As the 1980s
trundled on, fueled by Miami Vice,
swatches, and Duran Duran videos, the fantasy films should have gotten better, but
they didn’t. After such a promising start, the rush to make more of the same
spawned a host of shittier and shitter sword and sorcery movies, each one worse
that the last. The genre had split into two tracks: cheap-o boob-grab
exploitation nonsense, or big budget ham-fisted embarrassments, and both of these new movie styles served to give Sword and Sorcery a bad name.
Granted, we
still watched them, because we were young and our tastes had yet to fully
develop, and also because even the mediocre movies had cool swords, sometimes
pretty cool effects, and maybe a neat battle sequence or some wizardly
shenanigans or a monster. At least, that's what we hoped. We were quickly getting used to disappointment.
