The Beastmaster
All actors and roles (10)
All team (91)
Short description
A king's infant son is targeted by a priest who wants him dead, so the boy is raised by a hunter instead of in the palace. Years later, when raiders kill the man who raised him, the grown Dar learns he can speak with animals and sets out for revenge against those responsible, joined by a black panther, an eagle and other animal companions. The priest Maax has seized power and threatens the land with terror, so Dar's personal hunt becomes a wider fight against a tyrant. The film is a sword-and-sorcery adventure drawn from Andre Norton's novel.
Don Coscarelli directed and co-wrote the film with Paul Pepperman, placing it between his debut Phantasm in 1979 and Phantasm II in 1988. Marc Singer plays Dar, with Tanya Roberts as Kiri, Rip Torn as Maax, John Amos as Seth and Rod Loomis as King Zed. The production had a reported budget of about 8 million dollars and returned roughly 14 million worldwide, a modest commercial result for a fantasy release of its time.
Ratings are mixed. On IMDb it holds 6.2 out of 10 across about 27,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.3 out of 10 from a much smaller pool of 478 votes. A critics' score of 5.2 out of 10 from 12 reviews sits below both audience figures, so viewers have been somewhat warmer toward it than reviewers were.
What's left behind the scenes
- Eighteen-year-old Demi Moore, who had no prior acting experience, auditioned several times for the role of Kiri, Dar's friend. The director was very pleased with the results and was ready to offer her the role, but the producers preferred Tanya Roberts.
- Dar’s black tiger was actually an ordinary striped tiger painted black for filming. Every time the tiger drank water, the paint would run, and the stripes were clearly visible near its mouth in certain scenes.
- The trained eagle often refused to fly when needed, and to get the necessary shots of the bird in flight, it was dropped from a hatch of a hot air balloon lifted into the air.
- Despite not being a major box office hit, "Beastmaster" became one of the most popular and successful films in the history of cable television.
- Don Coscarelli, the director, producer, and originator of "Beastmaster," sold all rights to the film and its characters. As a result, he had no involvement whatsoever in subsequent sequels or the television series, and received no income from them.
- Producer Dino de Laurentiis was so impressed with the film that he invited Don Coscarelli to direct his next project, "Conan the Destroyer" (1984). The director declined the flattering offer, finding the proposed script simply terrible.
- The animal trainer initially hired was fired during filming and replaced with another.
- For safety reasons, the actor playing young Dar was prohibited from being on set at the same time as the tiger. A short stand-in wearing a special wig was used to film those scenes.
- Director Don Coscarelli was a big fan of writer Andre Norton's work as a boy, and her novel "Lord of the Beasts" served as the basis for the film.
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