But we'll get into Warner Brothers and their fantastic voyage of marketing another day. Today, I have a brain hemorrhage to have.
I mean, Barbarian Queen to review.
...same thing, really.
Yep, it's our old buddy Roger Corman at work again after his last appearance in my reviews. Will Barbarian Queen be able to reach the heights that Deathstalker lazily sort of pawed at while throwing an overabundance of boobs, butts, and blood at our faces in a way that made me question whether showers are able to make water hot enough to clean off the absolute funk? Let's have a look.
So our film begins with a woman being hog-tied and raped.
...excuse me for a moment.
...okay. I've robbed the Eastern Seaboard of all available booze. Let's continue.
An idyllic barbarian village is celebrating the wedding day of Queen Amethea (Lana Clarkson) and Prince Argan (Frank Zagarino). Of course, by the laws of sword and sorcery origin stories, the village gets attacked and Amethea must go out into the world to seek vengeance on the attackers of her home and perhaps save the people of her village who had been taken by the insidious forces of Thulsa Doom...I mean, Lord Arrakur (Arman Chapman).
Following this is roughly an hour of bad acting, blood, and boobs. Unlike Deathstalker, where all of this was just highly unpleasant...this film still has plenty of unpleasant bits, but ironically ends up having more substance to it than Deathstalker did. That isn't to say that it's any great form of cinema because it definitely isn't - it's exploitative, mid 1980's crap - but an attempt is clearly being made, which is more than I can say for the earlier film.
Amethea actually does more than Deathstalker in that she actually seems to care about things that are going on around her. She shows concern for the other members in her all-female troop, she makes clear that she wants to make Arrakur and his soldiers pay the price in blood for what they've done to her village. There's actual investment by the main character, so there's a better chance of investment from the audience.
In other words - "you care, we care".
As I said, this film is definitely no great cinema, but it really helps. Also, there are the more misogynistic elements to the piece that I'm sure people will look back on now with scorn and disdain, but consider this - unlike in Deathstalker, where the film is so bleak and nihilistic that the title character was as easily the villain as the actual villain, Barbarian Queen never portrays the raping, slaving, and wanton murder as positive in any way. It isn't glorified, the last in particular being used by Amethea as a vehicle for her revenge - not something she necessarily enjoys doing.
So yes, Amethea is an actual character. That doesn't mean that she has a great deal of depth or is portrayed all that well, but there is something there besides being an asshole who just doesn't care about anything and is ruled solely by their id.
The film has some funny moments, some unintentionally funny moments, and of course the bad acting, blood, and boobs I mentioned beforehand. It has the same sort of exploitative feel that Deathstalker does, but doesn't feel nearly as skeevy. Bad? Yes. Enjoyably bad? I would definitely say yes. There's a lot of skeevy stuff in this - such as the horrendous amounts of rape - but just as much intentionally (and unintentionally) enjoyable - such as a man getting shot in the eye with an arrow seemingly from behind or Amethea squeezing a torturer's joy department with her thighs before throwing him into a vat of acid. Amethea isn't a character on par with Falstaff, but you do feel at least something for her and her plight which is more than I can say for certain other fantasy protagonists that I've already referenced far, far too much.
Also, there's a camp gay guy running the gladiator harem.
Yes, there's a gladiator harem. The guy's obvious dubbing over is absolutely hilarious. (As a matter of fact, most of the dubbing is hilarious, but that's foreign film for you).
I may have been a bit premature to dig the booze out. Barbarian Queen is still pretty bad with bad acting, cheap sets, odd costuming choices, but it also has some good adventure, a few fights that don't look the combatants are just trying to hit their opponent's weapon instead of their opponent (though most do), and a main character that actually seems to give a damn about anything. While it's not perfect by any means, it's at the very least an enjoyably bad mess and sometimes with sword and sorcery that's all you can ask for.
Barbarian Queen was brought to us by Roger Corman and Concorde Pictures.
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