Mystery Science Theater 3000 season 12, episode 6 recap: Ator

One more movie to go in Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Gauntlet.

The suffering of Jonah, Servo, and Crow is now reaching the end but not without first having to sit through the Conan the Barbarian rip-off “Ator, the Fighting Eagle” on this episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

The plot point about Idiot Control Now gets resolved rather underwhelmingly as the song gets delivered to Erhardt without further incident.

For today’s invention exchange Jonah gives Swiss Army Cheese where blocks of cheeses are stack and folded like a Swiss Army Knife.

Kinga meanwhile has the Totino’s Pizza Roll Popper where pizza rolls are shot out a T-shirt cannon. Honestly this kind of feels like a real thing that could happen in a stadium someday so point to Kinga.

Now onto movie sign.

More. Mystery Science Theater 3000 season 12, episode 5 recap: Killer Fish. light

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Not much to say about the cast this time around. The leading man playing Ator, Miles O’Keeffe, doesn’t have much else of note in his career besides playing the title character in John Derek’s Tarzan, the Ape Man and starring in another Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed episode, the Ator sequel, Cave Dwellers.

There’s also Sabrina Siani as Roon. Siani became fairly well known in her home country of Italy for a few years mostly doing sword and sandal flicks like this one and cannibal movies before ultimately retiring from acting at 26.

As the film opens, the baby Ator is born with a mark that says he is destined to one day defeat the Spider Cult that rules over the land. Despite Dakkar’s, the cult’s leader, best efforts to kill the baby before this can happen, Ator is whisked away by a man named Griba (who kind of looks like John Wayne when he played Genghis Khan) to be raised by another family in secret, who have also just given birth to a daughter Sunya. The villains are still better off than when Voldemort tried pulling the crap.

Years pass and now Ator is all grown up. He and Sunya have fallen in love with each other (Jonah: Record scratch), so Ator goes to his father in the hope they can marry each other. This goes a lot better than Ator expects since his father informs him way too happy that he’s adopted and his parents are actually delighted at the idea of them marrying. Not to put a damper on the happy occasion but it feels like everyone involved is kind of glazing over the whole adoption thing.

Anyway, the wedding day comes but the village is ransacked by the Spider Cult and Sunya is kidnapped. In the aftermath, Ator is the only remaining villager left alive.

As Ator starts his journey to confront the attackers and rescue Sunya, he once again meets Griba and he informs him of his destiny to defeat Dakkar. With that in mind, he trains him to be a great warrior set to montage music described by Servo as sounding like mob hit is about to go down.

During Ator’s training, he witnesses a woman named Roon being attacked by three men and goes to help. They make short work of the men but Roon insists she could’ve handled things herself and admits they chased her because she robbed them.

Griba, apparently deciding Ator’s training is complete leaves him on his own to fulfill his destiny but leaves his sword behind.

This might not have been such a great idea though because Ator gets captured by Amazons very soon afterward. The tribe decides to use Ator as a prize in a fighting tournament in which Roon turns out to be the winner. The plan is to have Ator impregnate Roon and then kill him. So basically death by snu-snu.

When Roon hears of his plan to attack the Spider Temple, she decides to help him escape and attack with him in the hopes of stealing the temple’s treasure.

Ator’s survival instincts haven’t improved though since he gets lured away by a woman who appears to be Sunya. It turns out to be a witch who tries to seduce Ator and trick him into believing Sunya is a happy concubine for Dakkar. Since Ator isn’t too bright, this almost works until he is rescued by Roon.

As the plot eventually goes forward again, Griba once again finds his way back into the movie. He tells Ator that he must attain a shield that will grant him immortality. He succeeds once again mostly by Roon saving him from his own stupidity.

Ator and Roon attack the temple where he is able to make fairly short work of Dakkar. Not through any actual skill on his part but mostly because his shield is magic. Roon volunteers to stay behind to finish the henchman while Ator completes his quest.

Ator then goes to rescue Sunya only to be stopped by Griba. As it turns out Griba had been the previous cult leader and only trained Ator so that Dakkar would be killed and he could resume leadership of the cult once again and now that Ator has fulfilled his purpose he must die. Griba trained Ator a little too well though because Ator is able to kill him and rescue Sunya.

Ator then kills the giant spider worshiped by the cult to defeat them for good, though Roon ends up getting fatally wounded off-screen.

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The threat defeated, Ator and Sunya happily frolic away.

With the movie and The Gauntlet now over, Kinga prepares to send Jonah, the robots and bunch of bad movies on a shuttle to Earth as part of her latest plans for world domination.

In a cruel twist, however, Jonah convinces Kinga and Max to load the latest movie canister themselves which Jonah has secretly booby-trapped. Now they themselves are being forced to sit through the experiments starting with Mr. B Natural.

What did you think of this episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000? Be sure to tell us in the comments below!

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