Horizons Norse

From the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.
- supposed British prayer

...Where were we? Oh, that’s right, we were talking about how hard it is to make a good Viking movie. (Prerequisite reading: previous "Go A-Viking" blog post)

In 1967, Hammer Films Productions, the studio that pumped new blood (in all its neon-crimson vibrancy) into legendary screen frights Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula and the Mummy, presented "The Viking Queen." The movie was loosely based on the exploits of Boudica, a Celtic queen who led a revolt against occupying Roman forces in ancient Britain, and was primarily produced as a showcase for eyefuls of curvaceous Finnish beauty Carita in the title role, the second and last role in her screen career.

Incidentally, there isn't a Viking to be found in the film, but we mentioned "The Viking Queen" at the onset because that also happens to be the title of one of the earliest Viking movies, a silent picture made in 1914, apparently lost forever like so many movies from that era. Going back even further, we can only imagine what "The Viking’s Bride" (1907) and "The Viking’s Daughter" (1908) depicted. We do know that the 1928 silent film "The Viking" starred a young Donald Crisp, who matured into a versatile character actor, memorable for his Oscar-winning supporting role as the stern but loving patriarch in director John Ford’s "How Green Was My Valley" (1941).

In the wake of "The Viking," it would be 30 years before Hollywood produced another major motion picture about Norsemen, appropriately titled "The Vikings" (1958), and it would be a doozy, a rollicking, old-fashioned entertainment on a grand scale, recalled with nostalgic fondness by many movie buffs. Director Richard Fleischer, in his own words, set his film "in a romantic, time-shrouded period of history that hadn’t been done to death in a hundred other movies."

Well, it had been done the previous year, albeit on the cheap, by B-movie king Roger Corman. Also known as the "King of the Drive-In Movies," the prolific producer and director could crank out a film - on a minuscule budget - in less than two weeks and make money on it. He served as a mentor for several noted directors early in their careers, among them Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard and John Sayles, as well as jump-starting the acting careers of Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro and Peter Fonda.

"The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent" (1957) told the story of, in Corman’s words, "the wild adventures of some Viking women who set sail to find their long-lost men who have disappeared at sea while fighting the dread Monster of the Vortex." In his 1990 memoir How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Corman noted, "AIP (American International Pictures) had been going with short catchy titles for its films, but no one could summarize the complicated plot in a few words so I went the other way."




The movie’s budget was around $100,000 and starred Abby Dalton (above left), later a familiar face on television, including regular appearances on such game shows as "Hollywood Squares" and "Match Game," and a recurring role on the prime-time soap "Falcon Crest." "I shot it in ten days," Corman recalled, "with most of the rugged Nordic exteriors done at Iverson’s Ranch and Bronson Canyon," both popular filming locations in California.



"It turned into an insanely difficult shoot," Corman said. "At Iverson’s I hit my all-time record for most camera setups in a day - seventy-seven. I was just going like crazy." Abby Dalton remembered, "Roger, on his way to setting his record, set up shots so quickly in the canyons that one of the Viking girls in the background raced through a shot with her sunglasses on. No one even noticed."

Mel Welles, an actor who worked with Corman on a number of pictures (most memorably as Mushnik, the harried plant shop owner in the original "The Little Shop of Horrors"), once commented on the director’s singular approach to filmmaking: "In spite of the shortcomings and short tempers involved in trying to shoot a movie in a quarter of an hour, Roger was a driven, committed filmmaker. He was…very decisive whenever things fuzzed. He knew how to focus and forward the action when there wasn’t time for subtleties, courtesy, politeness, and innuendo."

As for 1958's "The Vikings," director Richard Fleischer, in his 1993 autobiography, Just Tell Me When to Cry, reminisced, "It promised to be great fun - a roistering, rowdy swashbuckler; plenty of action, adventure, sex, and violence…" Star Kirk Douglas, who also happened to be the film’s producer, described it as "a big outdoor picture, a sort of Scandinavian western." (Four years earlier, Fleischer directed Douglas in the Disney hit "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.")



