matinee superstar Cuynet Arkin, as well as playing Captain America (just like Reb Brown!) in the curious 3 Dev Adam, in which Captain America and Santo the masked Mexican wrestler team up to defeat the murderous, chain-smoking Spider-Man, who likes to shove women’s faces into outboard boat motors (which is much better than what happened in Reb Brown’s own Captain America movies). Akkaya also worked with Margheriti again on the decent Indiana Jones cash-in Ark of the Sun God, starring David Warbeck. So really, when you think about it, Yor is an amazing multi-national nexus point of exploitation movie talent.

Margheriti was one of the most prolific directors working in the Italian exploitation genres, and amid all the movies made so he could pay his bills, there are actually quite a few gems. Some are simply delightfully bad, while others are genuinely good. And his moody, atmospheric Gothic film Castle of Terror is a bona fide horror classic. His specialty eventually ended up being action, though like any Italian exploitation director, he’s worked in pretty much every genre and scored a memorable (if not always good) film in each one, including science fiction (Wild Wild Planet), peplum (Hercules, Prisoner of Evil), Eurospy (Lightning Bolt), western (And God Said to Cain), and giallo ( Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye), but his specialty became cheap action films in the 1980s, often working with David Warbeck to knock off Vietnam war movies or Indiana Jones adventures. Even in his worst films, Margheriti infuses the proceedings with energy, and while his statements betray the fact that he really has no love for Yor (I think No Love for Yor might be the title of his autobiography), the movie still benefits from his touch. Special effects are bad, acting is bad, and the script is daft, but Margheriti is still professional enough to make sure he turns in a technically competent directorial job (decent lighting, no boom mics in the shot, etc).

As for that theme song — I loved it when I was young, and I think it’s still thoroughly rousing and utterly absurd, boasting all the theatrical bombast of Queen’s work for Sam Jones’ Flash Gordon movie (a Dino De Laurentiis production!), but relying less on guitars and more on synthesizers. Years later and farther down the road of no return, I’m a little more familiar with the stable of guys who wrote music for Italian genre films. My first guess, given the vocals and the over-the-top synths, was that this was probably the work of Guido and Maurizio DeAngelis, one of the most prolific score writing teams in the Italian film industry. They always relied pretty heavily on synths. A quick check of the credits revealed that, yes indeed, the DeAngelis duo was responsible. This correct guess coupled with my disturbingly exhaustive knowledge of Reb Brown’s filmography should really make me worry. Anyway, beyond the theme song, the rest of the score is pretty standard “future synth” stuff. They didn’t have the money to try and mimic Conan’s even more bombastic “barbarian brass” orchestration. Guido and Maurizio DeAngelis have written some spectacular scores for some spectacular films. This isn’t one of them, but man! That theme song!

Most people list Yor among the worst movies of all time. It may have even won some awards to that effect. All I can say is that if this is the worst movie you’ve ever seen, then you haven’t seen enough movies. I admit I have a soft spot for the hunk of junk, the same “saw it in the theaters” soft spot that makes me crack a warm smile even for a film like Treasure of the Four Crowns, and I still find myself enjoying Yor far more than I should. The revelation about the past being the future is not exactly as stunning as that first time you see Chuck Heston stumble upon the Statue of Liberty, but I don’t figure anyone goes into Yor expecting stunning revelations. You go in because you want to watch cavemen do somersaults and have laser battles with robots.

Release Year: 1983 | Country: Italy | Starring: Reb Brown, Corinne Clery, John Steiner, Carole Andre, Luciano Pigozzi, Ayshe Gul, Aytekin Akkaya, Marina Rocchi, Sergio Nicolai | Writer: Robert Bailey and Antonio Magheriti | Director: Antonio Magheriti | Cinematographer: Marcello Masciocchi
Music: Guido and Maurizio De Angelis | Producer: Michele Marsala | Original Title: Il Mondo di Yor