Rip Off

Author notes

How much Keeffe is in this movie anyway? Miles O' Keeffe!

metabad

on May 23, 2010

Ator is a character featured in four European movies made in the 1980s. He was created by Italian director Joe D'Amato, under the pseudonym David Hills. D'Amato wrote and directed the first, second, and fourth films in the series, himself disregarding the existence of the third. Ator was played in the first three films by Miles O'Keeffe and Eric Allan Kramer in the fourth.

Swordsman, alchemist, scientist, magician, scholar, and engineer, with the ability to sometimes produce objects out of thin air (see Ator 4). Unintentionally comic moments sometimes arise when writer/director Joe d'Amato has Ator use modern-day technology in the film's medieval setting. For example, in the second film of the series, Ator storms a castle using a 1980s style hang glider, and later destroys the "Geometric Nucleus" with what appears to be a nuclear bomb, complete with mushroom cloud, at the end of the film.

The character appears to be a parody (or direct copy) of the main character in the popular Conan movies (the first Conan film, Conan the Barbarian, was released March 15, 1982; the first Ator movie was filmed shortly thereafter and came out later the same year, premiering October 7, 1982). Both Conan and Ator are heavily muscled, scantily clad Western European men (Ator is meant to be Scandinavian, whereas Conan, portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, appears to be Germanic) who do battle against bizarre monsters and fantasy villains in unspecified time periods based on the Middle Ages. Controversy has existed for some time that D'Amato—who was repeatedly blacklisted in Europe—created Ator as an attempt to make money from the success of the Conan films.