When I reviewed Frankie Freako, last year’s outrageous party-goblin comedy from director Steven Kostanski, I mused that the FX wizard-turned-filmmaker was trying to fill the shelves of an alternate universe video store, one long-forgotten sub-subgenre at a time. This is even more true for Kostanski’s latest film, Deathstalker, which literally reboots a “classic” franchise from the straight-to-video action era. Kostanski’s Deathstalker finds the director modulating his outrageous sensibility to a (relatively) more straight-faced approach, but it’s still one of the most joyously stupid films of the year, and perhaps the best showcase yet for the filmmaker’s endlessly inventive practical effects.
Deathstalker is one of those films whose plot is at once deeply convoluted and entirely beside the point. Direct-to-video veteran Daniel Bernhardt plays the titular barbarian, a seemingly unkillable mercenary with a head of flowing, Fabio-like hair. Following a particularly bloody opening battle, Deathstalker plucks assorted trinkets from the dead, including what turns out to be a precious, cursed amulet forged by the sorcerer Nekromemnon. Joined by beautiful thief Brisbayne (Christina Orjalo) and pint-sized goblin-wizard Doodad (embodied by Laurie Field and voiced by Patton Oswalt), Deathstalker embarks upon a quest to dispose of the amulet and vanquish Nekromemnon’s dark forces.
Deathstalker is less overtly parodic than most of Kostanski’s films; there’s less winking to the camera here than in, say, Psycho Goreman (though not zero, particularly when Kostanski regular Conor Sweeney pops up as a hilariously pettish prince). But just because Deathstalker isn’t quite a capital-C comedy doesn’t mean it’s not very funny. The best point of comparison might be ‘90s Sam Raimi— Army of Darkness, of course, but also the amiable doofiness of Hercules and Xena. Like Raimi, Kostanski has genuine affection for this material, embracing it because of its cheesiness. Bernhardt and Orjalo make exactly zero attempt to disguise their contemporary speech patterns (“I am so soar-y!” Brisbayne at one point pleads in her Clearly Canadian accent), but they also never give the impression that they’re above the material. From beginning to end, it’s clear that everyone in front of and behind the camera is having a grand old time. I can’t say I laughed as hard as I have at some other Kostanski films, but I had a great big smile on my face from beginning to end.
Of course, tongue-in-cheek humor is only half of the filmmaker’s signature touch. Kostanski’s primary career is as a special effects whiz, contributing creature designs and ooey-gooey practical effects to films by Guillermo del Toro and TV’s spectacularly gruesome Hannibal. Deathstalker is perhaps the greatest showcase yet for Kostanski’s gleefully puerile creations. Nearly every frame of the film is packed with grotesque puppets, exploding heads, and grotesque puppets with exploding heads. In one establishing shot, as Deathstalker and his friends cross a meadow, we can see a detailed, dessicated corpse in the foreground, and a pair of towering giants brawling in the distant mountains; neither of these are commented upon, and serve no purpose in the scene except to look rad as hell. The effects aren’t “convincing,” per se— you can sense the rubber masks stretching around most of the creatures’ mouths— but they are endlessly inventive, and the amount of care put into their creation is staggering.
Overall, the key word here is metal, not in the sense of the characters’ clanging armor and multi-bladed weapons (though there’s certainly a lot of that), but in the sense of crunching power chords and luscious, flowing hair. The association between heavy metal and sword-and-sorcery fantasy runs deep, of course— early metal records are replete with lyrics about dark elves and Mordor— and Kostanski gleefully leans into the curve. The soundtrack, by synth-rock trio Blitz//Berlin, is augmented by blistering guitar solos by the one and only Slash, whose prominent executive producer credit will tell casual moviegoers all they need to know. This is a film that could easily be airbrushed onto the side of a beat-up ‘70s van, or scrawled in the margins of a teenage reprobate’s notebook. Sometimes you need to set aside your ten-dollar film critic words and acknowledge when a movie fucking rocks.
It has become the way of the world that a promising indie filmmaker, particularly one working in the genre sphere, will be swallowed up by the franchise machine, forced to sand down their idiosyncrasies to a corporate-friendly nub. This is Kostanski’s second time tackling an existing franchise (after 2018’s little-noted Leprechaun Returns), but by choosing to work on series with, shall we say, lower financial stakes, the director remains free to let his imagination run wild. It is unlikely that Deathstalker will make much of a splash at the Academy Awards (though I would love to be proven wrong!), but not every movie needs to be a grand statement on the human condition. Sometimes, you just need a movie in which a guy picks up a gigantic, wildly impractical sword with four separate blades and solemnly intones, “The perfect sword!” before thrusting it into the four beating hearts of a gigantic skeleton puppet. All that’s missing is the “Be kind, rewind” sticker.
Deathstalker
2025
dir. Steven Kostanski
102 min.
Now playing @ Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport
