Pi in the Sky

Barbarian Queen

Posted on July 15th, 2007 at 10:34am by Pi.
Categories: Cinema.

Barbarian Queen
Action. USA / Argentina, 1985
Director: Héctor Olivera
Writers: Howard R. Cohen
Cast: Lana Clarkson, Katt Shea, Frank Zagarino

This is an awful movie. Ugh.

I have a training in watching bad movies. And lately I’ve been watching a lot of kaiju movies (japanese giant monster movies). But apparently I wasn’t ready for the “lower than the average B-movie” fest of Barbarian Queen. The plot says that it’s set on the Roman Empire days, and some roman soldiers from a guarnition or something go around attacking towns, slavering people, and raping women. Well, I see nothing roman at all in the movie.

In fact, this movie is a mixture of the first part of Conan, with a female version, and the first part of Spartacus, getting nothing good from either movie. The main character, Amethea (small clothes, big sword), survives to an attack to her town the day of her wedding. With three more (barely dressed) women, she goes onto the rescue of his husband, who is trained to be a gladiator and prepares a rebellion. Everything looks very barbarian, although there’s no magic/supernatural element like in The Beastmaster (a not very good movie, but at least decent and I actually like it).

Also known as The Queen of Naked Steel and going with the tagline No one can touch her naked steel, Barbarian Queen tries to stay up to expectations, showing a lot of skin and flesh. You get some topless from early in the movie, and gratuitous abuse and raping scenes (nothing too explicit anyway).

The whole problem is that everything is done with so much bad taste, poor acting talent, horrible dialogues, vague plot and drama, poor editing, cheap dressing… Even the action scenes are awfully done. So you get a mess of tits & ass (some hair too), raping, sword fights, and killing sprees, but all done in a very coherent bad way.

But maybe we should think that it’s a movie without pretensions, done in a humble way, and that we shouldn’t expect much. Yes, I don’t expect much, but I expect a minimum - this movie doesn’t get close to it. I’ve seen movies with low budget pouring quality and imagination, for example El Mariachi is a quite good movie, with decent acting, good plot, good dialogues…

Instead, Barbarian Queen just goes for the easy blood and sex, done in the quick & dirty style of “let’s finish this so we can make the sequel quickly and cash in some more dollars from the t&a hungry world”. Well, the sequel took a while, but it was there. Actually this movie is one in the series of cheap sword & sorcery that plagued the 80’s since the advent of Conan, mixing the theme with some more sex to attract easy bucks in. Judging by the amount of these movies, it seems they really made money - if not, movies like these would be scarce. I bet they were popular in the early tape renting days.

Well, I am going to insist that almost everything in the movie is bad, silly, unconnected, cheap, etc. I’m not going to rejoice in the filthy details, except that it’s yet another movie where the main female character is not the most beautiful woman of the cast. Lara Clarkson isn’t bad, but she’s not the hottest one. If you’re going to do a movie where women & sex are the main attraction, at least put the hottest babe in the lead! However, it seems that she was popular in this kind of movies, and people appreciated her. She took her participation in these B-movies with humour, and she’s remembered as a kind lady. I have nothing against you, Lara, but against the movie!

Instead, I’m mentioning the “not so bad” elements. The score is probably the best part of the movie. It isn’t great, and the orchestration lacks a little bit of punch, but it’s decent, and compared to the rest of the movie, it’s remarkable as one of the few good things. The movie poster, painted by Boris Vallejo (one of my fav aerograph artists) is very nice, so much better than the movie that it’s shameful. Another thing I liked is the very short length: 68 minutes. I don’t think I could have survived 90 minutes.

I was going to shut it down at minute ten. In the end, I decided to finish watching the movie to see how bad it could get. It didn’t get much worse, the movie kept with the line of very ridiculous fighting scenes, dialogues out of nowhere, and bad taste (yet little) sex. I decided to give it a high score because it showed some resources and effort here and there, and trust me, the score I gave to it it’s high. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve raised the average score in iMDB for this!

My score: 3/10. Very bad but still not among the worst.

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