"Right from the beginning," Fleischer recalled, "Kirk and I saw the picture the same way. We aimed for two goals: quality and authenticity." The two decided "to make this the most authentic picture about the Vikings that had ever been made or could be made. This film had to be accurate in every detail." Costumes, weapons and architecture were exhaustively researched and reproduced. The fearsome long ships, also known as "snake ships," were painstakingly recreated from historical plans. For just a single scene depicting Douglas on horseback, the filmmakers scoured northern Europe for a genuine Norwegian Fjord Horse, also called a Viking horse, a breed shorter in stature than others but made up for in reliable sturdiness.




When it comes to authenticity, one might fault Kirk Douglas for not spoiling his chiseled, cleft-chinned Hollywood visage with a Norseman’s beard as Einar, the hot-blooded son of Viking chieftain Ragnar (played to the hilt by Ernest Borgnine), but the box-office savvy ploy is tactfully dismissed as the vanity of the character, who, as Ragnar explains, "scrapes his face like an Englishman."

It's sensitive, soulful-eyed Tony Curtis who needs a shave as Eric, the Viking slave who turns out to be Einar’s half-brother. Add the distracting presence of a kidnapped Northumbrian princess (played by Curtis’ beautiful, real-life spouse, Janet Leigh) and you have the formula for a deadly romantic rivalry. "If I can’t have your love," the lustful Einar declares to her, "I’ll take your hate!"

(Below: Publicity photograph of "The Vikings" cast)



One writer astutely observed that Douglas was "born to play a Viking." He insisted on performing most of his own stunts, including a rousing reenactment of oar-dancing, a long-forgotten feat performed by Norsemen as their long ship slid into home port. The crew held their oars horizontally while exuberant Vikings bounded from staff to staff, stern to bow, without slipping into the icy waters. "It was a stirring and moving sight," director Fleischer proudly recounted, "a direct, authentic glimpse into the ancient past, something no one in the whole world had seen for more than a thousand years."

Although director and star had gotten along famously during the production of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," Fleischer, in his autobiography, pointed out that the making of "The Vikings" brought out Douglas’ "unreasonableness, ego and short temper" in "ample quantities" of "browbeating and petty tyrannies." Fleischer wrote, "If it hadn’t been for Kirk, it would have been a wonderful picture to make. Of course, without Kirk, there wouldn’t have been any picture."

A year afterward, Douglas embraced Fleischer and laughingly told him, "You know, you’re the only director who ever survived two pictures with me!" Fleischer agreed, noting, "You don’t make pictures with Kirk, you survive them."

Joseph Roquemore, author of History Goes to the Movies, called "The Vikings" "a rare, reasonably convincing portrait of Viking culture and warfare." He remarked, "Filmed in and around Norway’s majestic fjords, ‘The Vikings’ delivers epic battles and authentic period detail…and drips with a cold, foggy atmosphere that takes you straight back to medieval Scandinavia." In his book, The Hollywood History of the World, George MacDonald Fraser noted, "‘The Vikings’ is what a historical epic should be: an excellent film in its own right, and a striking evocation of period. It is fiction against a carefully researched historic background, shot wherever possible in the proper locations, and presented with feeling for its subject."




"The Vikings" led to the short-lived TV series "Tales of the Vikings," produced by Kirk Douglas’s production company, Brynaprod, and starring Jerome Courtland as Leif Ericson. (Courtland, a busy actor on television in the 1950s and 1960s, later became a busy television director for such series as "The Flying Nun," "The Love Boat," "Dynasty," "Falcon Crest" and "Knots Landing.") His stalwart sidekick, Finn, was played by Walter Barnes (below right), familiar to Clint Eastwood fans as the cowardly sheriff in "High Plains Drifter" and bare-knuckle fighter Tank Murdock in "Every Which Way But Loose." Filmed on-location, using costumes, props, ships and sets left over from "The Vikings," the half-hour program lasted a single season in 1960.




The success of "The Vikings" also inspired a new trend in the Italian sword-and-sandal genre that gave us "Hercules Unchained," beginning with "Erik the Conqueror" (1961), starring Cameron Mitchell. Mitchell, one of the founding members of The Actors Studio in New York City, originated the role of Happy Loman in the Broadway debut of Arthur Miller’s "Death of a Salesman," a role he reprised in the 1951 film version. He is probably best known for playing Buck on the popular late 1960s TV series "High Chaparral."



