Deathstalker 4: Match of Titans (1991)

Rich Hill is back and I can only imagine the relief long time Deathstalker fans must have felt to see that, in 1991 when this film was released. I gotta say, this one truly captured the vibe of the first Deathstalker movie and that alone makes it watchable.

Right off the bat the movie addresses how Deathstalker doesn't have his magic sword and what happened to it. I felt like this was a nod to number 2 and 3 in the series, where the magic sword isn't ever mentioned. Like, here ya go... here's why we never said anything about the sword. Then when Deathstalker finally does get his sword back, near the end, it does a bunch of stuff that it never could do before. This ends up being pretty hilarious and somehow is totally fine. It's probably good he didn't get it back earlier, he'd have been near unstoppable.

Also interesting, the movie had much the same plot as Deathstalker 2, at least as far as centering around a tournament that a bunch of warriors have to fight in, and Deathstalker meets a few on his journey there. It makes one wonder, do these tourneys happen often? Or, do we just happen to catch Deathstalker twice going to one? It's mentioned that every warrior within 200 miles is there. That ends up being about 25 people, apparently. With travel times as they are in the movie, seems like many people must just go around fighting all the time or traveling. In fact, one guy there refers to himself as an athlete and seems to be training for just such a life. As some of the warriors get killed off, maybe it's not hard to see why there's so few left around. Anyway...

An evil sorceress, Kana, is poisoning the warriors with wine so she can turn them to stone, build an army of golems, and essentially eliminate anybody who could challenge her at the same time. It's a brilliant plan. And it would have worked perfectly if she was just a little more careful. She just left the stone person antidote lying around and didn't take into account that one warrior might not be into wine. It spelled her doom. There's certainly no way Deathstalker could have otherwise stopped her.

So it all works out. Deathstalker slow motion dance move sword fights his way through hordes of wimpy soldiers. And he has all the best warriors within 200 miles to help him out, so it's not that tough. His princess pal conveniently used to live in that very castle and can now rule again. So it all works out nicely. Now I wish there were 17 more Deathstalker movies to watch.