Talk about going down the rabbit hole. I just finished this terrific book about Italian exploitation director Umberto Lenzi (Seven Blood-Stained Orchids/Orgasmo/The Tough Ones/Cannibal Ferox) by Troy Howarth called “Make Them Die Slowly” and I was catching up with other films I hadn’t seen by Lenzi. I finally got around to a later, low-budget, prehistoric-man, 1983 flop called Ironmaster.
Even describing the plot of Ironmaster is going to make my hair hurt. It’s just the stupidest rip off of a fantasy/adventure flick about cave people like Quest for Fire, except without all the characters speaking gibberish. (Actually, director Lenzi originally conceived of doing it that way which might have made it goofier and better). In fact, the original working-title was to be Quest for Iron. The movie opens in the prehistoric era where a tribe of cave dwellers are complaining of their lack of food. “How can we bring down a buffalo with sticks and stones?” Ela (Sam Pasco) is the oiled muscleman hero of the tribe, while the scheming Vood (George Eastman) is eventually banished for killing the elderly leader. But, during a volcanic eruption Vood discovers a sword-like piece of cooled molten steel. He kills a lion with it and returns triumphantly to the tribe wearing the lion’s head and crowning himself leader. “With this weapon, I shall rule mankind” he cries, banishing Ela and getting the tribe to gather volcanic rocks, heat them and create many more swords which they use to slaughter tribe after tribe. Ela meets up with a pretty blonde in the jungle named Esa (Elvire Audray) who leads him back to her peace-living tribe by the lake run by her pacifist father (William Berger). But Ela is forced to teach the whole tribe how to fight back to battle the bloodthirsty, power-crazed Vood. Ela even invents bows and arrows. Alright, my head is splitting from even explaining that much.
Poor, beautiful, wooden Elvire Audray was the girlfriend of one of the French investors and tragically committed suicide in 2000 at only 40. George Eastman (aka Luigi Montefiori) was a talented screenwriter and actor, most notable for his galvanizing performances in director Joe D’Amato sleaze classics such as Anthropophagus (1980), Absurd (1981) and Porno Holocaust (1981). (He’s also the minotaur in Fellini Satyricon). The big-chested lead with the bad wig who played Ela was Sam Pasco and presumably was selected from his poses in many muscleman magazines. (He was a Mr. America runner-up in 1983 and 1984). He also was a porn actor for Colt Studios known as Big Max. And Mike Spanner or Jim Craig in gay X-rated loops like Grease Monkeys. It’s doubtful that anyone at the time of the shoot knew this in that pre-internet era. Umberto Lenzi is quite nasty about Sam Pasco in interviews calling him “pathetic” and “worthless,” but I suspect someone in later years told him about Pasco’s porn background, which may have colored his opinion.
Some of the movie was shot in the Black Hills of South Dakota and the director had some of the cast run along with real herds of bison which often was quite dangerous. On the Code Red Blu-ray, actor George Eastman hilariously recounts a scene he had to do with a live lion, who was promised to be very tame. Eastman refused to do the scene and they brought in a stuntman to tousle with the lion. What they didn’t take into account was that the actors were all dressed in goatskins and one whiff and the lion attacked, slashing the leg of the stuntman with a claw, causing him to be rushed to the hospital and ending up with a multitude of stitches.
Hey, it’s hard finding information about certain people who lived and died before the internet era. Unless there are books where the author did extensive research on them, you can only go so far looking things up online. I’ve been stymied many times trying to hunt down info on directors and actors for my articles. Sam Pasco was one of those impossible searches for me online. I discovered he did live in NYC and he was related to another Sam Pasco who had been a United States Senator in the late 1800s. I also discovered that he was found dead in his Manhattan apartment in 1986. It wasn’t from AIDs but possibly a heart problem caused by his steroid abuse. Other than that, there weren’t many other leads save pointing me to a book by Tim McElhinny: Confessions of a White Heterosexual Male: Your Guide to Understanding Civil Rights History for Gays and African Americans. And I thought the title to Ray Dennis Steckler’s film, “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies,” was a mouthful.
Of course, I just had to order it and I have to say it’s a jaw-dropper. For a lot of reasons. And you do find out a lot about Sam Pasco too. Tim McElhinny was watching movies with his son one night when they decided to watch the VHS tape of Ironmaster. When the movie was over Tim asked his son what he thought of it and he replied “I liked it. It had a good message.” But Tim, a fan of weightlifting was also curious about the lead Sam Pasco. But here is where it gets wild. He goes all out trying to find information on him. Even his son joins his quest- they research libraries together and when Tim finds this heart-felt obituary from the New York Native, he tracked down the author who filled him in on Pasco, who was a personal friend. Pasco was a sweet, funny, smart guy. A rabid opera fan, Sam wrote poetry; did have a lover who was also a bodybuilder and worked for a publisher writing blurbs for the jacket covers of books. The New York Native journalist did believe steroids had a lot to do with Pasco’s sudden death, but because there was no autopsy there was no way to say for sure. McElhinny even reaches out to Pasco’s family- particularly Sam’s brother who was very close to him. After a few letters the brother finally calls him, once he realized McElhinny’s intentions were honorable.
The book goes off on tangents (whole chapters actually) charting: “Gay Civil Rights History 101” and “The Flight, Plight and Imprisonment of African Americans,” and, as heartfelt and laudable as that is, unless you’ve been in a coma since 1966 you know a lot of that. But when he gets back to his search for information on Sam Pasco I admit it gets interesting. He even tracks down Pasco’s dissertation from Auburn University: “The Three Dimensions of English Prosody.” Yes, I had to look up that last word too. But, considering the author is straight and a dad, the lengths he goes to uncover the backstory of a muscle queen he saw in a bad Italian caveman movie is unendingly fascinating.
I think the porn side of Sam Pasco’s life was rather short-lived. but his sexy image was used for Colt calendars and an ad for a San Francisco bathhouse. The nice thing about McElhinny’s book is that it humanizes this massive muscleman. I’m leaving a lot of the good stuff for you to read in the book. It’s such a peculiar work that I have to give it credit. Not only for good intentions, but confirming to me that when you go down a rabbit hole, determined to find all that you can about something, the results are often rewarding in many unexpected way.
Great article!
Not all muscle men are goons.