"Erik the Conqueror" was directed by Mario Bava, famous as a director-screenwriter-cinematographer from the golden age of Italian horror films (see "Black Sunday," "Black Sabbath," "Blood and Black Lace"). Cameron Mitchell and Bava worked together again on "The Last of the Vikings" and "Knives of the Avenger" (also known as "Viking Massacre"), earning Mitchell recognition from one writer as "the Italian industry’s resident Norseman."



Second only to "The Vikings" in popularity was 1964’s "The Long Ships," a boisterous, rowdy comic book of an adventure starring Richard Widmark as a wisecracking, treasure-hunting Norse ne’er-do-well and Sidney Poitier as a cruel Moorish chieftain who forces the Vikings on a quest for a legendary gigantic bell called the "Mother of Voices," fashioned from gold looted by Christian Crusaders in Byzantium.




Russ Tamblyn (memorable as the oddball Hawaii-obsessed psychiatrist Dr. Jacoby on the cult TV series "Twin Peaks"), then an acrobatic actor known for his exuberant dancing in such movies as "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," "West Side Story" and "Tom Thumb," brought the same lively athleticism to his role as Widmark’s kid brother (below).




The casting of Italian beauty Rosanna Schiaffino as Poitier’s number-one wife in his harem initially worried American studio suits who were concerned about the depiction of an interracial relationship when the country was in the midst of a civil rights turmoil. The filmmakers, however, overrode the objections. (Apparently, U.S. distributors had no issue with Poitier’s abduction of a blonde Nordic princess into his harem.)


Three full-sized Viking ships were constructed for "The Long Ships." Filmed in the former Yugoslavia (now Serbia), the coasts of which filled in convincingly for both Scandinavian and Moorish locales, the movie was directed by Jack Cardiff, who, coincidentally, was the cinematographer for "The Vikings." (Recalling Cardiff’s contribution to "The Vikings," director Richard Fleischer boasted, "He just made this picture look like an oil painting all the way through…It was one of the most beautiful jobs of color photography I’ve ever seen…It’s really a beautiful picture.")


Allegedly, Widmark disliked the script and camped up his role, while Poitier hated his dialogue and played it deadly seriously. Years later, however, Widmark told an interviewer, "I had a good time making it, but I don’t think the audience had a good time watching it."

The New York Times critic Howard Thompson noted, "‘The Long Ships’ is a big one for the eye, if not the mind…splashing color, gore and enough action to rattle five Westerns. No one is going to sleep through this one…A hollow movie and a loud one - but it moves." He added, "Big, empty, gory - yes. But flavored with a floridly apt musical score, this…production simply boils with locomotion, some of it fine movie stuff."



It would be nearly 15 years before moviemakers cranked out another Viking movie of note, albeit a sour note, when TV actor and then-Mr. Farrah Fawcett, Lee Majors, produced and starred in "The Norseman," loosely based on the historical premise that Norse seafarers reached Newfoundland on Canada’s rugged northeastern coast.

L’Anse aux Meadows is the archaeological location in Newfoundland believed to have been a Viking settlement, established in 1003 by Leif Ericson, hundreds of years before Columbus’ historic voyages. The Norsemen called the region Vinland, meaning either "wine-land" or "meadow-land." Confronted by too many dangers and too far from their homeland, the Vikings ultimately abandoned the site. According to a Nordic saga, the Vikings thought it was "a beautiful, rich land, but we can’t defend ourselves on it."

The presence of Vikings in North America sparked an ongoing controversy right here in the moviehouse backyard when, in 1898, a Swedish-American farmer named Olaf Ohman, while clearing his land of trees and stumps in the rural township of Salem in Douglas County, Minnesota, supposedly unearthed a 200-pound slab of gray sandstone, engraved with characters from the archaic Germanic runic alphabet.





Dubbed the Kensington Runestone, after a nearby settlement, the monolith’s text, dated 1362, relates that thirty Norsemen had arrived on an "acquisition journey" from Vinland. A Viking fishing party returned to camp only to discover ten of their comrades "red from blood and dead," presumably massacred by Skraelings - the Norse name for indigenous peoples. "Ave Maria save from evil."

