By Christopher Luis-Jorge

One date night, my partner and I downloaded the streaming platform Plex. We saw an absurd poster for a movie called The Warrior and the Sorceress in which a nearly-naked swordsman flexed while a four-breasted woman in a glittering bikini lay around his feet. Of course we watched it. It was, predictably, camp.

But the algorithm was incapable of distinguishing an ironic watch from an earnest one, suggesting that if we “liked” The Warrior and the Sorceress, then we had to check out Wizards of the Lost Kingdom or Deathstalker II. All of which, I admit, we watched. Sometime around the moment I witnessed a medieval warlord build sexual chemistry with a weird snake puppet in the middle of an otherwise human orgy, I found myself asking the only reasonable question: “how did we get here?”

Because while I was addicted to these movies, I had to admit that each one was a train wreck. But stranger still, each picture seemed to be the same train wreck. They all had posters painted by the artist, Boris Vallejo. They all cast actress María Socas in supporting roles. They were all shot in Argentina with Argentine extras and buff American leading men.

As it turned out, they were all produced by the same guy, Roger Corman, who produced 10 extremely low budget movies in Argentina throughout the ‘80s. Almost all of them were Sword and Sorcery-style fantasy.

But why? If it was a cost saving measure, then surely there were cheaper locations than Argentina. And why fantasy? The costumes and magic presumably drove up production costs.

No matter what angle I sliced the question, my journey kept bringing me back to Pretoria, South Africa on November 8th, 1975 for that year’s Mr Olympia bodybuilding competition.

Mr. Olympia, 1975

A modest, but dedicated crowd gathered in Pretoria to watch the annual Mr. Olympia competition. At the time, bodybuilding was a niche sport. While the modern bodybuilder had been around since the late 19th century, the bodybuilder of the mid 20th century generally lived in the popular imagination as a carnival act. Niche or otherwise, Mr. Olympia was the highest honor in the sport.

But that year’s competition promised to be a historic occasion. Five years earlier, the reigning champ, Sergio Oliva from Cuba, lost to an up-and-coming Austrian, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who went on to maintain an unprecedented five year winning streak. Eager to topple Schwarzenegger’s spree, American bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno pushed himself to physical extremes in his Brooklyn basement in preparation for the contest. Unlike past years, however, the 1975 Mr. Olympia was attended by a film crew: Pumping Iron, a documentary directed by George Butler and Robert Fiore.

The documentary highlighted the rivalry between Schwarzenegger and Ferrigno. It amplified the drama and portrayed Ferrigno as an underdog, a mild-mannered and partially deaf hopeful who trained with his dad in a humble basement. By contrast, Schwarzenegger was presented as an egoic bully. Still, on November 8th 1975, Arnold secured his sixth and final consecutive Mr. Olympia win before retiring from professional bodybuilding.

Pumping Iron released in January of 1977. It was a box office hit, simultaneously informing general audiences about the sport of bodybuilding and elevating some of the athletes into household names. Despite Schwarzenegger’s villainous performance, audiences loved his on-camera charisma. While Schwarzenegger and his entourage enjoyed a temporary celebrity status, Arnold held greater artistic ambitions:

Hollywood.

Heavy Metal

Again in 1975, Tony Hendra, a founding writer for National Lampoon magazine, visited Europe. While there, he became enraptured with European comic books. Their backgrounds and plots tended towards surrealism and they staged sex in subversive ways relative to the mainstream comics in the anglosphere. At National Lampoon’s New York office, editor Sean Kelly shared in Hendra’s fixation. He was especially taken by a Science Fiction comic anthology called Métal hurlant, or “Screaming Metal”, which was created by Les Humanoïdes Associés, a conglomeration of four French creators including Philippe Druillet and the acclaimed Mœbius.

The National Lampoon offices passed around copies of Métal hurlant until finally in April 1977, they released a full-color monthly English translation titled Heavy Metal. It was a success. It paired surrealist landscapes with speculative iconography in ways most American audiences had never seen and put into the English-speaking mainstream ideas previously only explored in underground publications with limited distribution.

Heavy Metal was not without its critics. It contained full-color penises and vulvae, graphic violence, and plots some regarded as juvenile. One comic from the first issue, Rut by hurlant founder Phillipe Druillet, follows an astronaut who is anally impregnated after a space monster mounts and ejaculates into his spaceship’s thrusters, filling the ship with apparently sentient ejaculate. Still, the controversies only stoked the magazine’s reputation and the quasi-pornographic imagery created a context in which consumers who might otherwise be unwilling or unable to purchase explicit material could engage with erotic art.

