Brutish Vood (Luigi Montefiori as George Eastman) is booted out the tribe for killing his father, the chief, and the tribe's wiseman - but then stumbles upon a shaft of iron in the shape of a sword while hiding from a thunder storm in the shadow of a volcano.
With his new weapon - and a smouldering hot chick, Lith (Pamela Field) on his arm - he returns to the tribe, takes over (pointy rod of iron trumps flint-headed axe) and exiles his brother Ela (nude model Sam Pasco in his only non-porn role).
Wandering the lion- and ape-man infested wilderness, Ela teams up with the stunning hotness of Isa (Elvire Audray, star of the infamous cannibal movie Amazonia: The Catherine Miles Story aka White Slave), who takes him to her lakeside village.
This is ruled by a grumpy old pacifist called Mogo (William Berger) - who sulks whenever Ela points out the need for weapons to defend themselves from the free-roaming lions and the threat of Vood's tribe.
Meanwhile, Vood hasn't been just sitting around - as well as creating an iron-forging, sword-producing production line, his tooled-up troops have been gradually subduing all the villages in the area - fuelling Vood growing megalomania so that he is no longer satisfied with taking over the valley, but wants to take over the world instead!
Eventually, Vood's scouts come across the village where Ela is hanging out - but before Vood can attack, Ela invents the bow (no, really!) and the concept of archery and then proceeds to train the village up as archers in the space of 24 hours.
The battlelines are drawn...
After a rather slow start, Ironmaster gathers manic pace until it's almost running away with itself - not bothering with such trivial details as how Vood suddenly knows to make swords or Ela suddenly invents archery.
Throw in some random encounters with ape-men and primitive plague carriers, a splattering of delightfully gruesome effects and an assortment of attractive women (although sadly no nudity), shake well and serve.
With its simplistic storyline, this is not a film to be taken too seriously. Ironmaster is well-loved in certain quarters and while I might not share that passion for this picture, there's no denying that it's a pretty unique barbarian film and is superbly shot, with some truly majestic scenery.
Look out for the brief shot of the plastic elephants near the beginning as well which are, thankfully, not a sign of things to come.
However, how could I resist a crossover whose main joke is the fact that Bruce Campbell plays both Ash in Army Of Darkness and Autolycus, King Of Thieves, in Xena?
A collection of four issues, the first three by John Layman and the fourth by Brandon Jerwa, it tells of how one of the mini-Ashes from Army Of Darkness steals a mini-Necronomicon and heads back to ancient Greece to raise hell.
Ash, as the Chosen One, is dispatched to stop him and naturally ends up meeting Xena and Gabrielle, and mistaken for Autolycus (who they happen to be adventuring with at that time).
Much hijinks ensues that manages to capture the flavour of both franchises - right up until the final pay-off (in Jerwa's issue) when the joke is taken just a step too far and derails the good will the collection has garnered to that point.
To be honest it's a totally redundant - and pointless - two-and-a-half page sequence that has no real connection with the main story and could have been axed without anyone being any the wiser.
Miguel Montenegro's art has a beautiful flow about it, reminiscent of Alan Davies or John Byrne, which certainly makes the illustrations easy on the eye, with good likenesses of the central characters and suitably humourous expressions where appropriate.
Despite the hic-cup towards the end of the book, I'm intrigued to see where Dynamite takes the story in Volume Two: What...Again?
In a nutshell, three horny American teens are lured in by an online honeytrap and instead of the sexual gratification they were hoping for, end up prisoners in the compound of an extreme Christian fundamentalist sect led by the charmingly evil Abin Cooper (Michael Parks).
A rapid chain of events leads to a visit by the ATF, fronted by agent Joseph Keenan (John Goodman), and what could have been a "friendly negotiation" quickly develops into an all-out gun battle (with the ATF totally unaware of the presence of the three boys).
For its first two acts, Red State roars ahead like an out-of-control steam train barrelling from sex comedy to (potential) torture porn and finally into guns-a-blazin' action film, then just as it looks as though it's about to head off into further gonzo territory, the story leaps off the tracks and disappears into a very downbeat, low-key and rather unsatisfying, over-talky, ending.
There are signs of Smith's touch all the way through, from the creative foul-mouthness of the lads and the witty banter of their teacher in one of the openng scenes, through the moments of deadpan comedy and stylish camera work - also showing heavy Tarantino influence - but the movie belongs to the central performers - Michael Parks on one side as the demented Westboro Baptist-inspired preacher and harassed ART officer John Goodman on the other side of the divide (a long way from Dan in Roseanne), given orders he's not entirely comfortable with following.
Red State suffers from its own indecision over who it wants to hold up as its protagonist (given a particularly Hitchcockian twist near its middle), yet at times it's a very strong film when it's letting the characters' actions speak for themselves. However, to then sit down and spell things out at the end totally crashes against the cinematic maxim of "show, don't tell".
In the extras, Smith says that by the conclusion Cooper is a broken man who has realised that everything he believed in was a lie, but I just didn't see that on screen at all. He appears just as deranged as he did when we first met him.
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