Just one arrival today, but it’s a title that generated a lot of excitement the last time it came around: Don Coscarelli’s “The Beastmaster.” Coscarelli, who grew up about 40 minutes south of Los Angeles in Long Beach, was a big fan of Saturday afternoon sword ‘n’ sandal pictures like the Steve Reeves “Hercules” movies as a kid, but it was seeing Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” that inspired him to become a filmmaker. Years later, after his low budget horror film “Phantasm” became a box office hit Coscarelli used the opportunity to make “The Beastmaster,” a Bronze Age action adventure fantasy like the kind he loved as a kid — shot by none other than John Alcott, the Oscar-winning cinematographer of Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon”!
After a tumultuous production and release that included Coscarelli almost getting fired the first week, numerous decisions being imposed on him by one of the film’s producers, having the footage taken away by said producer to be edited without his participation, and, finally, being dumped in theaters without sufficent promotion, to hardly anyone’s surprise “The Beastmaster” was a box office dud. However, the film would go on to inspire a devoted following on television — first during its numerous airings on premium channel HBO (as one comedian joked, HBO stood for “Hey, Beastmaster’s on!”) and then on basic cable (prompting the joke to be amended to TBS standing for “The Beastmaster Station”) — in fact, at the time the film was second only to “Gone With the Wind” as TBS’s most requested title.