The magazine continued to grow in renown, culminating in the 1981 film adaptation of the same name including the voice talents of John Candy, music by Devo and Black Sabbath, and plots written by members of the original Les Humanoïdes Associés. Its R-rating and sexually explicit visuals translated the motifs of the original comics for the big screen. And with a box-office pull of nearly $20 million against a $9.3 million budget, the project was a certified success.

Hollywood producers took notice.

Conan the Barbarian

Pumping Iron was not enough to make Arnold a leading man. He starred in the 1979 comedy The Villain and made an appearance in the film Scavenger Hunt, but neither had the same impact as Pumping Iron. Meanwhile, Ferrigno successfully broke into television playing the titular green mutant in CBS’s The Incredible Hulk. This established two important precedents:

It was possible to release a commercially viable product with the alumni of Pumping Iron in leading roles.

Bodybuilders were uniquely suited to adapt comic book heroes into live action.

But the emergence of the leading-man bodybuilder still faced additional difficulties. Schwarzenegger was charismatic in the context of Pumping Iron, sure, but neither he nor Ferrigno had significant acting training. And with Ferrigno’s partial deafness and Schwarzenegger’s accent, speaking roles strained the bodybuilders’ acting abilities.

Further, audiences in the ‘70s tended to associate the action hero with martial arts films. On occasion, bodybuilders had appeared in movies, but they seldom enjoyed celebrity. Actors like Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee, or David Carradine were not bodybuilders. Nor was Shaft nor Dirty Harry. Still, the success of Star Wars and Heavy Metal magazine in the same year fostered Hollywood’s interest in pulp stories.

In 1978, John Milius (Dirty Harry) began work adapting Robert E Howard’s Conan the Barbarian—a pulp anti-hero who had seen a second wind throughout the ‘70s thanks to a popular Marvel Comics’ adaptation. The addition of screenwriter Oliver Stone (Midnight Express) gave the project a sense of legitimacy. And though they were unable to strike a deal with Conan cover artist Frank Frazetta to helm the film as a visual consultant, the visual language of the barbarian story was unambiguous: they needed a muscular leading man.

At first, they considered Charles Bronson or Sylvester Stallone. But after seeing Pumping Iron, the producers approached Schwarzenegger. Finally, with Star Wars actor James Earl Jones cast as antagonist Thulsa Doom, it appeared possible for Conan to become a viable Hollywood movie.

Conan the Barbarian released in 1982 grossing up to $68 million dollars at the box office against a meager $20 million budget. Again, producers took notice. In particular, the producer Roger Corman.

Roger Corman

In 1954, Roger Corman directed his first film, Monster from the Ocean Floor. His formal training was in industrial engineering, giving him a highly practical perspective on certain technical aspects of film-making, especially when working with tight budgets. This one had a budget of between $15,000 to $35,000. Upon release, critics were unimpressed, but it nevertheless grossed up to $850,000. Next, Corman wrote and produced the original The Fast and the Furious. $50,000 budget; $250,000 in the box office. Then Five Guns West (~$60k budget, $350k box office). Then Apache Woman (~$80k , ~$200k). Again and again, Corman directed and/or produced B-movies on impossibly tight budgets and turned them into profit. In Corman’s own words he “made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime.”

Across his decades of work, Corman mastered the art of identifying mainstream trends then cloning bigger movies on smaller budgets. His movies also gained a reputation for being highly sexual and, in many cases, sexually violent. Take, Galaxy of Terror (curiously, one of James Cameron’s earliest credits) as a case study, in which an astronaut is sexually assaulted by a giant maggot puppet until she orgasms to death.

Many of these movies could generously be described as juvenile. And so was his core audience: teenagers. While Corman worked on more thematically mature works, such as a film cycle based on Edgar Allan Poe, the arrival of the home video market gave Corman the ability to offer adolescent viewers nudity and gore by burying the lead and releasing it as a feature length film.

By 1982, it was becoming clear the kids wanted something specific. Heavy Metal. Conan the Barbarian. Even the Mattel’s line of He-Man toys and comics. They all pointed in the same direction. The kids craved buff barbarians. And, by god, would Roger Corman give them buff barbarians.

But second-world fantasy wouldn’t be cheap. Corman had to be very careful about where it was shot if he was going to turn a profit.

