Don Coscarelli Needs Your Help to Find the Lost Original Negative of The Beastmaster

Just when you thought 2020 couldn’t get any worse, comes this disturbing news: The original film negative of The Beastmaster is missing.

What’s that? You don’t remember 1982 sword-and-sorcery fantasy film The Beastmaster? Well then, we presume you didn’t spend a lot of time watching HBO and TBS in the 1980s and 1990s, as the Marc Singer-starring cheesefest was such a regular staple that a running gag became that HBO stood for “Hey, Beastmaster’s on!”, while TBS was “The Beastmaster Station.” It was ultimately that high volume of TV airings that led to cult classic status for The Beastmaster, a perennial “why has nobody remake this yet?” contender.

Now, however, the film’s director and cowriter are calling upon fans to help them locate its missing original negative. Director Don Coscarelli, well known to horror geeks as the man behind 1979’s Phantasm, is on the hunt for The Beastmaster in order to find the highest possible quality version for subsequent re-releases, although he’s also planning a future Beastmaster reboot of some kind. Unfortunately, though, the trail of the original negative seems to have gone cold.

“The rights holder sent [someone] to pick up the negative and the guy put it in his vault in the San Fernando valley,” said Coscarelli to Entertainment Weekly. “Then he sold the house and now he [doesn’t] know where it is. As they used to say in the labs, when we were making Phantasm, nothing’s ever lost, it’s just misplaced. We have this fervent hope that maybe we can reinvigorate this fan base of ours to go out and help find it.”

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To that end, Coscarelli created a webpage, aptly titled whereisthebeastermaster.com, which contains a history of the negative’s known movements as well as contact information where fans can report anything they know about its whereabouts. The director is clearly hoping that the project will end up under the nose of a collector who just so happens to be holding on to that fabled cut of The Beastmaster, perhaps unaware of its importance.

The original 1982 film starred V mini-series star Marc Singer as a ripped, ancient warrior with the power to commune and communicate with all animals, along with Tanya Roberts (Charlie’s Angels) and Rip Torn as the evil priest villain. A clear response to Conan the Barbarian, it didn’t make a splash in its initial release, but its gratuitous nudity and cheesy action quickly made it a perennial cable classic. Eventually, that notoriety led to two low-budget films sequels and a syndicated TV series in the 1990s.

Coscarelli, for his part, simply wants to find the fruits of his own original labor, so whatever restoration is attempted can be done from the best quality materials.

“The finest quality material is the original camera negative which was out there, on the set, going through the camera,” he said to EW. “That’s the beauty of film. Even though it’s a medium from a hundred years ago, 35 mm film carries a lot of information and, if it’s carefully taken care of, those original negatives, you can really get a beautiful image out of them. There’s a back-up plan, but it’s just not as good as the original.”

The director even offers some tips as to what The Beastmaster’s film negatives would look like, saying the following: “It’s basically six film cans and then outside it would have The Beastmaster and it’s called ‘Original camera negative. We have all of this on the website and there’s a trail of where the negative went and where it went missing. There’s a chance it just went into a dumpster, never to be seen again. But there are a lot of rabid film collectors out there. A lot of times they gather up this stuff and it’s of uncertain lineage. A lot of them hang onto it because they don’t want to tell people they have it, or whatever. This would be an open license [to] be a hero to a generation of Beastmaster fans.”

Let’s hope that harnessing the power of the internet pays off. In the meantime, check out the gloriously flesh-laden original trailer for The Beastmaster below.