Most experts have deemed the Kensington Runestone a hoax. Despite numerous analyses and dismissals of its authenticity, it remains on display at the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota, which still claims to be the "Birthplace of America."

But we digress. It was the legacy of the Scandinavian settlement in Vinland that inspired the makers of "The Norseman." Lee Majors, fresh from TV stardom on the series "The Six Million Dollar Man" (he had previously costarred in the western series "The Big Valley"), hungered for big-screen stardom. What he got instead was a string of cardboard hero roles in forgettable, low-budget potboilers. In "Steel" (1979), he played a trucker and famed construction foreman taking on an evil corporation; in "Killer Fish" (1979), he was a master jewel thief taking on ravenous piranha; and in "Agency" (1980), he took on…well, an evil ad agency. It all started with 1978’s "The Norseman."




Sporting a ‘70s porn-star mustache, wearing a ridiculous, eagle-topped helmet with a built-in Zorro mask and persistently pronouncing "Norsemen" as "Norz-z-z-men," Majors portrays Thorvald, leader of a Viking expedition that has sailed across the Atlantic in search of the hero’s long-lost father and his crew, the survivors of which turn up as slaves of a tribe of Native Americans, blinded and forced to toil at grinding corn for their captors.


The rugged terrain of Newfoundland was laughably substituted with the white sandy beaches and palm trees of Florida by director Charles B. Pierce. A director, screenwriter, producer, set decorator and cinematographer, Pierce had established himself as a regional auteur of the South with such shoestring-budgeted, homespun thrillers as "The Legend of Boggy Creek," a faux documentary about a Bigfoot-like creature, and "The Town that Dreaded Sundown," based on a real-life Texas serial killer. (Later in his career, Pierce befriended Clint Eastwood and worked as the set decorator on "The Outlaw Josey Wales." Pierce co-wrote the original screen story for the fourth Dirty Harry movie, "Sudden Impact," and is credited with creating Eastwood’s iconic phrase, "Go ahead, make my day!")




"The Norseman" features Hollywood veterans Cornel Wilde and Mel Ferrer as Viking elders, both in thrift-store wigs and Halloween beards, "behind which to hide their embarrassment," according to Time Out Film Guide. (Time Out also noted the flabby white extras disguised as "Indians who resemble Grateful Dead roadies given the freedom of the makeup department.")
Thorvald’s Viking crew, all of whom wear plastic helmets with glued-on horns (Vikings did NOT wear horned helmets), includes NFL Hall of Famer defensive end Deacon Jones and Oakland Raiders wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff. (What? Nobody from the Minnesota Vikings was available?)




Overacting honors go to venerable character actor Jack Elam as Death Dreamer, the Vikings’ onboard psychic friend. Dishonorable mention goes to "Indian Woman," portrayed by the instantly recognizable Kathleen Freeman (above), whose 50-year career playing comedic busybodies and battle axes was especially noteworthy for her appearances in a number of Jerry Lewis pictures.

Portraying an Indian maiden, Susie Coelho, the third Mrs. Sonny Bono (of four), wears a buckskin mini-dress (as did most Native American women at the time). (Of East Indian and Portuguese heritage, Coelho is now a multi-media lifestyle guru, offering tips on home style, gardening, cooking and entertaining.)

Speaking of woeful miscasting, Majors’ role as Thorvald has been likened to John Wayne’s shameless performance as Mongol chief Genghis Khan in "The Conqueror" (1956). In 1981, Majors wisely returned to television as the star of the series "The Fall Guy."

(Incidentally, there was a historical Thorvald, who, in fact, reached the shores of Vinland, like his brother, Leif Ericson, only to be killed with an arrow by a one-legged Skraeling.)



