Third in the generally terrible Deathstalker series of swords and sorcery flicks, this episode has Deathstalker running into yet another princess and yet another powerful badguy bent on...well, whatever it was he was bent on. Ruling the world, I think. All I remember was that he reminded me of Gene Siskel, and then I postulated that Siskel would have done a better acting job.

Continuing with the trend started in the second movie of the series, this Deathstalker (the third actor to play the role in three movies) feels no emotion other than "amused." (In the first movie, he never expressed any emotion at all.) He is still the most thoroughly developed of all the characters.

Amidst all the badness are a few classic unintentional laughs. One has Deathstalker hiding from pursuing villains on horseback by hanging from a tree branch not six inches above where the villains pass. My favorite is when Deathstalker is held at bay by a woman while her daughter searches him for concealed weapons. The daughter's hand comes to rest on the hilt of a dagger in plain and obvious view of anybody with at least one eye but, taking a sudden inexplicable liking to him, pretends not to notice it. It'd a good thing the mother is apparently blind, or they'd have been found out.

And yet, there are elements of the movie that aren't half bad. It's not hard to see how this movie might have been good had they only cast people that could act, inflated the budget a little bit, rewritten the entire script, fleshed out the characters, and cut out the cheesy climactic ballet swordfight at the end. What matters, though, I guess, is that it isn't what it could have been, and my panning it is more than justified.