Supposedly there was a little fad in the late fifties and early sixties following Kirk Douglas’ The Vikings where everybody in charge of those Hercules, Maciste or whatever name they were giving their hunky slab of beefy sword guy movies, decided to break out the long ships and fur trimmed coats to cash in on the Nordic craze that was sweeping some remote part of Minnesota.

Mario Bava, never one to miss a chance to jump into a low budget picture whose director quit (see I Vampiri), grabbed his wife’s Ginsu knives, drove out to some part of Italy where people still lived like it was the year 800, got Cameron Mitchell to dye his hair yellow, yelled action and a week or so later you’ve got the greatest of all Italian Viking movies in the can!

To be fair, the film is intermittently entertaining and makes good use of the coastal locations, but things are hampered a bit in the middle when nothing much happens and it felt like they were just killing time before the final act could begin.

It all starts curiously enough with an old hag on the beach giving advice to Karin about the future along with the aid of some little diagrams drawn in the sand. I wasn’t really listening to what she was saying because generally it’s my policy to dismiss the dire predictions, the flashbacks, the curses, and the seizures these types go through as the ravings of a crazy old woman.

Karin is worried about her and her son (Moki) because she is the wife of King Harald and he’s been missing for three years. In the meantime, a warrior named Hagen has gotten it into to his head to capture both of them.

Later, Karin reluctantly hooks up with a stranger who suddenly appears at her cabin. Since Harald has been gone for three years and the child support checks haven’t exactly been rolling in she agrees to let him keep hanging out and to be a role model for her son.

The stranger and his new family get on famously. He’s teaching Moki things like how to shoot a bow and arrow, how to throw a knife and how a woman’s place should be in the kitchen. Karin just grins approvingly since before her son was just a yellow-haired sissy, but now is a full fledged Viking warrior!

It’s a happy time with day trips to the stream so that Moki can watch his new daddy go after a salmon with a knife and his bare hands and with Karin parading around in her snug fitting Viking outfit that shows us the Vikings were the inventors of the bullet bra.

Karin lets the stranger in on her secret origin with a dose of flashback containing the standard Viking elements of wedding-day beheadings, doublecrosses, and rape. As expected, Hagan was involved as was this new man in Karin’s life whose name we learn is Rurik.

Rurik has returned after all these years to settle up with Hagan. Hagan tries to capture Rurik which allows Rurik to throw some of his daggers (that’s his gimmick – he can throw knives really well) and outsmart the traps that are laid out for him.

This is the part of the movie where things seem to drift about listlessly like a boat loaded with King Harald and his troops. There’s some running around in the wilderness between Rurik and Hagan’s men and there’s some hanging out at the local pub where Rurik sits in Hagan’s chair and tries to set up the title fight with Hagan.

After an indecisive battle with Hagan as well as a brawl with the returning Harald, word comes that Hagan has kidnapped Moki. About this time Harald and Karin also have their big encounter and Rurik can tell that he’s seen the last of that Viking bullet bra, so he says he’s going to go after Moki and everyone races off to the secret grotto where Hagan is holed up.

A reformed Viking rapist determined to be a good father and boyfriend combined with a husband finally coming home gives this story the flavor of the tragedies of the ancient Greeks or at least One Life To Live.

Frankly, I was on the edge of my seat wondering just how could it all possibly play out! As it turned out, barely at all! No one seemed too put out about the rape, Moki immediately forgot how cool Rurik was once Harald returned, and Rurik just kind of slunk off into the sunset with little more than patting Harald on the back.

The movie is still worth seeing for what it attempts and for the better-than-average result that Bava wrings from this material. The shots are well-staged – the location filming provides lots of nice scenery and the village is convincing in its primitiveness.

The dubbing has a tendency to remind you of the film’s cheesy origins and brings to mind all those silly-assed Hercules movies, but the emotion that Cameron Mitchell manages to give Rurik over his screwed up life puts it head and shoulder above the rest of its ilk, in spite of the cavalier wrap up the movie gives us.

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