One thing that you can say about Roger Corman; he isn’t slow to take credit for something. To this day he maintains that Xena: Warrior Princess was ripped off from Barbarian Queen. Why? Well, because they both feature ass-kicking chicks in leather in Ancient Times™, and ‘Warrior Princess’ and ‘Barbarian Queen’ sound vaguely similar. So one is required to ask, is Barbarian Queen so spectacularly original? To which the inevitable answer is, yeah, and the Pope gives out free condoms. Hundra came out 2 years previously, Conan The Barbarian had Sandahl Bergman as a leather-clad warrior babe and even Corman had already been there with 1983’s Sorceress. And delving back further into pre-barbarian days, you find the likes of Terence Young’s 1974 movie War Goddess or even Corman’s own 1973 production The Arena – if you can find an ancient warrior babe more imposing than Pam Grier, I’m not sure I’d want to meet her. Scratch that – if she looks like Pam Grier did in 1973 I really, really want to meet her. So we’ve established that Barbarian Queen isn’t exactly novel, concept-wise. But is it any good?

The opening scene of the movie sets the tone for the rest of it; a young girl is picking flowers by a tranquil stream when she is attacked by the usual helmeted black-clad soldiers and raped. This being a Corman production the rape involves her losing her top to reveal her (rather nice, as it happens) breasts. Rest assured this won’t be the last pair we’ll see, nor the last to be revealed in this way. The girl is Taramis (Dawn Dunlap), younger sister of our heroine Amethea (the late Lana Clarkson). Amethea lives in a small, idyllic village, and is first seen enjoying a relaxing bath before her wedding to Prince Argan (Frank Zagarino). It’s never specified what he’s the Prince of, so one assumes it’s the village – one could be mean and call him Prince of the Village People, though given that his wedding outfit seems to be a pair of furry white muscle shorts it might not be such a bad description.

Before the nuptials can take place the village is attacked by more of the guard goons, because nothing says ‘barbarian flick’ like the hero’s village being destroyed. Amethea and her friend Tiniara (Susana Traverso) fight back bravely, though not bravely enough to prevent Tiniara being ravaged by some of the troops (cue top-removal and more bare breasts). Anyway, it appears as if Amethea is killed and the rest of the villagers, including Argan and his pal Strymon (Victor Bo, Deathstalker) are taken as slaves by Eee-vil warlord Arrakur (Arman Chapman).

Of course Amethea isn’t really dead, and with her pals Tiniara and Estrild (Kathy Shea) she sets off to rescue her people. Before long they find an enemy outpost where some random naked girl is tied up so that the soldiers can – yup, you guessed it – rape her as the fancy takes them. Now, I’ve long maintained that it’s pointless to watch an exploitation film and then get upset if the content is distasteful or shocking, but even so this was a bit much. We’re only about ten minutes into the movie and yet we’re on our third rape scene. I realise that such scenes may be accurate to the period being portrayed (i.e. cheap-ass iron age) and I’m all for naked women in my exploitation flicks, but this seems a trifle over-the-top.

Anyway, our band of heroines attacks the camp and kills all the guards, and although the random girl expires from her ordeal they do find the traumatised Taramis inside. Riding on they encounter survivors of more villages destroyed by Arrakur. One of the survivors, a kid named Dariac (Andrea Scriven) agrees to take Amethea and her friends into Arrakur’s city. They sneak in via a series of tunnels, and meet Dariac’s father, leader of a group of motley rebels. I didn’t catch his name, but it’s safe to say that he isn’t too good at the whole rebellion thing; not only does he have only one eye, he’s also lost an arm (though it’s only lost in the sense of ‘Jimmy Wang Yu, stuffed inside the shirt lost’). Though he’s reluctant to help with the rescue, he does at least give our four heroines some cloaks so they can wander around town unnoticed.

And wander around they do, for what seems like ages. Amathea learns that Argan and Strymon have been pressed into service as gladiators, while Taramis, still supposedly traumatised, gains entry into Arrakur’s castle by convincing him that she’d like to get to know him better. Meanwhile Estrild runs afoul of a couple of soldiers, and (yep, you know what’s coming) they rip open her top and rape her. What, it was her turn. Anyway, when Amathea and Tiniara try to help they are captured, and the trio find themselves prisoners of Arrakur.

Tiniara is tied up (semi-clad, of course) in the dungeon, menaced by a loathsome guard played by Marcos Woinsky, the loathsome guard from Deathstalker. The plucky heroine manages to escape but is killed in the process. Meanwhile Arrakur, conscious of the fact that nobody’s tried to rape Amathea or rip her top yet, does just that. However she proves to be too feisty, so he ships her off to his wacky torturer so she can be tamed a bit. At least he didn’t say, “this one has spirit” or “I like a beauty with a bit of pluck” or something equally unpleasant.

