Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal
of Time
Director:
Sylvio Tabet
Year: 1991
Rating: 4.0
I just want to know why Tanya Roberts wasn't
in the sequel to the first Beastmaster. Dar (Marc Singer) and Kiri (Tanya)
looked so happy together at the end. Of course, this sequel was nine years
later and Roberts had been Sheena and a Bond Girl in the meantime. And maybe
she saw the script and said, are you kidding me. Nine years between films
is a long time. Had Beastmaster become popular in vhs form? The Sword and
Sorcery films had been very popular in the first half of the 1980s with Conan,
Krull, Dragonslayer, Red Sonja, Hercules, Barbarian Queen and Beastmaster,
but had sort of run its course by this film in 1991. So the filmmakers in
their infinite wisdom decide to turn it into a Sword and Sorcery Fish Out
of Water tale and absolutely miss the boat. Laughably bad at times. The dialogue
deserves its own special place in Dante's circles of Hell.
Dar is still roaming the wasteland with
his buddies, the tiger, the eagle and the two heroic ferrets. He has been
captured by the new megalomaniac of the land, Arklon (Wings Hauser) who is
in possession of some sort of laser weapon that shoots out green bolts. In
a decent scene, Dar escapes with the help of his friends and goes into a
swamp where a mutated creature tells him that he has an evil brother who
he must kill. Guess who? All solid Sword and Sorcery so far. But Arklon allies
himself with a witch (Sarah Douglas) who tells him he can rule the world
if he gets his hands on a neutron detonator.
A neutron detonator? Where do I get one
of those? And the witch shows him a parallel world of cars, buildings and
girls in bikinis. Los Angeles. You know an LA video montage is on the horizon.
Through a magic portal. But before they go into LA, a spoiled Valley girl
comes through the portal in her red Porsche and meets Dar. And the film quickly
devolves into a dreary series of cultural cuteness with none of the wit of
Back to the Future or the tension of Time After Time. They all end up in
LA including the animals and Dar learns about rock and roll and X-rated films.
Arklon goes to buy new clothes and the film has the nerve to do a feeble
imitation of Serge from Beverly Hills Cop. Five years later, they did Beastmaster
3 which sounds like a more legit sequel than this hodge-podge is.
