Of his two stars, one, John Terlesky as Deathstalker, is replacing Rick Hill in that role, while the other, model Monique Gabrielle, has never done comedy before, but they manage to hit it off and even display some onscreen chemistry together, a thing nearly unheard-of in a cheap sword-and-sorcery film. This is the last of the low budget barbarian flicks producer Roger Corman made in Argentina the genre was nearing the end of its popularity and there was no money for magic or monsters, so director Jim Wynorski threw out the script he’d been given and rewrote it as a comedy. (Yep.) Just… don’t let your expectations get out of hand. It totally makes up for the scene where Dyala has to wrap a tame snake around herself to make it look threatening and then roll around in the dirt. However, there’s this one action sequence where Dyala has to save Tashi from being sacrificed by a tribe of masked goons to their creepy sacred tree that’s not half bad - like, somebody spent time and effort on setting it up, and it works. There’s a lot of gratuitous female nudity on display here, so be prepared for that, and the battles between Kalungo’s troops and the Amazons are unusually feeble, even by low-budget fantasy flick standards. It’s so wrong that after a while you kind of get to like it. Whipp, Kalungo in this setting is jarringly incongruous, less the usual gloating mad tyrant than an oily self-satisfied California producer who has somehow ended up in a fantasy world with lightning powers. This may sound dumb, and it mostly is, but the interest comes from the character interplay between Dyala, her treacherous bottle-blond aide Tashi (Penelope Reed), and Tashi’s even more treacherous but equally blond mother Tashinge (Danitza Kingsley), who is the commander of the Amazons but is selling them out to Kalungo for wizard-nookie and future queen rights. But because this is called Amazons, Kalungo is opposed by a corps of warrior women in leather bikinis, and the warrior with the quest, Dyala (Mindi Miller), is the bikiniest and blondest of them all. In outline, the plot is nothing special: a sorcerer-king named Kalungo (Joseph “Cool” Whipp - okay, I made up the “Cool” part) uses his lightning powers and black-clad mercenaries to conquer a generic fantasy town, and threatens to conquer the rest of the Emerald Land unless a warrior can bring back a magic sword from a distant, mystic cave. Saunders’ story, though, is just interesting and complex enough to pull you through, even while you’re shaking your head at the terrible performances. The bad news: what passes for acting isn’t any better than usual, the costumes, sets, and fight direction are bottom-of-the-barrel, and the special effects for the wizard magic are acutely embarrassing. Still, this barbarian boobfest may be the best of Corman’s cheapo Argentine action fantasies, though that’s admittedly a low bar. But in the end, it’s one more example of how anything good fed into the Roger Corman woodchipper comes out the other end as mulch. Saunders based on his fine story “Agbewe’s Sword” from the Amazons! anthology edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, and therefore one could hope it might be good. This heroic fantasy has a screenplay by Charles R. Thus, it’s a pleasure this week to cover two movies we can actually recommend! To prepare yourself properly, practice your “Hur hur hur!” ahead of time so you can laugh like a real barbarian. Though the spate of barbarian films in the Eighties is beloved by fantasy nerds of a certain age, as we’ve seen in our previous instalments in this series, very few of them hold up to a contemporary rewatch. If nothing else, self-parody is inexpensive, and if you have a rock-bottom budget anyway you might as well aim for something that’s within reach. By late 1986, the Barbarian Boom was well into its deliberate self-parody phase - and all the better for it, frankly.
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