The Headsman
Here’s an obscure film that shouldn’t embarrass whoever participated on it.
This is a by-the-book B-movie that gets retroactive recognition since apparently the lead has starred in other, more well know, by-the-book medieval fantasy TV show. This film involves no thrones, the emperor is only mentioned in passing, the plot is city-sized only.
Being a fantasy film, it’s contractually obliged to include a prophecy, so it starts with the lead and his best friend being kids, run to the underside of the scaffold and getting splashed in the face with the still warm blood gushing from a fresh beheading. It looks brutal to our soft XXI century sensibilities, but for them it was Tuesday.
They get separated later that day when the Archbishop comes and takes to not-lead to “bible studies” that turn out to include paedophilia. The lead goes to WAR. Fast forward to 15 years later, and they are both high ranking in their respective jobs of pederasting and warrioring.
The lead sees distress being foisted upon a sexy damsel about his age and goes in for the kill. Coitus ensues, but only on the second date, they are not animals. Turns out the damsel is the daughter of the headsman, and therefore condemned to be an outcast.
The lead goes off to fight in some other place that it’s not so far that the environment changes, but not so near it can be construed he is defending the town. Since condoms were non-existent in that time, or the lead’s sperm count is inversely proportional to his chest hair count, she gives birth to a male. After mercy killing some ally, the lead returns home (horny as hell, probably), and finds out he has a mini version of himself.
He wants to recognise the son so bad, he throws away his life of medieval middle class for love. And by “throw away”, I mean go live as an outcast in the outskirts of town and behead defenceless people for a living, condemning his whole lineage to being a pariah. This coming from the illegitimate son of the archbishop.
Now that I wrote it down, I realise it’s not so bad as I thought at first. There’s a moderately complex plot, the actors do a good job considering most frames are brown. I knew Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from the fantastic Gods of Egypt, but this is not his finest hour.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.