Song of the Sword

There’s a place down by the Pittsburgh Zoo where the USS Potemkin (a Star Trek fan club) used to volunteer to clean the road in costume, where firefighters burn a fake building for practice, the Shuman Center used to hold the worst yinzer teenagers and the Society for Creative Anachronism would do fake swordfights. For some time, if you looked this place up on Google maps street view, you’d see this microcosm all coming together as one.

It’s this kind of magic that led Abraxas Productions to make this movie all over Kansas — mostly in Lawrence — and it’s a sword and sorcery film without even the budget of a Joe D’Amato production. I’ve tried looking up director J. Stanley Haehl and there’s nothing on IMDB. There’s no entry on Letterboxd. This is literally undiscovered territory and even crazier, it feels like Gor on a less than paperback budget.

Imagine, if you will, LARPers — Live Action Role Playing — but on a much larger scale, filmed by video camera, fuzzy drained video colors coalescing to give us wanderers with walking sticks in the woods, primitive video effects in the place of computer generation magic and best of all, everyone is so serious about it. Like, serious enough to get out amongst the jagger bushes — my Pittsburgh is showing, you know, those trees that catch on to you in the woods — and mosquitos in a loin cloth of all things.

You ever pore over that old Monster Manual and have a Hook Horror LJN figure? Then you’re going to get this. Maybe you’d like to see ladies in Renaissance Faire garb sword fight one another in the hometown of William Burroughs, possibly behind a mall? Do you like dialogue like, “Do mine eyes deceive me or is it Shan-Ra?” And people bowing and saying, “My lady, I beseech you for protection?”

This movie makes me feel like everyone in this is really into symphonic metal, BDSM, polyamory or painting miniatures. Maybe and instead of or. And look, I could make some jokes about Charisma rolls and doing 3d6 damage and kno...