Inevitably, one aspect of Viking lore would be capitalized upon by the horror genre, and in 1987, some guys with loose change in their pockets produced "Berserker: The Nordic Curse." (Berserkers were an elite, particularly feared breed of Viking raiders, so notorious for their unbridled ferocity that they were supposedly held in chains between battles.) Shot in the wilds of Utah, the grade-Z slasher begins with the usual dead-teen premise as six horny adolescents (played by obviously older young adults) camp in the woods, where they end up getting sliced and diced by something with claws. The terrifying menace could be either a lumbering grizzly bear or the hulking incarnation of a Viking berserker, who wears a bear’s snout and hide. By movie’s end, the two beasts face off against each other, but by then, no one cares.



On the subject of no one caring, in 1989, Terry Jones, co-director of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and director of "Monty Python’s Life of Brian" and "Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life," wrote and directed "Erik the Viking," inspired by his 1983 children’s book The Saga of Erik the Viking. According to an onscreen credit, "This film is not based on children’s book…by Terry Jones. (Although he hopes it will help the sales.)"



Tim Robbins stars as Erik, a clumsy, baby-faced, somewhat dense Viking with a conscience, reluctant to partake of the Nordic lifestyle of pillaging and raping. Eager to find an end to the endless winter brought on by Ragnarok (the Nordic apocalypse), Erik leads a shipload of mates on a quest for a magical horn that will awaken the gods in Valhalla and restore peace and order in a savage world.

Los Angeles Times critic Chris Willman called the film "a stillborn comedy in which minutes sometimes mysteriously go by between even attempted gags, and in which no comic scene works up to any kind of viable punch line or payoff." Roger Ebert dubbed it "an utterly worthless exercise in waste and wretched excess, uninformed by the slightest spark of humor, wit or coherence."

According to Ebert, ninety percent of the "comic invention" in the film "is based on Vikings speaking as if they were 20th century satirists of themselves. The other 10 percent of the movie consists of guest appearances," including Mickey Rooney as Erik’s grandfather, Eartha Kitt as a witchy seer and John Cleese as what the A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin described as "an evil warlord with the buttoned-down soul of a middle manager."

"Some of the film’s random silliness hits its target," Rabin commented, "most notably a deranged Japanese slave-master who torments his pale-skinned charges with racial insults, calling them ‘incomprehensible horizontal-eyed trouser-wearers’ who have never ‘committed ritual suicide’ in their lives. ‘How I abominate your milk-drinking and your lack of ancestor worship!’"

After "Erik the Viking’s" dismal reception in the U.S., Jones edited the 100-minute film down to an hour-and-a-half for its British release. In 2006, Jones’ son Bill, for whom Terry originally wrote the children’s book, cut an additional 15 minutes for the DVD release, appropriately titled "The Director’s Son’s Cut." Nathan Rabin concluded that "if current trends provide any indications, around 15 years from now, Jones should absolutely kill with ‘Erik the Viking’s’ smash-hit musical Broadway adaptation."


In 1976, Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton published the novel Eaters of the Dead, based in part on the actual tenth-century accounts of Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a Muslim ambassador from the Arab Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad who journeyed north and traveled with Vikings from Sweden. The latter portion of the novel is an unsubtle reworking of the Anglo-Saxon epic medieval poem "Beowulf," with ibn Fadlan joining a shipload of Norsemen on a mission to defeat supernatural fiends who eat human flesh.

Antonio Banderas was cast as ibn Fadlan, now (appropriately for the actor’s romantic Latin image) a poet in political exile after a tryst with an Arabian nobleman’s wife, in the 1999 film version, the title of which was changed to "The 13th Warrior" and a production which took more than a year to get to the screen.




Original director John McTiernan, who enjoyed great success with pictures like "Die Hard," "Predator" and "The Hunt for Red October," was replaced by Michael Crichton himself, presumably due to a ballooning budget and disappointing test screenings. Crichton was no stranger to directing, with a number of impressive credits, including "Westworld," "Coma" and "The Great Train Robbery."



Added up, production and marketing budgets totaled $160 million, while "The 13th Warrior" raked in less than $62 million, making it one of the most expensive flops ever. According to Roger Ebert, "it displays a lot of cash on the screen, but little thought. To extract the story from the endless scenes of action and carnage is more effort than it’s worth. The film seems to have been conceived from the special effects on down…it apparently began with f/x and then the story was shoehorned into the pauses in the action…‘The 13th Warrior’ is another example of f/x run wild, lumbering from one expensive set piece to the next without taking the time to tell a story that might make us care."

