''Gunan, King of the Barbarians'' (), aka ''The Invincible Barbarian'' is a 1982 film directed by

Franco Prosperi Franco Prosperi (2 September 1926 – 17 October 2004) was an Italian film director and screenwriter, active between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. Career Born in Rome, Prosperi began his career as an assistant director with Mario Bava ...

Production

''Gunan, King of the Barbarians'' uses footage from ''

One Million Years B.C. ''One Million Years B.C.'' is a 1966 British Adventure film, adventure fantasy film directed by Don Chaffey. The film was produced by Hammer Film Productions and Seven Arts Productions, Seven Arts, and is a remake of the 1940 American fantasy f ...

''.

Release

''Gunan, King of the Barbarians'' was released in Italy on 9 September 1982. The film has also been released as ''The Invincible Barbarian''. As of 2016 the only available copies of ''Gunan, King of the Barbarians'' were home made DVDs sold on

eBay eBay Inc. ( , often stylized as ebay) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that allows users to buy or view items via retail sales through online marketplaces and websites in 190 markets worldwide. ...

that are sourced from

pan-and-scan Pan and scan is a film editing technique used to modify widescreen images for display on a fullscreen screen. It involves cropping the sides of the original widescreen image and panning across it when the shot's focus changes. This cropping ca ...

transfers from

VHS VHS (Video Home System) is a discontinued standard for consumer-level analog video recording on tape cassettes, introduced in 1976 by JVC. It was the dominant home video format throughout the tape media period of the 1980s and 1990s. Ma ...

tapes.

Reception

Colin Greenland Colin Greenland (born 17 May 1954) is a British science fiction writer, whose first story won the second prize in a 1982 Faber & Faber competition. His best-known novel is '' Take Back Plenty'' (1990), winner of both major British science ficti ...

reviewed ''The Invincible Barbarian'' for ''

Imagine Imagine may refer to: * Imagination Music Albums * ''Imagine'' (Armin van Buuren album), 2008 * ''Imagine'' (Eva Cassidy album), 2002 * ''Imagine'' (Janice Vidal album), 2012 * ''Imagine'' (John Lennon album), 1971 ** ''Imagine: John Lennon' ...

'' magazine, and stated that "What makes this Invincible Barbarian invincible? Probably the fact that everybody he comes up against is even more stupid than he is. See how long you can watch this one without giggling." From retrospective reviews, the German book ''Lexicon des Fantasy-Films'' referred to the film as a rip-off of ''

Conan the Barbarian Conan the Barbarian (also known as Conan the Cimmerian) is a fictional sword and sorcery hero created by American author Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) and who debuted in 1932 and went on to appear in a series of fantasy stories published in ''We ...

'' but "only dumber".

References

Footnotes

Sources

* *

External links

* Sword-and-sandal Sword-and-sandal films Films directed by Franco Prosperi 1980s Italian films Films about barbarians {{1980s-Italy-film-stub