The Lessons of Yor--with updated pics!

Maybe it's just because I miss JP and Batmite!, but I'm on a tear about bad movies I saw as a kid.  This one can really give Rem Lezar a run for his brass medalion.  Enter, Yor, The Hunter From the Future!!

This was another brilliant pick by my mother, and its plot was pretty weird for girls who were eight and ten when they saw it. The movie came out in 1983. Here's the plot.

The movie opens with Reb Brown jogging around the stone towers of Cappadocia, Turkey while a rock ballad plays in the background.
[Here's the totally bitchin' YouTube theme song with the introduction of Yor. Note how incredibly unathletic he seems to be. Also, I think the main catchphrase in the song is "Yor (something), he's the ma-an!"]

In a nearby village, Kala, a seemingly primitive cave-woman, and her older protector Pag are hunting. Suddenly, they are attacked by an animatronic triceratops. Yor appears out of nowhere and cracks the skull of the dinosaur. Yor is befriended by the village and joins in the feasting.
While Yor is there, a band of cavemen with blue skin attack the village. Only Yor and Pag escape. Yor immediately swears to get Kala back. Yor and Pag track the blue cavemen to their lair where Yor clubs a giant bat to death with a rock. He uses the dead bat like a hang glider to storm the lair and sneak out the back of the cave with Kala before flooding the cave.
Eventually, Yor (in an effort to discover his true origins), makes his way to an island surrounded by storms. There he discovers that his parents were from a small band of nuclear holocaust survivors. An evil man named the Overlord has taken control of the remaining nuclear technology with his android army.

Yor is the epitome of manliness. Don't believe me? Watch this brief clip of how he deals with modern weaponry:


It is on this island that he discovers a female who is blonde and presumably of his race. The brown headed girl Kala sees this as an imminent sexual threat and beans her in the head with a rock, killing her. At the time, I remember thinking that was probably the best thing to do. The best line of the movie comes when Yor stares helplessly with rising frustration at the alien communication device. Yor to alien communicator: "Damn talking box!!!" We thought that was pretty risque. Yor also wears a medallion, which is the source of his quest. Maybe Mom had a thing for movies with medallions in them?

Reb Brown was a really crappy actor who made a couple of guest appearances on Miami Vice and he was Captain America in the TV version, which Wiki calls "unsuccessful." He was also in Space Mutiny, which seems to be his bigger claim to fame.

You can actually watch the whole movie in parts on YouTube, if you want to. And I'm betting a couple of you actually will. You know you want to...

But he has helped shape my thinking when it comes to trying to navigate nonhuman phone services--you know, the ones where you have to push one for English and then two for something else and then five if you have this particular problem and then enter your account number followed by the pound sign, etc.: "DAMN TALKING BOX!!!"

Or, maybe the movie should've just released straight-to-teenage-girls'-bedroom-walls posters of Yor's glamour shots. That might've been more successful:



-- Virgil