Stephen Holden, critic for The New York Times, remarked, "If the juiciest bouts of professional wrestling…leave you feeling unfulfilled and pining for the primal howls of fight-to-the-death combat, ‘The 13th Warrior’ just might be the answer to your prayers…More than once, the movie gives you the delirious thrill of ripping off your enemy’s head and watching the blood gush by providing a ringside seat."

A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias wrote, "Intended as a grave tribute to super-masculinity, ‘The 13th Warrior’ is more like a Dungeons & Dragons game writ large, a silly and gratuitously brutal fantasy." The film "can only be taken as an action movie built on the perverse assumption that severed heads, flying limbs, and oceans of blood are acceptable entertainment outside of the ‘Evil Dead’ trilogy." Tobias noted, "Signs of post-production abound…but nothing could save this loud, crass, overpriced dud from being resigned to the late summer dumping ground."




Omar Sharif (still a mesmerizing screen presence, 49 years after his breakout role in "Lawrence of Arabia") was so dissatisfied with his part as ibn Fadlan's faithful courtier that he took a hiatus from films. "After my small role in ‘The 13th Warrior,’" Sharif told an interviewer, "I said to myself, ‘Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because it pays well.’ I thought, ‘Unless I find a stupendous film that I love and makes me want to leave home to do, I will stop.’ Bad pictures are very humiliating, I was really sick. It is terrifying to have to do the dialogue from bad scripts, to face a director who does not know what he is doing, in a film so bad that it is not even worth exploring."


Despite Sharif’s disenchantment, in his 2001 book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilified a People, Jack Shaheen, a mass communications and media studies professor, included "The 13th Warrior" on his "Best" list of films with positive, balanced, even heroic portrayals of Arabs.

Filmmakers tried to do something creative with the genre in 2003’s "Blood of Beasts," basically transplanting the classic fairy tale "Beauty and the Beast" into the Viking Age. Unfortunately, their imagination was undersold by a limited budget, resulting in cheap-looking sets, costumes, props and shoddy special effects. Particularly laughable is the cover art on the DVD jacket that boldly rips off the look of "The Lord of the Rings" posters.



Laughability brings us to our next feature, "Pathfinder" (2007), which Michael Ordona, of the Los Angeles Times, called "one of the funniest films of the year." To its credit, Ordona did like the film’s setup: "One of the Viking expeditions to reach North America hundreds of years before Columbus leases as its only survivor a 10-year-old boy. The child is raised by Indians, who call him ‘Ghost’…Years later, the Norsemen return to exterminate all Indians, and only the native-friendly Ghost can stop them. Dismemberments ensue." (The Icelandic Sagas told of some deadly encounters between Viking settlers and Native Americans, but there was no drawn-out conflict nor a Norse strategy to ethnically cleanse the region.)


The Native Americans encountered by Leif Ericson were presumably the Beothuk people of New Foundland. Those depicted in "Pathfinder," set a couple of centuries before Ericson’s arrival, are the Wampanoag (or Wanapoos) of the New England area. These movie Indians are not far removed from the "Dances with Wolves" tribe, living an idyllic existence in fairy-tale villages. Adding a false sense of authenticity is Russell Means, the Oglala Sioux activist who delivered such a fine performance as Chingachgook in "The Last of the Mohicans" (1992), here battling clichés as the mystical tribe elder.

Director Marcus Nispel went on record as saying he was going to do "something very authentic with the Indians," but admitted, "We’re going to take license with the Vikings." Heavily armored and armed, the Norse performers wore shoulder pads to amplify their threatening, hulking presence. Unlike the simple helmets of leather and metal strips worn by the actual Norsemen, headgear here is ostentatiously ornamented with bones and imposing horns, emphasizing the bestial essence of the invaders. Clancy Brown, who plays the menacing Viking leader, Gunnar, commented, "What we have is probably more imagination than truth. But it is a movie." It should be noted that although the Norsemen communicate mostly in grunts and howls, when they do speak, it is in the historically accurate Old Icelandic language.




