Customer Reviews

Norseman,The (Amazon.com Exclusive) [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Director Charles B. Pierce hit the jackpot with his quintessential 70's drive-in, cult classic- "The Legend of Boggy Creek." "Boggy Creek" was a docu-drama about a bigfoot-like creature that prowled the Arkansas backcountry. Despite its absurdly low budget, it was quite a hit! Instead of attempting to follow up his success with similar movies, Pierce took his money from "Boggy Creek" to make mind-numbingly dull westerns like "Gray Eagle" and the schlocky B grade epic- "The Norseman."

"The Norseman" was either a big step-up for Pierce or a big step down for its cast. The star is Lee Majors who was at the pinacle of his popularity thanks to his TV role as the Six Million Dollar Man. The film also features famed character actor Jack Elam as a Norse wizard and once upon a time A-list Hollywood actors Cornel Wilde and Mel "the ex-Mr. Audrey Hepburn" Ferrer. And how can any fan of the NFL fail to notice Deacon Jones and Fred Biletnikoff among the Vikings? After working in "Boggy Creek" with a cast that featured ordinary Arkanas people playing themselves, Pierce must have felt pretty darn good working with Wilde, Ferrer, Elam, and Majors. However, it must have been tough for Wilde and Ferrer to realize that their careers have been reduced to playing supporting roles in a grade B kiddie adventure movie.

The plot is simple: Lee Majors and his band of rough and tough Vikings come to North America looking for other Vikings who never returned home. They discover the reason their companions never returned is because some dastardly Injuns burned their eyes out and enslaved them. Of course, Majors and the boys have to kick some Injun butt in lots and lots of slow motion battles.

Overall, this is a silly 70's kids' movie. If I had seen this as an 7 yr old back in 1978 I probably would have loved it! Lee Majors, Vikings, Indians, and lots of battle scenes- it would have been right up my alley. However, when I was seven years old I had no taste whatsoever.

While this Viking/swords and sorcery "epic" is anything but a comedy, I have to admit I laughed wholeheartedly throughout.

Lee Majors leads a rag-tag group of Norsemen to America to find lost comrades, only to be rudely greeted by a band of especially sadistic Indians whose hobby seems to be poking out tourists' eyes with burning sticks of firewood. The slow-motion battle sequences, complete with thundering musical score, reminds one of an XFL football game, though I must admit "The Norseman" predates that colorful sport by several decades.

I rather enjoyed the list of established character actors, including Cornel Wilde and Jack Elam, furrow their overgrown eyebrows while praying to Odin after the death of yet another Viking caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Several former football players, among them Deacon Jones (yes, Deacon Jones) provide picturesque blocks to weak Native American offensive lines, and there's even Susie Coelho playing a female squaw with the proper fashion sense to wear her buckskin as short as a Nancy Sinatra mini-skirt. That's the pioneer spirit!

I actually enjoyed this wild adventure, if for no other reason than it reminds me of my own youth, sitting in a darkened theater during a Saturday afternoon matinee, guzzling Mr. Pibb and voraciously swallowing Lemon Drops while listening to Lee Majors deliver lines like...."What say you Wizard! When will the Gods show us land!"

Roger Corman, no doubt, is proud.

Drumroll please for The Norseman... Being the heroic tale of a band of Vikings who venture across the waters in their long ship Raven-in-the-Wind to Vineland (Florida to you and me), where the treacherous Indian chief Kiwonga (Jacob Jerry Daniels) is holding Mel Ferrer, the blinded father of our eponymous hero, to grind corn. And boy, do they get through corn at a rate of knots in this joyously misbegotten venture.

It's the kind of movie where you keep on expecting Tony Curtis to turn up and say "Yonda lies da teepee od my fadda," but instead have to make do with Lee Majors failing spectacularly to capitalise on the success of The Six Million Dollar Man. Even more so than Tom Selleck in Christopher Columbus, you just have to feel sorry for the poor man. Wearing a Zorro mask under his helmet in a vain attempt to hide his embarrassment, he doesn't even make it to the level of Jon Hall in his Maria Montez days.

