Now Available: Berserker: Hell's Warrior

[Pak-Man]

Berserker: Hell's Warrior (not to be confused with Berserker: The Squeakquel) takes your standard Viking movie and adds a unique twist: total narrative incoherence!

This comes as a shock if you've seen any of the director's previous work, such as previous RiffTrax Merlin: The Return (not to be confused with Merlin: Port of Call New Orleans), which is widely used in film classes to teach the arts of storytelling, cinematography, and how to humiliate actor Craig Sheffer.

Berserker: Hell's Warrior tells the tale of two brothers who betray each other in the quest to win the love of the Valkyrie Brunhilde, thereby incurring the wrath of Odin, not to mention Irwin Troll and Gaylord Buzzard. What follows is a time-travelling mishmash that's the cinematic equivalent of reading a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book directly from front to back without actually choosing an adventure.

Will Boar remain a cannibalistic Berserker for all eternity? Will Barek encounter delightful fish out of water antics in modern day situations? Can Odin please just get thirty damn minutes of Odinsleep, he had a very long day hanging from Yggdrasil! Find out all these answers and more in Berserker: Hell's Warrior!

Head writer
Mike Nelson
Additional contributors:
Conor Lastowka - Senior Writer
Sean Thomason - Senior Writer

Contributing Writers: Molly Hodgdon, Jason Miller, and Mike Schuster

[PontifexPrimus]

I highly recommend this one! A word of warning, though: the movie itself is _really_ badly edited, and only watching it four or five times makes it clear it's actually a very simple, linear story - a story that tries to rip off both Highlander and a bunch of vampire movies. The acting, special FX, soundtrack and props are all delightfully bad, and the riffs really focus on the weaknesses without ever being too mean.

A great, fun romp that starts out with fights between warring Viking tribes (including two full-sized actually seaworthy prop longships) and ends with the hero carrying his freshly reincarnated newborn brother out of a modern neonatal hospital ward after having killed their vampire nemesis in a junkyard.

Just don't try to follow the plot when first watching it - the flashbacks, confusing time jumps, and dream sequences make it impossible to get a feel of the underlying sequence of events; but then again this is entertaining enough to stand up to multiple rewatches.

[TriffRax]

Great riff but please please please no more Paul Matthews movies.

[Edward J Grug III]

Great riff but please please please no more Paul Matthews movies.

I love the Paul Matthews riffs. I hope they keep them coming!

[MerryWanna]

Maybe I have to watch this one again (it has made lots of difference in past Rifftraxes) but my first reaction was "meh". Same as that space movie...whathehellwuzzit called..."Reclamation"? No..."The Journey: Absolution".


Just meh. Maybe it was my mood at the time. You know how it is...

[dbsommer]

Finally got around to watching this. I had no problems following it. In fact, I thought it was light years better than Merlin: The Return.
And no, not just because Kari doffed her clothing again. While it was pure low budget, it wasn't pure drek. Not a great riff, but more middle of the pack.