It’s too bad Clancy Brown (above) is practically hidden under pounds of armor and fur and layers of makeup and beard as Gunnar, but there’s no mistaking the piercing gaze and brute magnetism that has made him an enduring cult favorite, from his role as the Kurgan in "Highlander" to Frankenstein’s Monster in "The Bride," Capt. Hadley in "The Shawshank Redemption," Sgt. Zim in "Starship Troopers," Brother Justin Crowe in "Carnivale," and Meacham the preacher in "Cowboys & Aliens." His nemesis, Ghost (or as one critic dubbed him, a "circa 900 AD Rambo"), is played by the very athletic Karl Urban (below), familiar to "The Lord of the Rings" fans as Éomer. He also portrayed Dr. McCoy in the 2009 "Star Trek."




Nispel graduated from directing a multitude of commercials and music videos to directing the 2003 remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." "Marcus Nispel," critic Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times, "takes his butchery very seriously…He may not be able to make this movie move, but, man, can he make an eyeball fly." A.V. Club’s Tasha Robinson pointed out that Nispel "puts a heavy-handed directorial stamp on the proceedings," which includes enshrouding most of the action with an annoyingly persistent "ultra-saturated blue-black pallette," bringing new meaning to the Dark Ages. And fog? "Seriously," critic Michael Ordona wrote, "they went a little bananas with the fog."


"Pathfinder" covers territory all too familiar from "Conan the Barbarian," "Dances with Wolves," "The Last of the Mohicans," "Apocalypto" and "300." However, this may be the first movie with a Viking Age version of a 007-worthy chase, as Ghost uses a shield for a toboggan to race down a snowy slope, pursued by Norse warriors on conveniently located sleds. The film, in Ordona’s words, "is aimed strictly at teenage boys, with its arterial sprays and mysterious machismo. This one is an instant ‘Mystery Science Theatre 3000’ classic, ideal for watching on TV with loud friends."

Appropriately, our voyage through Viking cinema comes to an end on the stark, rocky coastline of the New World depicted in the haunting "Valhalla Rising" (2009). The somber drama was made a half-century after the raucous Kirk Douglas-Tony Curtis adventure, "The Vikings," but it seems more like eons separate the two movies.




Co-written and directed by Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn and shot on rugged, unforgiving locations in Scotland, "Valhalla Rising" stars Mads Mikkelsen (a charismatic Danish actor familiar as Le Chiffre in the 2006 James Bond film "Casino Royale" and as Draco, the gruff captain of the guard, in "Clash of the Titans") as One Eye, a mute pagan warrior (said to come "from hell") held prisoner by a Nordic chieftain and forced to fight in wagered death matches. A.V. Club’s Scott Tobias noted, "He acts out of self-preservation…he never acts out of passion, ideology, or easily definable motivation." The opening minutes of the picture are jarringly brutal, including broken necks, bashed brains (literally), slashed throats and disemboweling.

Accompanied by a boy who served as his caretaker in captivity, One Eye eventually falls in with a band of Christian Vikings (played by Scottish actors) on a journey to fight in the Crusades. It is their seemingly interminable sea voyage, listless and lost in a blinding fog, that launches what Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir dubbed a "hallucinatory Viking odyssey," an existential ordeal that becomes more unsettling when the fog breaks and the would-be Crusaders find themselves in the strange wilderness of a "New Jerusalem," where they are threatened by an unseen enemy.

The viewing experience, in O’Hehir’s words, "plays…like a feverish nightmare." He called it "a fugue-state meditation on the medieval encounter between Europe and America rather than a comprehensible yarn that travels from a beginning to an ending." If Ingmar Bergman had made a Viking movie, it might have played out much like "Valhalla Rising." There are lengthy silences and lingering shots of motionless actors, almost frozen in meaningful poses. While Vadim Rizov of the Village Voice found the film "maddeningly ponderous and self-important," Scott Tobias deemed it "a beautiful head trip…like a John Milius film reduced to its pure, masculine essence."

Our Vikings have come a long way since Kirk Douglas jumped the ship’s oars (and slipped), Cameron Mitchell swashbuckled in Nordic short-shorts and Richard Widmark found the "Mother of Voices" - a cinematic saga worthy of Icelandic warrior-poets.