Tanya Roberts will probably never be a respected actress, but she was given some pretty awful material to work with. I've always liked John Amos, who gave some real feeling to his lines. The desert locations were the most depressing parts of the film (for me -- I've never really liked deserts) -- but it does offer (for its time) some very good ideas in terms of telling a fantasy story (even though the original story was a science fiction book).

The bird creatures, for example, were well used, even if some people saw the ending coming. The Jonzz horde was not well developed (why were they running around the landscape slaughtering whole tribes?), but the Elamites were fairly well depicted. They weren't just barbarians who waited around to be slaughtered. They actually seemed to be doing stuff when they got slaughtered.

The whole problem with "Beastmaster", and other films from that era, is that it IS low budget. It shows that it's low budget. And the story drags in some parts. I think if it had been taken more seriously, it could have been a better movie. But I saw many so-called fantasy flicks when they came out in the 1980s and most were truly horrible. "Beastmaster", at least, was better than most.
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