Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Orla Zuniga It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

steven-222 Let's see, our "hero" is a rapist...a fratricide...AND a traitor, to the Duke who elevated him...and all for the sake of getting his rocks off with the only available hot box in the boondocks. Please don't tell me he did it for LOVE. That chick does have a smokin' bod, but she also has the personality of a sack of rocks...if a sack of rocks could quiver like a timid girl and pout. Ugh.As for the cinematic qualities, it is hard to imagine anyone too young to have been to a drive-in movie sitting through this. I suspect most of the viewers who rate this film highly are at least 50, and saw it when they were boys. I'm glad it reminds them of their carefree barefoot days playing sword-fight in the back yard, but don't hold your breath waiting for the remake.One interesting footnote: I bet this is the movie dwarf who inspired that dwarf in Game of Thrones. He's a dead ringer! And George R.R.Martin is old enough to have seen The War Lord at the local drive-in when he was a boy.

sol ***SPOILERS*** Almost laughable 11th century costume epic with Chuck Heston sporting a Prince valiant hairdo as blood & guts Norman Knight Chrysogan who's put in charge by the Duke of the a Druid village on the Normandy coast. Chrysogan's job among other things, like collecting taxes, is to protect the village from the hated Frisian.Besides fighting off the Frisians Chrysogan is also looking for some action in town since in being in combat in the crusades for the last 20 years he needs a woman's touch to relive all the pent up sexual frustration, in not being with a woman, he's since developed. Spotting the beautiful peasant girl Brouwyn, Rosemary Forsyth, feeding the pigs outside town he has his second in command Bors,Richard Boone, check her out for him and see if she's married or not. As it turns out Brouwyn is already taken or to be married to her boyfriend Marc, James Farentino. But because he's now the big man in town Chrysogan uses this archaic law about the right to spend the last night with a virgin before her wedding day he has things turn his way. As for Marc in seeing that his sweetheart and future wife is to be taken for the night by the lustful Chrysogan he loses it and eventually joins with together his pop Odins, Niall MacGinnis, the village elder the hated Frisians.The film really starts to move when Chaysogan's jealous kid brother Darco, Guy Stockwell, starts to make waves in him shaking up with Bronwyn and spending more time with her then in defending the land or village that the grateful Duke has given him. This soon leads to a violent confrontation between the two brothers where Darco who had just come to the rescue with his calvary, in preventing the Frisians from overrunning the castle that his brother is commanding, getting the short end of the stick or dagger in his gut by a very reluctant, in trying to avoid killing him, Chrysogan.Besides all the corny and ridicules sub-plots in the movie it's the action scenes that saves the " The Warlord" from being the bomb of a movie that it at first looked like it was headed for. Chuck, Heston that is, is at his best as the fearless Warlord Chaysogan together with his top kick or #1 man Richard Boone as Bors as they turn the tide against the invading Frisians in the films exciting final battle scenes. ***SPOILERS***The heart-broken Marc who turned traitor when his love Bronwyn willingly dumped him for Chrysogan still seeks revenge against him only to have himself get run through, by a large tree branch, by Bores who by then was about the only on left, besides Chrysogan,of those defending the castle from the invading Frisians. The Frisians by then were so beaten up that they were glad to get back on their ships and sail back home,to Norway, to lick their wounds and forget they ever tangled with Chrysogan. As for Chrysogan with him looking like he's about to kick off, from the wounds he suffered by Marc nailing him, he's now a king or knight without kingdom in that by the time the movie is finally over just about all his subjects are dead & buried or just checked out,together with the Frisians, for good.

Spikeopath The War Lord stars Charlton Heston, Richard Boone, Rosemary Forsyth, Guy Stockwell, Maurice Evans, Niall MacGinnis, Henry Wilcoxon and James Farentino, amongst others. It's directed by future Oscar winning Director Franklin J. Schaffner (Best Director for Patton), and the screenplay is by PJohn Collier with the adaptation coming from the play, The Lovers, written by Leslie Stevens.The War Lord harks back to days of yore as we enter the 11th century and ancient Normandy. The film successfully brings the period down to the nitty gritty and doesn't glamorise either the characters or the way of life of the various social dwellers. Time has been afforded the pagan mythologies that existed back then, whilst the upper class' rights such as "droit de seigneur" (ius primae noctis) forms the back bone for our story as Heston's Duke falls for the Druid peasantry virgin (Rosemary Forsyth) he has claimed his right too, tho his inner conflict with the ways irks him so. Thanks to Schaffner the film manages to blend its dialogue heavy plot with some well crafted battle scenes, with the use of weaponry and tactics particularly impressive. You can see that this hasn't just been thrown together as a cash in historical epic featuring Chuck Heston. The cast are strong, particularly Boone and Stockwell, while Jerome Moross (score) and Russell Metty (cinematography) capture the time frame with skill.Rarely talked about in terms of historical epics, or even Heston epics come to that, The War Lord is however one of the more tightly written and thematically interesting movies from the genre. 7/10