Guerra Sucia

On March 24, 1976 Isabel Perón was deposed as the president of Argentina. “Isabelita” was the wife of the previous and controversial president, Juan Perón, whose political ideology, peronismo, had generally dominated Argentine politics since the 1940s. Perón’s own politics swung between fascist-inspired to socially progressive. The same administration expanded social programs while simultaneously protecting former Nazis from international prosecution.

Peronism made Washington antsy. When Juan Perón died in 1974, the CIA wanted to ensure the regime that filled the power vacuum was right-winged and sympathetic to American economic ambitions. Within the framework of Operation Condor, a US-backed campaign to secure American financial and political interests in South America, Henry Kissinger met with leaders of the coup. Their aim was to destroy political dissenters. What followed was a period described as guerra sucia, or The Dirty War.

Guerra sucia was a decade of state terrorism and genocide as the military Junta launched a campaign to silence perceived political threats through death camps, systematic torture, state-sanctioned rape, and redistributing newborn children from political enemies to families that supported the regime. Some 22,000-30,000 people were “disappeared” without record.

Argentina’s film industry ranked as a footnote among the myriad casualties of the Dirty War. Argentina was one of the most popular film industries in the Spanish-Speaking world. But In 1976, filmmakers including Raymundo Gleyzer, Pablo Szir, and Enrique Juarez, joined the desaparecidos or “the disappeared” as the military Junta continued their ongoing campaign for complete media control. The surviving Argentine filmmakers were under strict surveillance and censorship.

But the staggering number of desaparecidos was impossible to disguise. As people went looking for their missing loved ones, political dissent began to boil. Notably, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a woman-led protest movement, brought visibility to the crimes through public demonstrations. They sewed the names of their disappeared children into cloth diapers, which they wore as head scarves, further weakening the regime’s information control.

In 1982, Argentina attempted to invade the British occupied Falkland Islands. It was a costly and humiliating failure that challenged the Junta’s ubiquitous control. Soon, Raúl Alfonsín was elected the 49th President of Argentina and began the work of restoring the democratic process and removing the laws that prevented the Junta and Nazis from prosecution.

Though the regime collapsed, irreversible harm had been done. Tens of thousands of desaparecidos were forever missing, the economy was in an era of severe stagflation, and Buenos Aires was awash with highly skilled and unemployed workers, including filmmakers. Among the directors who worked in this period included Héctor Olivera, who navigated guerra sucia by making dark comedies. Eager to reignite the suffering film industry with foreign capital, Olivera and producer Alejandro Sessa reached out to a certain American producer known for working within tight budgets.

Deathstalker

Corman moved his Barbarian ambitions to Argentina. His goal was singular: clone Conan. Unlike some of the other countries in which Corman worked, 1980s Argentina was a Goldilocks of cheap but highly skilled labor. So, Corman with his production studio, Palo Alto, got to work on the project.

They mobilized on a script written by Corman’s frequent collaborator, Howard R Cohen. It was called Deathstalker. It followed a wanderer, Deathstalker, who competes in a tournament to determine the most powerful warrior in the kingdom. However, the tournament was a ruse created by the sorcerer Munkar to trick the kingdom’s warriors—the only real threat to Munkar’s power—to kill each other. In the end, Deathstalker wins the tournament and tosses Munkar to a starving crowd of serfs, who dismember him.

The cast was composed primarily of Argentine extras who worked for as low as $3. But they still needed lead actors and the Pumping Iron alumni were outside Palo Alto’s tiny budget. Still, the Conan template was clear. They needed a buff leading man. Instead, they cast Rick Hill, a former Georgia Tech football player whose professional career was ended by a string of injuries. With the addition of Playboy playmate Barbi Benton, who had made the jump into film and television throughout the ‘70s appearing in shows such as Hee Haw and The Love Boat, it seemed Deathstalker was a go.

Principal photography was shot on location in Buenos Aires. The country’s economic crisis kept production costs low. The props and costumes tended to be cheap with a few more detailed pieces for leading actors and foreground monsters. Marionette puppetry solved whatever problems couldn’t be resolved with a rubber mask.

