Ator-ible Movie!

Ator or Ator the Fighing Eagle or whatever name it travels under at any given point and time is a derivative piece of barbarian schlock. Clearly meant to jump on the Conan the Barbarian bandwagon getting underway by dint of the John Milius movie starring a future governor of California this movie is awful in a host of ways. 

First and foremost is the plot which rambles on but eventually announces our hero named "Ator" is the son of "Thoron" who we never meet and how he fathered a child is never explained really, but after he is born he is rescued by an enigmatic man named Griba, and is secreted with a peasant family and grows to manhood alongside a lovely girl as his sister whom he lusts after. Yuck to begin with, but when he goes and asks their father for permission to marry his sister his "Pa" is overjoyed and promptly announces it's not incest after all, though I get the impression Ator wasn't much concerned about that to begin with. 

Then no sooner do they get married than the villain sends henchmen to kidnap a bunch of women and Ator's new sister-wife is among the victims. With the village largely dead Ator goes off on a quest to find her and pretty runs into a lovely "Amazon" named "Roon" who becomes his partner eventually, though they never seem to want to shag in any shape or form. (I guess Ator didn't think she was related closely enough to him to be really attractive.) They rumble around and eventually find the Spider-King and defeat him and then we learn that Griba's motives were less than noble. But it all comes out pretty much happy more or less as these stories are wont to do. 

One of the major deficiencies with this movie is the costuming which appears at first to capture a wild look but really just becomes annoying as Ator wears some ensembles that don't really make sense and instead make him appear downright spindly at time. Miles O'Keefe who plays the titular hero look much beefier in his Tarzan the Ape Man debut. The villains all do and preen as you'd expect but little of it comes across as really threatening in the long run. And someone really should've gotten a handle on the wigs, which are often quite ludicrous. It almost comes across as a parody of Conan the Barbarian and not merely a wannabe clone. 

But it made enough money to warrant sequels, three in fact. I've only seen the first one under the inauspicious title Cave Dwellers as part of MST 3000 and it was god awful, worse than its predecessor by a magnitude at least. Ator is not a good movie, but if you want a laugh at a barbarian's expense you could do worse. 

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