Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Yor the Hunter from the Future


History: Yor, the Hunter From The Future is a film released in 1983. It was directed by the Italian B-movie director Antonio Margheriti (also known as Anthony M. Dawson) and stars Reb Brown, and was pieced together from a four-part science fiction miniseries shown on Italian television.The film is based on the comic Argentine Yor the hunter (Henga, el cazador) by Juan Zanotto and Ray Collins. The setting is a mixture between the prehistoric and the futuristic, borrowing elements from numerous popular franchises of the time.

Plot: The movie opens with Yor jogging around the stone towers of Cappadocia, Turkey while a rock ballad plays in the background. In a nearby village, Kala, a seemingly primitive cave-woman, and her older protector Pag are hunting. Suddenly, they are attacked by a Stego-Ceratops. Yor appears suddenly and kills the dinosaur with his axe, drinking some of its blood immediately afterwards. Yor is befriended by the village and together they cut the choice meats to be feasted upon in celebration.

While Yor is there, a band of cavemen with bluish skin attack the village. Only Yor and Pag escape. Yor immediately swears to get Kala back. Yor and Pag track the blue cavemen to their lair where Yor shoots a giant bat with his bow and arrow. He uses the dead bat like a hang glider to storm the lair and starts flooding sections of the cave, the diversion helping his escape out the back with Kala. The flood kills everyone inside the cave, including the other kidnapped villagers (who had been locked in cages) as well as the blue cavemen.

Kala and Pag decide to follow Yor in his adventure to find his origins. Along the way, they find a mysterious society of sand mummies led by a blonde woman with an amulet similar to Yor's. Yor proceeds to kill everyone except the blonde woman, deciding that she will be important for their journey. Kala tries to kill the blonde woman, but they are both suddenly attacked by more blue cavemen. Yor and Pag come to the rescue but a caveman hits the blonde woman and she dies in Yor's arms.

Yor, Pag and Kala make friends with another tribe after saving some children from a dinosaur, but this tribe is killed by (unseen) flying saucers shooting lasers. Yor and company use a boat to make their way to an island surrounded by storms. There Yor discovers that his parents were from a small band of nuclear holocaust survivors, revealing the 'twist' that Yor's world is actually Earth after a nuclear holocaust, the radiation from this war apparently having somehow resurrected dinosaurs. An evil man called the Overlord has taken control of the remaining nuclear technology with his android army. Yor attacks the Overlord and his forces, defeating them with help from Pag and Kala. Yor then flies off into the distance in one of the Overlord's spacecraft, even as the Overlord's facility is in a state of self-destruction. As the movie ends, the narrator intones that: "...Yor returns to the primitive tribes on the mainland. He is determined to use his superior knowledge to prevent them making the same mistakes as their forefathers. Will he succeed?"

Fun Fact: The film is listed in Golden Raspberry Award founder John Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of the The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made. It was also nominated for three 1983 Golden Raspberry Awards: Worst New Star (Reb Brown), Worst Musical Score and Worst Original Song ("Yor's World").


1 comment:

Kal said...

I have a special love for this film. I had a buddy rent this TWICE when it was his turn to bring over a movie and forgot how we trashed him when he chose this movie to see in the theatre. To this day he is still embarrassed by YOR.