Review of Knives of the Avenger (1966) by Zach M — 02 Jul 2008

I don't know what it was about Italians and these Viking epics, but they sure are silly. I'm just glad that this movie isn't called Hercules and the Knives of the Avenger.

Well, this is Bava's first foray away from the horrific kind of movie and it kindof isn't the worst movie ever. I won't even say it is good, but I've seen a lot of these trashy movies under the Mystery Science Theater 3000 or The Film Crew label. These kinds of movies suck. They one-star suck. This movie isn't the worst and you can kind of follow it, so I have to give it three stars. (By the way, get ready for me to start turning on Bava in the near future about this kind of stuff. His movies go from really clean and cool to just absolutely convoluted when it comes to storyline. This one is at least making a little bit of sense.).

If you were to classify this movie into any genre, I would have to put it into the action epic category. The most absurd idea behind Knives of the Avenger is that, like it sounds, the main character uses knives as weapons. That's not to say that he uses knives like a knifefighter, slashing and ducking. No. He's awesome at throwing them. Now, that can be cool if executed once or twice, but a billion times. I mean, there's not much action going on with this movie. It's just that the main character runs into problems with oodles of henchmen and he dispaches them all with an unlimited supply of throwing knives. Where the hell does he get all those knives? There's no way that he would be carrying that many knives on him at any one point that he could just dispose of knives like bullets.

But the worst thing is that you don't really see the knives fly and hit their targets. It's just people miming that they are being hit by knives and falling out of sh*t. There's a guy in a tree. The viking throws a knife (because he sees him in the tree) and he falls out. Replace tree with high walls or gates or stairs. First of all, in an era without guns, what is everyone doing in trees. Shouldn't they be weilding some bows and arrows or something? I mean, the guy throws knives. You'd think after you found most of your forces dead from knife and fall wounds, you'd want to change up your approach, but these guys don't listen. Stupid Vikings.

The main story is more like "eh." You want to see the guy kick the old husband's ass because he's being a puss. Yes, there's always matters of honor and dignity and boning another man's wife, but the guy spared him time and time again. Does he honestly think that he won that fist fight? It was obvious that he didn't fight back.

Okay, this wasn't so much of a review as it was a rant. This is another good drunk movie, but don't expect a lot out of it. It doesn't have that much going for it besides the fact that it is a halfway decent Italian Viking movie. The biggest issue I have with the movie is that you just don't care about the main story. After a few movies, Bava really got involved with how important the story is to justify all this action. This movie has a ton of action. Too much action. Hell, if people aren't throwing knives at one another, then they are teaching children how to throw knives and laughing it off.

All I can tell you is that the "teaching to throw knives sequence" isn't as powerful as Shane teaching the kid about how to shoot a gun.

But there's all kinds of backstory. I mean, there's the backstory of the princess on the run. Then there's betrayal and people hate each other. It's very unneccessary to follow the details. All you have to know is that someone wants to be king through marriage. I'm sure that if he cut off enough heads, things would work out fine, but then there'd be no one to root for.

This is silliness and I'm amazed that I've devoted this much bandwith to this movie.