syntinen It's rotten luck when someone takes the trouble to make a historical drama based intelligently on the best historical knowledge available to them, only for subsequent research to prove it completely wrong. This fate befell The War Lord, which hinges on the idea – a perfectly respectable academic theory in 1965 when it was made – that the "jus primae noctis" was a survival of pre-Christian fertility rites. A couple of years later a French historian thoroughly exploded the idea that the custom ever existed at all; this left the film looking like an obvious historical nonsense, and as it doesn't contain enough wall-to-wall action for the average "never-mind-the-sense-bring-on-the-swords-and-battle-axes" fan of historical epics, it's been all but forgotten. A pity, because there's really a lot in it to like.The hero is an 11th-century Norman knight, Chrysagon (Charlton Heston in a brutally unflattering Norman haircut), who after many years' service as a household knight has finally been given a fief of his own somewhere on the North Sea coast to defend against Frisian incursions for his master the Duke. (It's not clear which duke – of Normandy?) The action opens as Chrysagon arrives with his younger brother and small following of fighting men to claim his fief. They're pretty underwhelmed by it – it consists of swampy coastal forest, the castle is a grim dank primitive tower, and the paganism practised by the local peasantry unnerves them considerably. Still, a fief's a fief, and Chrysagon has fought a long time for this hike in status.One of the local customs entails brides being taken to the local lord for their wedding night – for luck, fertility etc. Chrysagon rejects this custom not out of virtue but because he recoils from this pagan carry-on, and anyway, a Norman lord should be able to ravish peasants for himself - he shouldn't have to wait till they're brought to him. However (and you all saw this coming, didn't you?) one day his hounds chase a beautiful local bride-to-be into a pond and …… Okay, the plot is a bit cheesy – but the whole thing is surprisingly realistic and medieval; you get the feeling that everyone concerned was genuinely trying to think themselves into the 11th century. Someone went to a lot of trouble working backwards from 19th-century European folklore and forwards from The Golden Bough to imagine how an 11th-century fertility rite might have been enacted – it's not their fault said rite never existed. The village really looks as though nothing very much has moved on there since the Migration Period, and the lord's tower is genuinely Romanesque. (Okay, it's more 12th than 11th century, and any stone tower at all would have been the last word in luxury and modernity back then – but that's nitpicking.) The Normans have the usual Hollywood knitted-string mail, but you can tell that the designer was looking hard at the Bayeux Tapestry. (And possibly even at the Norman-Sicilian clothes in the Imperial Treasury, judging by the side neck fastening on the Unreliable Younger Brother's tunic!) But it's not only the look of it that they tried to make medieval, but the way everybody thinks and behaves. Somebody thought through the questions "did 11th-century Norman fighting men believe pagan gods existed at all, and if so what did they think they were?" and "how might Norman knights and priests have squared with their consciences participating in pagan customs?". Chrysagon is not only good but (according to his younger brother) tediously righteous; but everybody, including him, assumes that he can and will shag on the spot any peasant who takes his fancy. (It's only a superstitious fright that stops him.) He has power of life and death over the peasants, and takes for granted that they are inferior, yet he also accepts that local law and custom have some weight which he can't simply brush aside. It's going to be a hundred years before anybody invents courtly love, so all the Normans – including Chrysagon himself – take for granted that any feeling for a peasant girl deeper than crude lust is as at best an unmanly weakness, at worst madness or bewitchment. His men are all loyal followers of many years' service, but as they see their lord starting to go mushy over some slut and endanger them all by provoking a peasant revolt on her account, their loyalty starts to crumble. His younger brother, who was more-or-less content to play second fiddle to him when they were both household knights, finds himself resenting the gap in status that has opened up between them now he is his brother's vassal. All this has credibility.It's far from perfect. Perhaps it really was necessary to label the peasants' religion as "Druidism" in order to convey the notion of pre-Christian paganism to the average viewer - but did they really have to call the heroine "Bronwyn"? (A friend of mine was misled by this into assuming the action was set in Brittany – she couldn't otherwise account for "Druids" and Celtic names!) And she is the one real embarrassment of the film. Her character is written as hopelessly sweet, feeble and drippy – no detectable personality - and Rosemary Forsythe doesn't look or sound like any kind of peasant from any place or time in history. Even so, The War Lord is one of the most medieval films I've ever seen, and is definitely worth watching if you can find it.