As the Roman empire crumbled in the fifth century CE, everyone wanted a piece.
The Barbarian Conquest of Rome, 400-500 CE. (Map by Joshua Kemble. Click for larger version.)
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Yaks (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Oct 2011 04
As Genghis Khan famously declared, “Nothing comes between a barbarian and his yak.” Or, as Charles Manson put it, “A barbarian without a yak is like a basketball full of lymph.” I’m not sure what he meant, but the sentiment is clear. So if you don’t already own one, it’s time for you to sell your kids and a buy a yak. Here are some tips for selecting a good one.
1. Different breeds have different specialties. Know why you’re getting a yak: as a working animal, for food, or for love?
The Striped Yak (also known as the Mandrill Yak) is popular with children and Muppets.
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Barbarian How-To: Surviving an Art Museum
Sep 2011 23
Art museums can be desperately boring places if you’re not looting them, but every now and then you should visit one just to remind yourself why you hate civilization so much. There are a number of ways to entertain yourself while you’re there. Have no fear, you don’t have to “get” “art” to have a good time!
1. Bring a set of paints to fix the paintings. Don’t forget your broadsword– you’ll need it if the security guards get all up in your face.
BEFORE: an old dull-ass painting by some loser in France or someplace
AFTER: a masterpiece!!
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Barbarian Movie Review: Kilma, Queen of the Amazons (1975)
Sep 2011 17
Kilma, Queen of the Amazons (Kilma, La Reina de las Amazonas). A Spanish production filmed around Barcelona, directed by Miguel Iglesias Bonns.
Rating: 2/5 Golden Axes
Summary: A thrilling island adventure that questions our understanding of civilization, barbarism, and prehistoric notions of femininity, and dares to synthesize them into a coherent statement about modernity. Aw, who am I kidding?
Kilma, Queen of the Amazons, and Dan Robinson share a tender moment with a musket. Why is this the first picture in this review? Because, unlike the director, I didn't want to waste a lot of time with the movie's plot before showing the movie's title character.
This is the name of the movie, not the name of the boat.
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Barbarian Movie Review: Hundra (1983)
Aug 2011 31
Barbarian Movie Review: Ironmaster (1983)
Aug 2011 30
Ironmaster (1983) aka La Guerra del Ferro, starring Sam Pasco and George Eastman.
Rating:
(3/5)
Spaghetti cannibal director Umberto Lenzi’s Ironmaster opens with a caveman wandering around Custer, South Dakota in a loincloth with an atrocious neckbeard, all set to knock-off Morricone (by Guido and Maurizio de Angelis). A tribe of scruffy savages spy some plastic elephants and complain about having weak stone-age weaponry– and good god, that actually sets up a plot!
After a battle with a local tribe of ash-covered idiots, the tribe’s resident bad guy Vood kills the tribal elders and is expelled. Vood (played by George Eastman, aka Luigi Montefiori, a 6’9” Ringo Starr look-alike) discovers iron (“a stone of divine power”) after a volcanic eruption, kills some out-of-frame lions, joins up with a hottie named Lith (a stone-age Lady MacBeth) and starts the world’s first arms race. Vood takes over the tribe, now unstoppable thanks to having one sword-shaped iron rod, and militarizes them with dreams of conquest.
He spends the rest of the movie wearing a dead lion head.
"And I thought they smelled bad on the outside!"
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Barbarian Movie Review: Colossus and the Headhunters
Aug 2011 18
Editor’s note: from time to time we’ll be posting barbarian movie reviews here on Skullbasher.com. There are also quite a few more prominent titles reviewed in the book. Movie ratings range from 1 to 5 Golden Axes. And yes, sooner or later we’ll be covering the new Conan the Barbarian movie with Jason Momoa, especially if Lion’s Gate wants to send us a screener and press kit, hint hint! Anyway, without further ado, here’s…
Colossus and the Headhunters (1963) – a.k.a. Maciste Contro i Cacciatori di Teste. Released in the USA by American International Pictures.
(2/5)
In this peplum pablum, Maciste (Kirk Morris) and his pompadour dye-job arrive on an island just in time for a volcano to force the inhabitants onto his raft. Maciste leads the tribe to another island, where they’re all immediately enslaved by, well, the “good” tribe, one of whom immediately shoots Maciste through the heart with a bow and arrow. Lucky Maciste recovers in full a few minutes later. The actual bad guys are a neighboring gang of headhunters (although you’d only know it by a couple of plastic skulls on posts). After Maciste has a low-intensity romantic moment with the good-guy queen Amoa (Laura Brown) she frees the captives. Some boring stuff happens to kill time, then Maciste winds up rescuing the queen from the leader of the evil headhunters while the two-and-a-half tribes square off and set some huts on fire. Maciste doesn’t do much of anything for most of the movie besides stand around with his shirt off, but he eventually defeats the evil headhunter leader which ends the conflict. Case dismissed, Maciste rides off into the sunset on his trusty raft with the queen swimming after him and declaring her eternal love. Their inevitable breakup is left to your imagination.
That’s pretty much the entire plot. If you’re wondering where Colossus is in all that, well, apparently he’s Maciste although they never say so in the English dub. In English, the movies were usually retitled with another hero’s name, e.g. Samson, Goliath, Hercules, etc.. There were a few more cheesy Maciste movies before Morris retired in 1971– 25 in total (though only 5 starred Morris). That’s not counting the 27 silent films (1914-1927) or the two in the 1970s by Jess Franco. 54 movies? Apparently Italians love them some Maciste! This entry was written and directed by peplum veteran Guido Malatesta, whose name loosely translates as “I drive bad head.”
Maciste, a.k.a. Colossus (Kirk Morris, a.k.a. Adriano Bellini) scoffs at the Queen's request for help. Yeah, I watched the MST3K version, got a problem with that?
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Barbarian Calendars
Aug 2011 16
Civilizations have always relied on sophisticated astronomical calendars to determine when to plant and harvest crops. Barbarians, however, mostly used their crude calendars to determine auspicious times for starting wars, i.e. so they could get out of the house when their wives had PMS.
The classical Mongolian calendar consists of nine thirteen day months followed by one six-hundred day month. Festivals coincide with the appearance of airplanes in the sky over southeast Kyrghizstan. Nowadays, these are celebrated by stir-frying bats and serving them with chocolate chips and crushed drywall.
The Bunglorian calendar has five three-day months followed by a 350-day leap year every year. This corresponds to the Gregorian calendar, except that every day of the entire calendar is a Tuesday. This calendar predicted the birth of Christ in 957 CE and the destruction of the planet Earth in 1994.
The only other known barbarian calendar, last used in the Hyborian age, has twenty-nine three-hour months, with a twelve-second month at 6:15pm on Arbor Day. Hours are seventeen days long, except during five random festivals where time decelerates, then stops and reverses until a child is born with creepy reptilian snake eyes. These are known as Füg Flügür Cycles and the last one ended upon the birth of James Spader in 1960 CE. By the Hyborian calendar, this event occurred 1246 years before the birth of Christ.
The Coligny Calendar, an ancient Celtic device, predicted the rise of Insane Clown Posse.
