Sorceress 1982
Movie - Review & Info

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Film Review:

There are times in your life when you revisit your childhood and find the things that enthralled, shocked and inspired you then still have the power to do so today after revisiting them after a large break. I think of the things I've revisited in recent times like The Singing Ringing Tree, The Usbourne Mysteries Of The World book and Moby Dick. Not only does revisiting restore your faith in them items and yourself, they often provide source material for further explorations and creative endeavors.

Then there are the times you revisit something you loved as a youngster, and half remember as a rip-roaring piece of cinema - only to find after twenty years that its a flaming piece of turd. Sorceress is a film I haven't seen since the early half of the 80s, when I was probably a gnat's whisker away from teenhood and full of the joys of the child. With trepidation I loaded the tape deck and wondered what I was to get - a classic re-empowered, or the feeling my childhood was tainted by tripe.

Unfortunately, the later was to be the case. They don't come much cheesier or poorer than this. Sorceress is a master class in laughable effects, inanely unfunny dialogue and acting that'd make even Keanu Reeves look like an old master. Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed every moment of this film - the little touches came flooding back that I'd forgotten, scenes I couldn't place but still in my mind and best of all, given some of the adult nature of the content, a sense of wonderment that my parents had let me watch it at such an early age.

Randy apes, sex by telepathy and nudity aplenty served to take my mind of the fact that nothing else of any worth other than the odd guffaw was actually happening on the screen. I dare any UK viewer to watch this film without seeing Ulrich the Barbarian as a young version of Top Gear twat Jeremy Clarkson, and the other good-guy as the screen embodiment of Hagar The Horrible whom coincidentally are both featured in The Sun - which also coincidently is on an intellectual par with this film.

There's a revenge tale at the heart of it, some magic, several unexplained plot twists, bad fight scenes, Zombie warriors and then a giant griffin appears in the sky and gurns at a floating face for a few minutes before nuking it with some bad lightening. Order is restored and the stolen music from the class Battle Beyond The Stars kicks in and we are left wondering what happened to the Sorceress of the title - because to my mind there wasn't one...

In the end, great fun, but boy was it not the film I remembered.

Video Capture Comments:

Age had not treated this tape well, this had to be one of the darkest and grainiest VHS tapes I've had the displeasure to deal with - a good quality capture despite that, the amount of noise made this one blocky as heck and used up every ounce of bitrate. This turky needs the DVD treatment now. But as to who would buy it? Mad fools and cheesy aficionados need apply only.

	Rating Out Of 5:
Video Quality:		1
Cheese:		4
Film:		2
Specificatons: Duration: 01:19:46 (119,640 fr) Video Codec: DivX 5.0 Resolution: 480x384 (1.25:1) =5:4 Bitrate: 1008 kb/s FPS: 25.000