Italian sleaze master Joe D'amato is known primarily for bringing the world loads and loads of nude Laura Gemser, and you can't hate a guy whose claim to fame is something like that. The rest of his career is peppered with gory horror, twisted sexploitation, Satanic lesbian nuns, and hardcore porn. Leave it to a guy like this to generate one of the earliest family-friendly sword and sorcery films. The Ator series represents the true bottom of the barrel of the sword and sorcery boom, which is why there are so many of them. Directed with lazy competence and even lazier incompetence by D'amato, the films are a mish-mash of fantasy, action, science fiction, and profound doses of tedium. The scripts were shabby, even by sword and sorcery standards, and the budgets were minute, especially when compared to the treasure chest heaped at the feet of Conan. D'amato's films featured none of the sleaze and nudity other sword and sorcery entries would trumpet -- odd given this particular director's filmography includes movies like Anal Paprika and Porno Holocaust.

The fun begins with Ator, the Fighting Eagle, in which our hero falls in love with his own sister and has to constantly get out of jams with the help of his pet bear cub. It is a blueprint of everything a bad fantasy movie should have. First, there is the prophecy that a child born with a particular birthmark will grow up and kill the evil king, so according to evil king mandate #102, the evil king orders the death of all babies everywhere. His men ride around in black and decimate entire settlements in order to provide the film the requisite scenes of masses being oppressed and slaughtered by guys in black. Ator, the child of the prophecy, is hidden away and eventually grows up to be Miles O'Keeffe. Miles is, of course, the working Joe's answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's not as big, but he's better looking. More athletic than bulky. Not a bad guy, just someone in a bad movie. It's not really that he's a bad actor either; it's more like he just doesn't give a damn and just needs the money. Hey Miles, remember when you were fondling Bo Derek in Tarzan The Ape Man? Yep, good times. Good times.

Ator spends most of the movie on his quest to kill the evil king, a quest that involves some of the most shockingly awful sword fights ever recorded. Fatal sword slashes fall inches, sometimes even a foot, shy of their targets who diligently do the job and lie down as if just cleaved in two. But best of all, Ator faces off against a seeming unbeatable shadow warrior -- literally, a guy off camera standing in front of a light so that he casts a big shadow on the wall next to Miles O'Keeffe, who then swings his sword around in roughly the same vicinity as the shadow's sword while foley artists loop in the sound of clashing metal so long as the sword and the shadow sword are within a few inches of each other. It really is one of the most preposterous scenes ever, made even sillier by the fact that the giant magic light that makes the shadow warrior within the context of the film itself is sitting out in the open, and it takes Ator and his princess sidekick quite some time before they decide to just throw a cloth over the dang thing and be done with the whole battle.

And this is the best film in the series.

The adventure stumble son in The Blade Master, also known as The Cave Dwellers. In an homage of sorts to the first film, which ended with unrelated footage of a volcano erupting, the second scintillating Ator adventure opens with stock footage of the atomic bomb exploding. What the hell? In order to justify this, the movie's narrator tells us that some old wizard has made some terrible discovery, apparently the discovery of how to split an atom using a bowl and one of those grain-grinding mortars.

Naturally, a guy in a cheap wig wants to steal the discovery so he can explode his own atomic potions. How exactly you would use this is unknown. By all logical guesses, the first time the wizard invented the atomic explosion in his little lair, he should have toasted himself and the entire kingdom. How do you get far away and still detonate an atomic potion? You know, there's a reason atomic bombs are delivered from very far away by very fast-moving vehicles, just as there is a reason no one has ever bothered with atomic hand grenades.

A young woman travels to the ends of the earth to find Ator, which takes her about half a day. Along with his sidekick, the loyal Thong, Ator goes a-questing to rid the kingdom of the evil invader and his army of at least half a dozen men. The best action comes when Ator and Thong are stomping around in a cave looking for some bad guys. Suddenly, Ator starts flailing about. "They're invisible!" he shouts, and he and his friend proceed to fight imaginary! Invisible? How expensive can it be to employ a couple Italian bums, dress them up in fake fur, and let Miles O'Keeffe kick them? Imagine how exciting it would have been if the heroes were invisible, too!

Suddenly, one becomes nostalgic for the sophistication of the shadow warrior fight from the first film.

Ator devises a superior plan to storm the castle that involves his Chinese buddy and the girl mounting a frontal attack while he "provides a diversion." So, what is Ator going to do to distract an entire army? If you answered, "spontaneously invent flight and build a powerful hang glider complete with bamboo frame and perfectly stretched and fitted animal skin wings," then you are correct. And if you went on to guess that he would invent flight and build the entire glider, complete with the treating of the hides, in under thirty minutes, well then you too could be an Ator-like hero.

