Ator, the Fighting Eagle (1982)
aka Ator l’invicible
Article 6046 by Dave Sindelar
2-26-2022
Directed by Joe D’Amato
Featuring Miles O’Keeffe, Sabrina Stani, Ritza Brown
Country: Italy
What it is: Sword and Sorcery on a budget

Ator must fulfill his destiny by destroying an evil spider cult.

One of the worst acting performances I ever gave was for a radio play where we were instructed to read our lines as deliberately and slowly as possible. The reason? – the script was too short to fill in the thirty minute running time needed for the production. This is one of those movies that suffers from the same problem; there simply isn’t enough script to comfortably fill up an hour and a half of running time. That’s why there’s so much dead air in the movie (such as the scenes of the baby bear running through the forest) as well as lengthy pauses between lines of dialogue; they’re trying to pad it to acceptable feature length. Add to that a hero who looks more like the lead vocalist in an eighties hair band and a production singularly short in spectacle, and you have a pretty poor excuse for epic fantasy. Dull and silly.