Best movie ever!

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

I found this DVD in the dollar store bin and have to say it was easily worth the $1 (plus tax.) Conan spawned a lot of these muscle man-with-a-sword flicks and this one featured 4 times Mr. Universe Michael O'Hearn. Unlike Arnold or Lou Ferrigno, whose steroid use left them bloated and musclebound, O'Hearn is all natural with a leaner, more ripped look giving his fighting scenes a lot more appeal. A good looking guy who can actually act, he's trapped in this low budget mishmash. Wisely though, they put him in almost every scene to make the most of his star quality. Some of the fight scenes are good and O'Hearn dispatches bad guys as easily with his bare hands as he does with a sword. He also has a couple of love scenes with some bare-breasted beauties which lets him display a lot more of his impressive physique. The plot is only an excuse for the martial arts action and that's where O'Hearn shines. His opponents are no-name local muscle (it appears to have been filmed in Russia judging from the names) but they only exist to give O'Hearn an opportunity to show off his lethal talents. If martial arts muscle is your thing, O'Hearn does his best to deliver.

Aside from having more guys named Yuri in it than any other English language film ever made, the only interesting thing about Barbarian is that I don't have the slightest idea when this thing was made. It's a remake of/sequel to a 1983 sword-n-sorcery flick called Deathstalker and IMDb.com officially lists Barbarian as coming out in 2003, so unless there were some Galifreyan investors involved, it must have happened sometime between those two dates. But with its noticeably cheap production values and retrograde camera work, I can't believe this thing was made at any time during the 21st century or even the 1990s. On the other hand, the multi-syllable monikers in the cast list place this production clearly in Eastern Europe, which locates it sometime after the fall of the Soviet Union. However, who would bother to cannibalize something like Deathstalker after that much time had passed? Who would even remember it or want to claim it? It is a puzzlement. Usually when you call something "timeless", that's an indication of high quality. Well, Barbarian is "timeless" but only in the sense that it sucks so hard that it's impossible to chronologically quantify it. If you showed this to people and then asked them when they thought it was made, they'd probably guess some time after 1970 but after that, all bets would be off.And when I say this is a remake of/sequel to Deathstalker, I mean it not only appears to be retelling the exact same story but it uses footage from the first film, both as flashbacks and as filler in between new material. In fact, it looks like there might be scenes from several more low-budget flicks being repurposed here in that same way. And again, someone trying to pass off a hack job sequel full of re-edited footage from a bottom-of-the-barrel D-n-D flick might have made some sense if it was done relatively soon after the original. Doing it 10 or especially 20 years later is head-scratchingly peculiar.The storytelling and acting and special effects in this movie are so uniformly terrible that it's hardly worth going into them. There are plenty of attractive, topless chicks and an abundance of fight scenes, but the combat staged here doesn't look like anything that's been done in any professionally made film since 1990. It's more like a bad imitation of that 1970s TV series Kung Fu, which brings us back to the time paradox that is Barbarian.I will say that anyone who ever criticizes Arnold Schwarzenegger's acting should view this thing for a reality check. Star Michael O'Hearn is big and muscular, has no accent and is more conventionally handsome than Arnold. Yet if you put him opposite a 30something Schwarzenegger, O'Hearn wouldn't just be blown off the screen. He'd be pulverized into a wet, pulpy mess.And if you read the other reviews of this weird dreck, you'll notice the common scorn for the character Wooby. He's a giant Ewok/midget Wookie who's meant as comic relief and is at least a 7 out of 10 on the Jar Jar Binks Scale of Annoying Anthropomorphs. Which once more revives the question of when the heck this thing was made, because Wooby is only something that would have been conceived in the immediate aftermath of Return of the Jedi, putting this movie that was released in 2003 and likely shot in 1990s post-Cold War Eastern Europe as somehow being actually made around 1985 or so. The Time Bandits need to team up with Timecop and hitch a ride with the Time Riders down the Time Tunnel and figure out what went on with this film. Maybe I need to look at it again and see if I can spot Michael J. Fox and a DeLorean in the background anywhere.And just to be clear, Barbarian is only watchable if you're going to MST3K it, but don't try and turn its crappiness into a drinking game. You will seriously damage your liver.

This is a zero budget, amateurish film that is laughably poor in parts. Obviously made on the cheap, with scenes cut in and some very poor acting and dubbing. It was made in the Crimea, in Ukraine and the scenery is the best thing about it. The soundtrack has been over-dubbed subsequent to filming, presumably because the local actresses accents were too heavy to be understood. This has made an already clunking script even more laughably bad. Where filing is off location, the sets are blatantly plywood, with no attempt made for solidity or weightiness.Assorted bad guys are too clean, the same locations are used for different parts of the plot, and overall it looks like it was thrown together in a wet weekend. Good points: the scenery, and surprisingly the score. And the girls are very pretty. Bad points: the rest of the movie.

Entertaining movie with lots of hot girls!!!! What all movies should be!!!!AMAZON GIRL was RREEAALLLY HOT!! Wooby was totally SWEET and had LOTS of funny moments as well!! Princess had nice legs, and when I say nice I mean NICE!!!!!!! Great family movie!!! All in all I'd give it 12 thumbs up, WAY UP!! I loved the tournament, the narrator and all those CRAZY fighters with all those SICK weapons, YEEAHH!! The editing was flawless, I couldn't even tell the difference between the NEW FOOOTAGE and the FOOOTAGE from DEATHSTALKER!!!! Special effects were great, especially Munkar's transformation at the end. He was KILLER fast!! Can't wait for the sequel.Barbarian would make an awesome franchise/video game/action figure!!