Deathstalker Reboots with Gooey Charm But Gentle Jabs: Deathstalker Film Review
Daniel Bernhardt as Deathstalker and Patton Oswalt as Doodad in Deathstalker.
Steven Kostanski’s newest feature revives a sleazy classic, draining the sleaze. Deathstalker rips and tears through gallons of liquid latex and fake blood, delivering a sticky, smirking vehicle. The creature effects warble between laughable and stunning, while the plot and characters mainly serve as a bland starchy base for the rich sweetness of the monsters and gore. Kostanski gives us all the joys of flipping through the Dungeons & Dragons monster manual, but skims through the campaign.
We open with an epic battle, where blood-hued suits of armour mutilate and tear apart steel clad knights. A lone warrior approaches at the moment the good-guy looking leader, a prince, is about to be executed by one of the foes. The buff hero dispatches the red guys with awesome strength and kneels with the dying prince. To care for his wounds? Not so: the warrior begins picking off anything that shines, listening to the prince’s gurgled last words while he steals a cursed-looking amulet. In a tavern, farmers eating handfuls of porridge gossip about the warrior, a man only called Deathstalker, and then a two-headed troll barges in. After slaying the troll, Deathstalker tries to get rid of the amulet, but it magically appears back inside his pockets each time it sinks below the boggy surface of swamp water. It IS cursed! Oh no!
He seeks the help of a delightfully creepy witch, her head encased in a steel-ribbed box, who says a little wizard goblin, perhaps with the voice of Remi from Ratatouille, might be able to read the inscription. Deathstalker does indeed find the wizard goblin, named Doodad in a cave, saving the fella from hideous, screeching worms. He can’t read the amulet, but he does in fact have Remi’s voice (it’s Patton Oswalt). They venture forth in search of scrolls to help decipher the amulet, where they encounter a Brisbayne (Christina Orjalo), a thief, and a corrupted knight from Deathstalker's good guy days, Jotak (Paul Lazenby). We continue following Deathstalker and friends as they become further wrapped into a battle to save the entire material plane from Evil.
For me, the best scene is when some mud-men from a swamp are mentioned to have forgotten the warmth of a brotherly hug, and then Deathstalker calms their wrath by helping them remember, by giving them brotherly hugs.
The movie's fun dark-fantasy premise struggles through its editing and writing. There’s cute moments, but the film doesn’t seem to want to get its feet wet. I’m reminded of the Saturday morning cartoon versions of movies like Robocop and Ghostbusters, which pare down the raunchy live-action roots and boil them soft, like smooth baby carrots. Which could be fine, except that the characters and dialog never fully become earnest enough—I ache for the melodrama, not to mention fight choreography, of a tokukatsu like Kamen Rider. It misses the more straight-to-the-gut jabs of Kostanski’s earlier films, as well, perhaps showing his delight when in his own sandbox, but maybe a hesitation to go too far when dealing with an established franchise. It's a food desert kind of movie, Diet Deathstalker, Deathstalker Zero.