But if costs were cut in casting and location, Palo Alto made the choice to go all in on the Peruvian-American painter Boris Vallejo, a peer of Frank Frazetta’s. Vallejo, who built a career painting pulp figures like Tarzan and Conan, was approached for the Deathstalker poster. He agreed. The final poster staged a classic pulp vignette: a bodybuilding barbarian holds a sword over head as he attacks an ogre who clutches a nearly-naked woman. The scene is, again, juvenile. But Vallejo’s painting technique, eye for color, composition, and knowledge of anatomy elevated the subject to a level of technical mastery far exceeding the occasion.

The whole movie cost a lean $457,000.

Deathstalker made 5 to 12 million dollars in the box office.

Audiences hungry for more Conan took the bait. Deathstalker, with all its B-movie limitations, found a cult following. But beyond the theatrical distribution, Corman and New World Pictures targeted the home video market, which gave teenage audiences the ability to rent or purchase the movie for private viewing. With the success of Deathstalker, it was clear cheap Argentine-shot movies could be profitable. And since Palo Alto’s production team already had infrastructure in Buenos Aires, they went into overdrive.

They reused sets and costumes. A protagonist’s sword in one film would reappear as an insignificant prop in another. Even footage was reused between productions to keep costs low, including a sequence where a gag from Deathstalker was reused unedited in Deathstalker II. Each film also came equipped with its own Boris Vallejo poster. Truly, the final death rattle for the 1970s martial artist leading man was fossilized in The Warrior and the Sorceress, in which, David Carradine (Kung Fu, Kill Bill) was depicted as a bodybuilder in the Vallejo poster.

Of the 10 films Corman made in Argentina, 5 were directed by Olivera. All were in English, which kept Spanish-speaking actors confined to bit parts while Americans got leading roles. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom even went as far as to anglicize Spanish names in the credits.

By the end of the 1980s, the market shifted from the Conan moment that began the decade. Corman’s final two Argentine films, Two to Tango and Play Murder for Me, were not fantasy, but adaptations of Argentine works, marking a rare occasion in which Palo Alto engaged directly with the country in which their pictures were produced.

***

While the Barbarian movie is not as trendy as it once was, the events of the 1975 Mr Olympia competition provided Arnold Schwarzenegger with a lasting film career. Throughout the ‘80s, filmmakers such as Roger Corman experimented with that implication, permanently altering audience expectations for the action hero. Soon, the doors would open for the next logical evolution of the archetype, the professional wrestler, who had an advantage over the bodybuilder as a train performer. Jesse Ventura acted alongside Schwarzenegger in Predator. Andre the Giant was in The Princess Bride. Matilda the Hun from Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling was in Deathstalker II.

Today, Dave Bautista, John Cena, and—of course—Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson have all made the same jump as Schwarzenegger. It is a path that was opened by Pumping Iron and iterated upon by filmmakers like Roger Corman. Though popular discourse suggests a certain fatigue in seeing The Rock in another Jumanji, this tiredness is only proof of the stranglehold the post-Schwarzenegger action hero continues to lord over the old guard, the martial artist.

In some ways, browsing Plex on date night made me feel like Corman’s archetypal ‘80s teen. I too was suckered in by the Vallejo posters and the promise of some buckles to be swashed. But even after I learned my lesson, both my partner and I continued to watch these movies. At their worst, they’re juvenile and sexually violent power fantasies built on the backs of exploited labor. But sometimes there’s a glimmer of a pre-Tolkien tradition that survived all the way from the original Robert E Howard stories of the pulp era. That’s when they shine. And with a remake of the original Deathstalker currently in production, it seems the legacy of the Corman/Argentina collaboration continues to find an audience within the anglosphere to this very day.

References:

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“Argentina’s Guerrillas Still Intent on Socialism.” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, March 7, 1976
Corman, Roger. How I Made A Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost A Dime, Random House, 1990
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“Ep 10. Roger Corman.” Eli Roth’s History of Horror: Uncut, 2020
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Fevrier, Andrés. “Hollywood en Don Torcuato (primera parte)”, Cinematófilos. 2008, https://www.cinematofilos.com.ar/2008/03/hollywood-en-don-torcuato-primera-parte.html
Generation Iron. Directed by Vlad Yudin, The Vladar Company, 2013
“He-Man.” The Toys That Made Us, 2017
Kelly, Sean. “Origins” Heavy Metal #1, 1977
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“Slash presents DEATHSTALKER by Seely, Terry, & Kostanski.” Kickstarter, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vault-comics/slash-presents-deathstalker
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Vallejo, Boris. The Fantastic Art of Boris Vallejo, Ballantine Books, 1980
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