Ator IV: The Hobgoblin (1990)

Excellent but underrated film

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Quest For The Mighty Sword is the title used for the version of this movie that I watched. This is the third and rarest film in the Ator trilogy, written and directed by Aristide Massaccesi under the alias David Hills, and photographed using the alias Federiko Slonisko. The first two films in the series were Ator, The Fighting Eagle (1982) and The Blade Master (1984), both starring Miles O'Keeffe. Another movie titled Iron Warrior, directed by Alfonso Brescia, also starred O'Keeffe as Ator; however, he wasn't quite the same character in this movie. Massaccesi wasn't very pleased with Iron Warrior (he wasn't the only one), so he retook his series and made this official sequel with Eric Allan Kramer as Ator. (No surprise that O'Keeffe didn't return as Massaccesi has stated that he can't act!) Kramer makes a decent Ator, and I'm disappointed that he didn't make another Ator movie. Quest For The Mighty Sword has never been released on DVD, and the VHS tape is out of print. The budget is low, the effects aren't so special and the directing and acting are fair-to-middling. Still, I love these types of movies despite their low ambitions as they show that films don't need to have a huge budget or big name stars for me to have a lot of fun watching them!

For me, this movie is kind of an inside joke for those who laughed their heads off at Troll 2. Most likely those who have seen Troll 2 will discover this later, and not the other way around.Like Troll 2, there are tiny pauses throughout the movie where everyone just blankly stares at each other, also everyone seems like a real dullard and has a glazed-over expression. Ator is the biggest dullard of all-- oafish; with the face of Benny Hill; waxed-legs, and clad in leather short-shorts.Other things about this movie include: the really cheaply made sets don't match the castle exteriors; the music goes from bad techno to 1970's Cop Drama theme; the plot is forgotten within twenty-five minuets of the movie; there isn't any fighting choreography-- it's "stab-stab, swing-swing, hope ya hit some thing", and this you will not believe: There aren't any horses in the movie and so to keep the pace THE ACTORS JOG THROUGH IT!Finally, the icing on the cake-- after Joe D' Amato finished working on Troll 2, he decided to use three of the goblin costumes from that movie. If any of you who've seen said movie can recant that the goblins mouths were badly animated, and they couldn't say their two lines without struggling or that they could only eat the green-stuff by smearing it on their teeth-- well, D' Amato allowed the actor in the goblin costumes full dialogue!

Well, I thought I had seen bad movies before............but this one is the worst by far. No plot, overweight and drag-queen-like "hero", cheap plastic monsters and effects, new york accents on all of the characters............. can you really get any worse? Even the background music is ridiculous.......often sounding Japanese, then techno, then just non-descript and drowning out the dialogue. Actually, the music drowning out the awful dialogue is probably the best thing to say about this movie. And just when you think the movie hits bottom, it never fails to disappoint you in reaching yet further into poor cheap effects. I am truly at a loss for words.

This one has been on my "Bottom 10" list since the first time I saw it, and it will probably remain there forever. There aren't enough of the right kind of words in any language to describe how awful this flick really is.This is the single movie I can recommend to anyone who claims to have never seen a "bad" movie. Probably the only film that could be used in university courses to illustrate the wrong way to accomplish any movie-making goal. Absolutely nothing about this film was done correctly. The script, plot, acting, direction, lighting, sound, costumes, effects, and set design, to name a few, were individually atrocious. The combined effect of these is one that prompts a gag reflex from the audience for a good solid hour and a half, if they can manage to remain conscious for the whole thing.