So Amathea, clad only in her barbarian leather bikini thong, gets strung up on a large rack-like contraption in a freaky torture chamber run by this little hunchbacked Woody Allen kind of guy. The exact means of the torture is unclear; there are lots of cogs and machinery and stuff but all this seems to do is make a metal gauntlet hanging in front of the captive go up and down a bit. Maybe the threat of cold metal accidentally brushing her nipples is enough to break the tough female – though Woody the Torturer does mutter something about her bonds getting tighter with every turn.

Meanwhile Estrild has been thrown into Arrakur’s harem, the usual gaggle of naked cuties and not-so-cuties that invariably turn up in movies like this. The harem is notable for the guy running it, a fat homosexual in Geisha makeup with what appears to be an old-fashioned handbag on his head. Luckily the harem is generally used for the amusement of the gladiators, so at the next orgy Estrild manages to speak to Argan. He is plotting a breakout with the other gladiators in order to rescue the enslaved villagers.

Meanwhile Woody the Torturer decides it’s simply not fair that Amathea is the only one who hasn’t been raped yet, and sets about the task with gusto. Now, here something rather odd happens. In the unrated version of the movie, Amathea somehow manages to free her legs and squeezes the guy half to death until he lets her go. For some reason the MPAA objected to this and trimmed it out of the R-rated version that appears on the DVD. So now Woody the Torturer rapes her and suddenly begins screaming that she’s squeezing him too hard, the implication of which is far more icky than the uncut scene would be. This is the only cut stipulated by the MPAA, all of the other rape scenes obviously not being a problem. Now free, Amathea pushes Woody into his own acid pit – probably shouldn’t have put that where somebody could just fall into it, or at least put a cover over it. Health and Safety is never a priority for these ancient warlords, is it?

Amathea now hooks up with Estrild, their plan to tell Eyepatch Guy to coordinate the rebel attack with the gladiators’ revolt. To this end the women sneak out of the castle, killing a few guards in the process (to be honest this veers dangerously close to the random wandering around corridors that marred the second half of Deathstalker – having filler in a 70-minute movie is really inexcusable). While all this is going on, Taramis (who is actually something of a spoiled brat) cosies up to Arrakur. This doesn’t mean she gets to wear any more clothes, but at least the ones she does have are nicer than warrior’s leather underwear.

And that, apart from the big final battle is it – literally, as the movie ends the moment the battle does. Pah, the Barbarian Queen doesn’t need any sentimental, last minute postscripts! What’s that? How did the battle turn out? Well, Argan is suitably heroic and manly in beating up assorted gladiators and guards, while Amathea dispatches the loathsome guard before duelling with Arrakur himself. Just when it looks like she might be defeated, Taramis predictably remembers her true loyalties (or possibly just sees the way the battle’s going) and stabs him in the back. Hooray for cowardly sneak attacks!

Howard R. Cohen wrote both this, Barbarian Queen II and Deathstalkers 1, 3 and 4, even directing the last one. When not scripting crap for Roger Corman (he also did Space Raiders, Cover Girl Models, The Young Nurses, Unholy Rollers, Lords of the Deep and Time Trackers), Cohen worked on a number of kid’s cartoon shows. It seems slightly distasteful that the guy who wrote many a barbarian rape scene should also have put in time on Rainbow Brite and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, but there you go. Anyway, it’s entirely likely that the producers mandated the frequency and method of the nude scenes. Having said that I’m at a loss to think of another genre that treats rape in quite such a cavalier manner. I think it’s the casual way in which they are shrugged off by the characters that bothered even me, a hardened and mostly-unshockable trash cinema fan. The counter-argument – that the women later violently avenge themselves upon the perpetrators – doesn’t really wash given that the scenes are only added for titillation. Even in prurient female revenge movies like Coffy, The Kiss of Death and The Sexy Killer, rape is shown to have consequences – to the victim as much as the (invariably doomed) person responsible. I suspect I’ll be talking about this subject a good deal more over the coming weeks, what with Barbarian Queen II and the unrated cut of Amazons on my reviewing pile.

So on to other aspects. Well, the cheap Argentinean castle interiors are the same ones from Deathstalker, as are many of the props. Lana Clarkson is from Deathstalker too, though she has more success in this movie. In fact if there’s one reason to check out Barbarian Queen it’s Clarkson; she gives a spirited performance that’s much better than one might expect given the rest of the cast. OK, I admit Frank Zagarino isn’t bad as the mostly-sidelined barbarian hero and Dawn Dunlap is enjoyably buxom, but the rest of them are useless. The action scenes fall somewhere between ‘bad’ and ‘average’, the final battle thankfully being the latter. And hey – unlike Deathstalker at least there was a final battle. Director Héctor Olivera generally points the camera in the right direction and the music is decent – half of it is ripped off from Battle Beyond The Stars, the other half is by Chris (now Christopher) Young, who has gone on to bigger and better things.

While I’ve talked at length about my misgivings, I can’t say I didn’t enjoy this movie. It has attractive women kicking ass, often in very few clothes, and I’m a sucker for that. If the misogynistic aspects (or misogyny in general) are liable to bother you, I’d suggest you give this and every other Roger Corman production a wide berth.

Dave Thomas, 14^th September 2004