TALES OF AN ANCIENT EMPIRE (2010)

 

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Director Albert Pyun passed away in 2022, but though I've not seen his entire repertoire, his best known works were confined to the 1980s and 1990s. The decline in Pyun's work was directly tied to his serious illnesses, but though his 21st-century works seem negligible at first glance, one exception was this 2010 film, a very loose sequel to the director's first movie, the CONAN-mockbuster SWORD AND THE SORCERER. The sequel-elements are fairly dubious: a handful of re-used names that don't necessarily tie to the original characters, the reappearance of the titular "sword," from the first film, and a cameo by Lee Horsley, though he's not called by the name of his character Prince Talon and seems extraneous to the plot-- more on which later.

The script is by Cynthia Curnan, a writer-producer with whom Pyun frequently collaborated in the 21st century. She may have sought to make the EMPIRE script match Pyun's own early projects, because EMPIRE is just as loosely plotted and spotty on exposition as the average Pyun movie from the 20th century. Because EMPIRE's story wanders so, it's hard to tell if Curnan meant to play off one of the most familiar aspects of the Conan-concept, in which the mighty thewed barbarian roamed from place to place, not only gutting evil sorcerers but also humping innumerable distressed damsels. EMPIRE comes close to being a commentary on the downside of the hero's inveterate wenching, for four of the five main characters of the story are such a hero's bastard offspring, and the fifth is the grown daughter of one of the hero's daughters.

Now, in the original 1982 movie heroic Prince Talon actually was not known for far-flung wenching, and he ends up marrying female lead Princess Alana at the movie's end, though there's no telling what might have happened if a sequel, promised at the end of SORCERER, had come to pass. My unverifiable theory: Pyun and Curnan considered having this much-delayed follow-up rewrite Talon's history by making him more Conan-esque. But perhaps Horsley didn't want to play that role for whatever reason, for in the twenty-years-previous prologue, Curnan creates a new character, Oda (Michael Pare), who is renowned for getting it on with assorted damsels. In fact, Oda  doesn't even stint at cohabiting with the monstrous female  vampire Xia (Whitney Able) after killing her evil father Xuxia. (The latter cognomen was also the name of SORCERER's main villain, but the two characters are not coterminous). In fact, Oda also gets Xia pregnant, but the hero courteously waits until Xia delivers her vampire-child, and then he kills Xia, seals her in a tomb, and gives the vampire-kid, later named Kara, to be raised by the rulers of Abelar.

Twenty years after the prologue, treasure hunters break into Xia's tomb, and she revives. After Xia conquers a city with her monstrous pawns (which conquest the viewer does not see), Maat, queen of neighboring city Abelar, decides that their only possible savior is Oda, the man who previously slew Xia. Though Maat is not related to Oda, her half-sister Tanis (Melissa Ordway) is told to seek out the father she's never known. The child of Oda and Xia is also still in Abelar, working as a handmaid to Maat, and she may have been intended to be a secret agent for Xia, though the script never has Kara do anything of consequence.

No one knows where Oda is, but Tanis finds out the location of Oda's only son Aedan (Kevin Sorbo). She finds Aedan in a tavern, cheating at cards and almost getting killed by a hulking warrior until Tanis intervenes to save her half-brother with her martial skills. Aedan tries to reward Tanis by groping her, earning him a knee in the balls. Eventually, in exchange for a bounty from Maat, Aedan agrees to lead Tanis to Oda. Along the way Aedan rescues a second half-sister, Malia, from prison, and the three of them go looking for the fourth half-sister (that they know of). This is Rajan, who runs a tavern and has the aforementioned grown daughter Alana. (Yes, Curnan named Oda's grandaughter after Talon's wife. Try to bring that sort of thing up at Thanksgiving dinner.)

At this point, Pyun and Curnan's money must have been running out, for the rest of the movie devolves into barely connected scenes with only fits and spurts of action. Rajan and Alana take the other three to meet Oda, but the meeting doesn't actually take place, though they do meet a character billed as "The Stranger" (Horsley), who oddly fascinates Tanis and who gives her a not-very-fatherly kiss on the mouth. Oda, though, comes back into the story, since he locates one of Xia's vampires and finds out about Xia's return, and then kills the vamp with Talon's patented projectile-sword. At some point Kara joins the anti-Xia party, and after some desultory battles with crude vampires, the heroes also run across Oda, though the meeting is entirely anti-climactic. Xia is defeated offscreen, and Oda continues his deadbeat-dad pattern by faking his death so that his children won't bug him anymore. The film concludes with the implication that there will be more "tales," but it's probably fortunate that there were not.

Though I feel sure Curnan composed her script on the fly according to all sorts of exigent circumstances, one ruling concept does unite the incoherence: the Zeus-myth. Oda is an alpha-male father whose offspring, like the offspring of Zeus, spend the rest of their lives trying to cope with their unusual patrimonies. In a strange way Aedan becomes an Oda writ small, for he's the only male in the group, followed around by four women who can't help but look like a mini-harem. Aside from Aedan coming on to Tanis, there's an odd scene in which Alana greets her uncle by holding a knife to his throat. Was there some inappropriate contact between Aedan and either his half-sister Rajan or his niece? Who knows, but-- "like father, like son."

Kevin Sorbo, the default star, is the only actor who gets a few decent lines, and he makes as much as he can of roguish Aedan. That said, if there's truth in the speculation that Pyn and Curnan couldn't afford Horsley once Sorbo was on board, I would have preferred to see EMPIRE take its original form, not least because the literal presence of Prince Talon would firm up the movie's qualifications as a bonafide sequel.