The Argentina Sword-and-Sorcery Movie Poster Collection
In the late 70s, Arnold Schwarzenegger was looking to break into Hollywood, with the help of the handy bodybuilder-to-comic-adaptation pipeline established by Lou Ferrigno's Incredible Hulk show.
At the same time, National Lampoon had successfully taken the French comic Métal hurlant to the US market as Heavy Metal magazine, revealing a rich vein of consumer interest in R-rated fantasy/sci-fi stories.
Those two factors collided with 1982's hit Conan the Barbarian. Which then got low-budget film producer Roger Corman interested in how to capitalize off the genre with a string of sword-and-sorcery movies filmed in the stagflated 1980s Argentina.
That's not half of the fascinating cliff notes you can pull out of a recent Typebar magazine article by Christopher Luis-Jorge titled "Pumping Gold: How a Decade of Bodybuilding and Terrorism Started a Wave of Cheap Fantasy Movies." You should check out the whole thing!
It's missing one element, though: Illustrations. Part of Corman's magic formula was splashing out on the marketing, securing high-quality fantasy artists like Boris Vallejo for each of the posters of his 10 Argentine movies. I'd never seen them collected before – the article doesn't even list all the film titles – so I figured I'd dedicate a post to them.
It all starts with Vallejo's 1983 poster for the first film: Deathstalker.
For the second movie's poster, however, we're already diviating from Vallejo himself: 1984's The Warrior and the Sorceress has a poster by Joann Daley in which a fantastically buff David Carradine isn't the oddest anatomical wonder.
Daley was a lesser known artist behind some of the creepiest surreal VHS covers around - I might do a whole post about her art, but check out this cool blog post if you want to see more.
We're back to Vallejo in 1985 with Barbarian Queen. The original illustration here sold for $15,000 a while back.
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, the first PG-rated effort, came out the same year. The whole thing is available on YouTube. I sadly wasn't able to find the name of the artist for the poster, but it's not Vallejo – either he was busy with Barbarian Queen or the filmmakers wanted a more kid-friendly vibe (The NeverEnding Story came out the year before).
Vallejo's back for 1986's Amazons.
Vallejo's Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans poster arrived in 1987, with a cool blood-red background and a weapon for the woman this time.
If anything ever gets me to watch one of these movies, it's the joke in this incredible 7-second clip introducing the film's title. This one was positioned as a parody of sword-and-sorcery movies... perhaps a sign that the genre was getting a bit stale.
Vallejo's Deathstalker III: The Warriors from Hell poster arrived in 1988 - the Polish VHS is one of the higher-quality scans of the art online.
Judging from that signature, the 1989 Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II poster is by Craig Nelson, another poster art veteran.
Finally, we have two more Boris Vallejo posters, both rounding out the sequel trend that signalled the close of Cormen's excursions to Agentina: 1990's Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back, which really shows its influences in that subtitle, and 1991's Deathstalker IV: Match of Titans.
And we're done! In just the time it took you to read this post, you saw what's probably the best part of ten different movies. That's the value-add we promise here at 70s Sci-Fi Art.
There are many other fantastic non-Corman-related posters in this short-lived genre – check out the collection here if you want a few more.
Music rec: It's actually harder than you might think to find great fantasy soundtrack playlists on Spotify, but luckily this one's probably the only one you need – Swords & Sorcery Soundtracks is over 24 hours long.
Next Time: More 'Epic' Sci-Fi