The Norseman (Video Tape/PAL) 1983 [Orion / Rank Pre Cert Release]

rare as it might be its not worth that condsidering if you have a multi region player you could get it with another film for about 12quid on r1.it is rarer on r2 due to the fact it was only released once in 1997 and never released again

I watched this film some years ago on the T.V. It tells the story of a meeting between Viking explorers and native American Indians. A nice idea but very badly executed. Lee Majors is just about as good as anybody else in this movie, which is not being over generous. He heads the Vikings, complete with cheap Roman sandals and mass produced horned helmets. We've known for many a year that Vikings did not wear horned helmets - ever! But it doesn't stop the movie makers from perpetuating this myth. In Pathfinder (although a good movie) they still wore horns, all be they set at a different angle. Helmets from that time were basic copies of later Roman examples. Anyway, sorry about the rant. I'm only writing this because I am bored.

Drumroll please for The Norseman... Being the heroic tale of a band of Vikings who venture across the waters in their long ship Raven-in-the-Wind to Vineland (Florida to you and me), where the treacherous Indian chief Kiwonga (Jacob Jerry Daniels) is holding Mel Ferrer, the blinded father of our eponymous hero, to grind corn. And boy, do they get through corn at a rate of knots in this joyously misbegotten venture.It's the kind of movie where you keep on expecting Tony Curtis to turn up and say "Yonda lies da teepee od my fadda," but instead have to make do with Lee Majors failing spectacularly to capitalise on the success of The Six Million Dollar Man. Even more so than Tom Selleck in Christopher Columbus, you just have to feel sorry for the poor man. Wearing a Zorro mask under his helmet in a vain attempt to hide his embarrassment, he doesn't even make it to the level of Jon Hall in his Maria Montez days."To go into the forest after them is worse than crossing the high Alps to kill the white bear with empty hands," warns Jack Elam's wizard the Death Dreamer, who keeps on turning his face away at the camera at every available opportunity. (This is a minor plot point, but he's probably just using that as an excuse.) Curiously for this kind of film, the Indians don't speak American, which is odd, since the Vikings do, none more so than Lee Majors' Thorvald. Somewhat hampered in his portrayl of a heroic Viking by his inability to say words like "Oden" (rhymes with loadin') and "Noars-mun" (rhymes with oarsman), imagine a disinterested, slightly embarrassed Nick Nolte with a cold and a bad mood and you have some idea of his vocal interpretation.The Vikings may look like a cross between Hells Angels and ZZ Top roadies but there are at least some good production values for such obviously cut-price fare - the odd oil tanker may stray into shot, but at least the microphone never does - but despite cinematographer Robert Bethard's more than competent efforts, aside from a mini-Viking funeral near the beginning it looks like nothing so much as a Seventies TV movie that somehow was accidentally shot in Scope, all sharp focus and limited shadow.They don't save the first Viking to get killed on the beach because the Indians attack at 24 frames per second while the Vikings, clearly inspired by Majors' Six Million Dollar exploits, can only run in slow motion, like a Dark Ages Baywatch. Their battles with those pesky Injuns are riddled with slo-mo as well. Although much of it looks a hell of a lot better than the normal speed action it is clumsily intercut with, you do end up thinking that if the film was run at normal speed it would only be half an hour long.As the young Eric, the hero's brother, the director's sprog Chuck Pierce Jr doesn't speak for half an hour. When he does, it becomes obvious that his mom was an Okie, although he obviously lost his accent in later years if the narration is anything to go by. Other great casting includes an Injun slave driver played by Kathleen Freeman, here strikingly made up to look like Anthony Zerbe, and Christopher Connelly as a black Viking called Rolf straight out of Studio 54. Although they have a black Viking along, they obviously forgot to bring the comic relief along. Thankfully, with a script like this they don't need one.Denny Miller, the star of MGM's disastrous 1959 remake of Tarzan the Ape Man, a stock footage fest with a Shorty Rogers (!!!) score that sank without a trace at the box-office, is also along for the ride, but of the rest of the cast, only Cornel Wilde looks comfortable in this sort of thing, but then, he did have a lot of practice at this sort of thing in the good old days.It's not so much laugh out loud, more a cumulative "They must have known" factor. Well, at least the weather stayed nice for them.

Good simple 1970’s movie.

I saw this movie on tv when I was a kid and liked it. So when I saw it for sale and bought it. 90% of this movie is UNWATCHABLE, litteraly unwatchable. The dialouge is terrible. Once you think there could be nothing worse then the dialouge then you hear the narrator and you sink even lower into bad movie hell. I don't know why the producers thought this movie needed a narrator other than the fact that the characters do things that are so inexplicably stupid that their actions need to be elaborated on.The plot is simple: A band of vikings go to the new world to find out what happened to to a previous party that never returned. They find that the previous viking party have been enslaved by native americans and set about to rescue them. The band is led by Lee Majors who wears an odd looking mask for reasons he doesn't explain. The othe vikings are not dressed better. They wear these comicly huge helmets with ridiculous horns. They look like they belong to Fred Flintstone's water buffalo lodge. Their armor and weapons look like cheap stage props.The last 5 minutes, which involves and chase back to the longship, is not bad. The rest could be used at GITMO to torchure infromation out of terrorists.