Iron Warrior, third in the series that shouldn't have been longer than one film, manages to confound the viewer by being twice as weird as any Ator movie that came before, yet still just as dull. D'amato, having made all the money he needed or simply having had his fill of Miles O'Keeffe in a loin cloth, ditched the series and went on to a career in hardcore porn. Directorial duties were assumed then by Alfonso Brescia, who seems to want, if nothing else, to prove he could still make a really strange film. This is, after all, the same man who directed Conquerors of Atlantis starring Kirk Morris back in 1965. That was easily one of the most outrageous and action-packed of all the peplum films, and snagging a seasoned sword and sandal vet for a sword and sorcery adventure seemed like a sure thing. Brescia was one of the only peplum directors to attempt the transition, and this movie displays that we were lucky few others gave it a go. Despite having been the man behind such a delightful peplum adventure, Iron Warrior is a maddening mess, which would be fine if it wasn't so dull.

Miles is back again as Ator, this time with his hair neatly braided and the loin cloth exchanged for a pair of jerkins. It's possible he isn't Ator at all. In a move hearkening back to the retitling of many peplum films to include the name of Hercules, Iron Warrior seems to be an unrelated sword and sorcery film that was retroactively dubbed into the Ator canon in order to ... well, they usually do this sort of thing to exploit the wild popularity of the other films, but it's not as if kids were lining up around the block to greedily consume anything with Ator's name attached to it. Well, whoever this guy is, he's called upon to interrupt his training in which he stand atop a cliff and uses a full-length mirror to watch himself strike manly sword-wielding poses, and he must help a young princess defend her kingdom from an evil witch and her metal-head number one warrior, who looks a lot like Destro from GI Joe.

Ator and the Iron Warrior engage in many a scintillating battle, the best of which involves the two adversaries standing at opposite ends of a hall. The Iron Warrior throws two spears at Ator, who being all mighty and everything, catches them and hurls them back. But then, the Iron Warrior is equally as mighty, and he catches the spears and throws them back at Ator. But Ator is not out of mightiness yet, and he catches the spears again and throws them back again, and the Iron Warrior catches them again. This goes on for quite a while, until the princess, sensing that this is all monumentally stupid, shows up and tells Ator they should split, which they do by casually strolling down a secret corridor. And this is the big problem with the movie: it's very casual. There is quite a lot of action, and it is all staged in a way that maximizes dullness. Say what you will about Ator's fistfight with the invisible guys. At least he put some effort into it. This time around he looks like he's doing tai chi.

And thus would end Miles' turn as the somewhat mighty Ator. O'Keeffe managed a fairly successful, if not entirely respectable, career in b-movies and direct-to-video features. His first big role was Tarzan the Ape Man, which was basically a movie John Derek made so he could see his wife, Bo, naked with a monkey. Gee, everyone wants to see Bo Derek naked, but no one wants to see Bo Svenson naked. Where is the justice?

Despite the title, Tarzan the Ape Man focused primarily on Jane and the many ways in which she came to be without clothing. From time to time, she would swing around with Miles O'Keeffe or take her playful romping with the family orangutan just a little too far for it to avoid being somewhat disturbing. The movie was panned. While few argued the fact that Bo Derek was a knockout in the buff, so too did few people care to argue that she was one of the worst actresses to ever recite lines in front of a camera. Critics also hated that the movie dwelled on Jane rather than Tarzan, but teenage boys across America defended this choice. Despite their chorus of support, there was no denying that Tarzan the Ape Man was a rotten film. But what the hell, Miles probably figured. He got to roll around on the ground with a naked Bo Derek. Only the manliest, most verile of men, like Miles O'Keeffe and Dudley Moore, were able to make such a claim.

Miles made a couple more films in America, S.A.S. San Salvador and Sword of the Valiant, before he hopped a plane to Italy and became Ator. As bad as the Ator films were, they still manage to entertain, though not necessarily in the way they were meant, and part of the reason is because no matter how bad his acting job or the material, there is something inherently likable about Miles. He’s like the cool older brother who gives you a copy of Playboy and takes you and your friends for rides in his muscle car. Aside from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Miles O'Keeffe became one of the genre's only "regulars." Schwarzenegger had three sword and sorcery films under his belt -- Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, and a supporting role in Red Sonja. Likewise, O'Keeffe appeared in three Ator films as well as the somewhat sword and sorcery related Arthurian spin-off Sword of the Valiant. Still, neither guy stands out as a "sword and sorcery" actor. Arnold, after all, became one of the biggest movie stars of all time and hopped from one genre to the next as it suited him. Miles, in the meantime, plied his trade in a series of low budget and direct-to-video (or cable) action films that have kept him busy and going strong.

Miles O'Keeffe did not return for the elusive fourth in the Ator series, and in fact neither did Ator since it is about the exploits of the son of Ator. It did see the return of Joe D'amato to the directorial throne, however. The film, alternately known as Quest for the Mighty Sword and Ator III: The Hobgoblin, what with it being the fourth film and all (or maybe they are refusing to acknowledge Iron Warrior -- I'm sure debates over canonical Ator movies must rage somewhere), involves a struggle against a troll who also appeared in the D'amato helmed Troll 2, the only movie with the power to make the viewer say, "Man, I sure wish I was watching the original Troll."