Filmed concurrently with
Gor,
Outlaw Of Gor is a half-baked sequel with a turgid plot and apathetic acting that makes the original look almost Oscar-worthy in comparison.
It's about 30 years since I read John Norman's
Outlaw Of Gor but I'm pretty sure this limp movie bares very little resemblance to its supposed source material.
Set three years after the events of
Gor (
we learn this from the VHS cassette box, not the film itself) and Tarl Cabot (Urbano Barberini) is summoned back to Counter-Earth, but this time his slimy colleague from the university, the lecherous Watney Smith (Russel Savadier), accidentally tags along... and has no problem adjusting to the fact that the pair of them have suddenly arrived on an alien planet.
Before that though, for anyone perverse enough to want to watch
Outlaw Of Gor without first having seen
Gor, Tarl has a very convenient flashback
précising the events of the first movie - but without mentioning Oliver Reed's rather central character (
obviously they didn't want to have to pay him again).
Our less-than-dynamic duo make their way to Ko-Ro-Ba (
which is noticeably different to what we saw in the first film), where Tarl is reunited with his love Talena (Rebecca Ferrati), her father Marlenus (Larry Taylor), the village elder - who treats him like an old friend, but I'm pretty sure we've never met before (Alex Heyns), and the sinister Priest-King Xenos (
a bewildered Jack Palance, who is still not an instectoid alien).
Cabot's arrival at Ko-Ro-Ba prompts a truly hilarious sequence where random people just shout "Cabot" (
one of the many bizarre moments in Outlaw Of Gor ridiculed by MST3K). The strange thing about this is until they arrived on Gor, I was convinced Watney had been calling his friend "Kevin", not "Cabot".
However, things are not all hunky-dory in Ko-Ro-Ba. Turns out Marlenus has hooked up with duplicitous Queen Lara (Donna Denton), who is secretly in league with Xenos in a bid for ultimate power (
over a single village - not exactly epic ambitions).
Lara promptly seduces Watney (
"Tell me, how do they make love on your planet?"), kills Marlenus and frames Tarl.
However, as if one Jar Jar Binks in his life wasn't enough, Tarl is also reunited with the midget Hup (Nigel Chipps), who is even more pointless in this movie than he was in the original.
Tarl and Hup go on the run in the desert - little realising that Lara has sent Ost The Hunter (Tullio Moneta), a monosyllabic bounty hunter, after them with the express orders that Cabot be brought back alive.
Ultimately this fuels a rift between Xenos and Lara (
Xenos accuses her of acting like a "bitch in heat") and eventually culminates in one of the most embarrassingly degrading death scenes for a Hollywood legend in the history of B-movie cinema.
Where the plot of
Gor at least moved forward, in
Outlaw Of Gor it just goes round and round.
If it wasn't for the awful lines and risible fight scenes, this film could almost be called tedious.
But thankfully, it has some wonderfully WTF moments that make bad cinema so great.
A particular highlight here is the character of a nameless slave girl that Tarl and Hup rescue from slavers in the desert (
a sequence in itself so laughable as to be a classic - just watch the slavers reaction at the end when they are standing around as their camp burns down around them).
From the moment she first appears among a crowd of slaves the camera picks her out as "someone important". She is then rescued and, in true
Gor style, offers to "pleasure" Tarl as a reward. He refuses, because of his love of Talena. Then they are all captured - rather easily - by Ost, who takes them back to Ko-Ra-Ba, where the slave girl gets chained up in the mines... and promptly forgotten about. Never to be mentioned, or seen, again!
All this sets up the climactic fight sequence, which is another masterclass in "what the frakkery" as Ost changes his allegiance for no readily explained reason and tips the scales in Tarl's favour.
As you may have guessed,
Outlaw Of Gor isn't particularly well-written. Not only is it full of clunky dialogue (
much of which clashes with the themes of John Norman's books), but many things happen without explanation.
The character of Xenos is totally wasted, as all his Machiavellian machinations are just echoes of the more successful Queen Lara's schemes, and the nameless slave girl - who you are led to believe is crucial to something or other - is simply filling a narrative role that Talena could have taken.
I'm also not sure why this merits an 18 certificate, while the original was only a 15. Once again there's no nudity or cussing and the fights are comparatively tame (
Tarl has a knack for killing floored opponents by stabbing the ground beside them). I can only imagine it's possibly because of the reasonably protracted torture scene of Tarl being whipped for Lara's pleasure.
The cassette box claims that "
Tarl embarks on a series of wild adventures battling the strange and magical creatures who live in this forbidding universe". Doesn't happen. There are no "strange and magical creatures" to be seen anywhere in
Outlaw Of Gor... and even "wild adventures" is stretching things a bit!