Pulse (2001) – Two completely separate storylines here that don’t intersect until the last ten minutes, and neither of them make any sense. There’s something about maybe people disappearing because of an internet site (but then it just turns out that people are disappearing willy-nilly), and maybe souls of the are stuck in a pseudo-electronic purgatory, and there’s also something about forbidden rooms with red tape on the doors that no one ever explains…
There was a feint at a subtext here, of people being so isolated in an electronics-mediated age that they literally slip out of existence, but it gets lost because the movie still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. (It’s a sign of the muddled conceptual background here that every single one-line synopsis to be found on the internet is almost completely wrong.)
People all over the internet call it really scary, but I was more annoyed than anything.
Conquest (1983) – Lucio Fulci demonstrates again that his couple of watchable movies are more the result of happenstance than skill. In this sword-and-sorcery fever dream, a young man inherits a magic bow and goes on a quest because that’s what you do; then he meets up with an older, more cynical mercenary, and eventually even the movie thinks that the mercenary is a more interesting character and starts ignoring what should be the Campbellian protagonist.
In the meantime, there’s a masked and ALWAYS TOPLESS sorceress who decides that the young man is a threat and she should take him out; this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — if she’d just left the young man alone, his path would never have crossed hers. (And naturally, it’s the mercenary who’s actually active through the last twenty minutes.)
I’ll be honest, I got bored and started doing other stuff for the last half hour, so I don’t remember it well. But I was paying attention for the first hour, and I don’t remember THAT part well, either.
The Archer: Fugitive From the Empire (1981) – Yeah, I’m on a little bit of a sword-and-sorcery kick. Oddly enough, this TV-movie just marginally predates Conan the Barbarian (1982), which is where all the other ’80s S&S flicks got their impetus (see Conquest, above). And hey, look at that — another magic bow! Young Toran is framed for the death of his father (George Kennedy!) by his cousin (Marc Alaimo!!), and goes on the run to find the Yoda figure that his father pointed him to. But he’s also in love with a young sorceress, who wants to find the same Yoda figure, but to kill him. Along the way, they meet the comic-relief gambler-rogue to complete their party.
Obviously meant as the pilot for a series that never materialized, The Archer tries to set up enough story threads for fertile future mining, but it’s not really compelling (which is probably why it never materialized) — my best guess is that it was meant to be a “nothing but side-quests” series like The Fugitive or Planet of the Apes or The Incredible Hulk.
Of the three main characters, only Victor Campos as the roguish thief Slant is at all fun to watch; the other two Lane Caudell as Toran, and Belinda Bauer as Estra) aren’t really given much to work with, and don’t have the chops to make much of what they’re given.
Even if The Archer couldn’t afford a skilled actor to play the title role, you would think that they could manage to pay someone enough to fake enthusiasm for the one minute, fourteen second trailer. The voiceover for that ad sounded like he wasn’t any more interested in this movie than you were!