"To go into the forest after them is worse than crossing the high Alps to kill the white bear with empty hands," warns Jack Elam's wizard the Death Dreamer, who keeps on turning his face away at the camera at every available opportunity. (This is a minor plot point, but he's probably just using that as an excuse.) Curiously for this kind of film, the Indians don't speak American, which is odd, since the Vikings do, none more so than Lee Majors' Thorvald. Somewhat hampered in his portrayl of a heroic Viking by his inability to say words like "Oden" (rhymes with loadin') and "Noars-mun" (rhymes with oarsman), imagine a disinterested, slightly embarrassed Nick Nolte with a cold and a bad mood and you have some idea of his vocal interpretation.

The Vikings may look like a cross between Hells Angels and ZZ Top roadies but there are at least some good production values for such obviously cut-price fare - the odd oil tanker may stray into shot, but at least the microphone never does - but despite cinematographer Robert Bethard's more than competent efforts, aside from a mini-Viking funeral near the beginning it looks like nothing so much as a Seventies TV movie that somehow was accidentally shot in Scope, all sharp focus and limited shadow.

They don't save the first Viking to get killed on the beach because the Indians attack at 24 frames per second while the Vikings, clearly inspired by Majors' Six Million Dollar exploits, can only run in slow motion, like a Dark Ages Baywatch. Their battles with those pesky Injuns are riddled with slo-mo as well. Although much of it looks a hell of a lot better than the normal speed action it is clumsily intercut with, you do end up thinking that if the film was run at normal speed it would only be half an hour long.

As the young Eric, the hero's brother, the director's sprog Chuck Pierce Jr doesn't speak for half an hour. When he does, it becomes obvious that his mom was an Okie, although he obviously lost his accent in later years if the narration is anything to go by. Other great casting includes an Injun slave driver played by Kathleen Freeman, here strikingly made up to look like Anthony Zerbe, and Christopher Connelly as a black Viking called Rolf straight out of Studio 54. Although they have a black Viking along, they obviously forgot to bring the comic relief along. Thankfully, with a script like this they don't need one.

Denny Miller, the star of MGM's disastrous 1959 remake of Tarzan the Ape Man, a stock footage fest with a Shorty Rogers (!!!) score that sank without a trace at the box-office, is also along for the ride, but of the rest of the cast, only Cornel Wilde looks comfortable in this sort of thing, but then, he did have a lot of practice at this sort of thing in the good old days.

It's not so much laugh out loud, more a cumulative "They must have known" factor. Well, at least the weather stayed nice for them.

No great special effects. However, the acting is superb, costumes look great, script and plot are exciting. It is not a BLOODY movie. Just some good old fashion NORSE violence. If it comes out on DVD i will immediately purchase it.

I saw this movie on tv when I was a kid and liked it. So when I saw it for sale and bought it. 90% of this movie is UNWATCHABLE, litteraly unwatchable. The dialouge is terrible. Once you think there could be nothing worse then the dialouge then you hear the narrator and you sink even lower into bad movie hell. I don't know why the producers thought this movie needed a narrator other than the fact that the characters do things that are so inexplicably stupid that their actions need to be elaborated on.
The plot is simple: A band of vikings go to the new world to find out what happened to to a previous party that never returned. They find that the previous viking party have been enslaved by native americans and set about to rescue them. The band is led by Lee Majors who wears an odd looking mask for reasons he doesn't explain. The othe vikings are not dressed better. They wear these comicly huge helmets with ridiculous horns. They look like they belong to Fred Flintstone's water buffalo lodge. Their armor and weapons look like cheap stage props.
The last 5 minutes, which involves and chase back to the longship, is not bad. The rest could be used at GITMO to torchure infromation out of terrorists.

.... than this movie for acting, dialogue, costumes, props and especially casting. It just doesn't...

Ok this movie is not great,is cheesy, but it might be good for some laughs and kids might like it, but unfortunately the film on the copy I have is dark,dull looking and washed out, like a lot of low budget(and higher budget) stuff from the seventies. I do not know if the film on the copy for sell here has been "restored" or could be.

Black Vikings, yeah right why do hollywood morons always make European heritage a grey mono-culture and distort history (reality) to be over the top PC and infest multi-culture into everything. I had to give one star to post my reply.

Great movie. kind of tells who came to America first. Lee is young in this movie must be one of his first ones