With Red Sonja, we’ve come full circle on the sword and sorcery boom of the 1980s. Though Conan The Barbarian began it, its sequel-in-all-but-name came out after too many knock-offs had killed the genre. The movie limped to a domestic gross of $13,400,000 against a budget of $17,900,000, demonstrating that the writing was very much on the wall for our humble barbarians. Oh sure, Roger Corman would keep cranking out the cheap sequels for a few more years, but as far as A-list stars (OK, Arnold Schwarzenegger) went, Treading the Jewelled Thrones of the Earth was a lot less interesting than being a killer Cyborg or slaughtering drug cartels.

Many people assume that Red Sonja was another creation of Conan scribe Robert E. Howard, including me when I first published this review. In fact Howard’s ‘Red Sonya of Rogatino’ was a 16^th-century gunslinger from the Ukraine. Red Sonja as we know her was created by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith for Marvel Comics, though they retained the name (sort of) and red hair Howard described. The child of a retired soldier, Sonja wanted to become a warrior but unlike her brother was prevented from doing so. One day soldiers came to Sonja’s farm and demanded her father join them, when he refused the family was slaughtered and Sonja raped. A mysterious goddess granted her fighting skills that would have no equal, and Sonja swore that no man would have her who could not defeat her in battle.

The movie begins fairly faithfully, with a pre-credits sequence showing the aftermath of this attack. The goddess appears, and in cheesy voiceover fills in the details of what just happened. There are some changes of course; the troops are in fact the servants of Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman, Conan The Barbarian), who seems to want nothing more than to pick up chicks. When her attention turns to young Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen), the feisty redhead fights back and scars the queen’s face. The rest plays out much as described above; the rape, the killings, the blessings, the lot really.

But there’s a problem. For one thing the average viewer isn’t likely to be clued up on Sonja’s origin story - I’ve seen the movie many times but only just found the bio information online - so the sudden appearance of this glowing white narrator is rather jarring. It also doesn’t help that the origin is related in flashback. There’s additional footage in the trailer suggesting this scene was originally meant to play out in real-time, and one suspects it was trimmed to get a PG-13 rating. Still, having seen so many of these things lately I was rather relived that the inevitable rape scene took place largely offscreen.

I couldn’t tell you if Sonja had a sister in the comics, but in the movie she does. Varna (Janet Agren) is a warrior priestess of some form or other, whose order is attempting to destroy a big green disco ball called The Talisman. Apparently the thing was used to create the World by the Gods, but now it’s grown too powerful and will destroy everything in mere days if not shut away from the light that powers it (solar-powered World destroying artefacts, very eco-friendly). Unfortunately Queen Gedren would rather hang on to it, so the destruction ceremony is interrupted by her army attacking and making off with The Talisman. Varna is the only priestess to escape, but she takes an arrow in the back and needs to be rescued by Lord Kalidor (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who was on his way to the ceremony but got held up en route.

Meanwhile Sonja is off learning the art of swordplay from a guy (Tad Horino) who can barely move in his ridiculous costume, let alone hold a weapon. The Swordmaster chides Sonja for her mistrust of men, what with a vicious gang rape having left her a bit sensitive and all. Shortly Kalidor arrives with news of Sonja’s dying sister, and the two leave.

Arriving at the conveniently-located giant stone bull under which Varna is sheltering, Sonja is told of the Talisman’s theft. Varna beseeches her sister to find the Talisman and destroy it, not because she’s the best warrior but because only women can touch it without dying. This is a good way to undermine any overtones of female empowerment the film might have had right off the mark; it’s as if the writers thought “she couldn’t possibly do a heroic quest as well as a guy, we need to come up with something only a chick could do.” I’m half surprised we didn’t end up with Red Sonja and the Dirty Dishes of the Titans.

Sonja sets off alone (she doesn’t trust Kalidor, who’s one of those pesky Men) and before long meets a couple of characters neither Conan movie was unlucky enough to have; the precocious Royal child and his fat comic relief sidekick. The kid is Prince Tarn (Ernie Reyes Jr.), ruler of Hablak, a kingdom destroyed by Gedren using The Talisman. Tarn’s bodyguard Falkon (Paul Smith) directs Sonja towards Gedren’s kingdom via Brytag’s Toll Road. Brytag (Pat Roach, Willow, Conan The Destroyer) is an unpleasant sort of fellow who doesn’t want to let Sonja through without her first providing him with sexual favours. When she refuses he engages her in combat, but the glowy white chick clearly gave Sonja some serious swordfightin’ mojo and she makes short work of him. Things look bad as Brytag’s men close in, but Kalidor has been secretly following along and he steps in to save Sonja. As she rides off she looks back, and dang if the sight of Kalidor hacking people to pieces doesn’t begin to melt her frozen heart!

Riding on, Sonja encounters Prince Tarn who has been seized by bandits. Not altogether sure how he got ahead of her, seeing as Brytag’s road was meant to be the quickest way and she had a head start, but never mind. Like all movie heroes do when the preferred course of action would just be to leave the annoying kid to die, Sonja rescues the snotty little bastard. They set off together, since Sonja wants to kill Gedren anyway. They arrive at the border of Gedren’s kingdom Burger-Main (I’m pretty sure that’s what they called it), The Land Of Perpetual Night. Crossing the nifty bridge made from a curiously sturdy dinosaur skeleton, they head on. Clearly the place has some mystical powers because from this point the spoiled prince suddenly begins turning nice.

Thanks to her court wizard, who looks a lot like old British kids’ TV magician Ali Bongo, Gedren is aware they are coming. She decides to thwart them by creating a storm that forces them into a cave, the home of The Machine. No, not some WWE wrestler, but a large metal sea serpent that lives in a pool, down a flight of stone stairs right at the back of the cave. So putting aside the idea that Gedren just used the Talisman to level an entire city and could presumably have unleashed enough climate-related whupass to kill them out in the open, her plan is to get them into one specific cave, hope they decide to explore it far enough to find The Machine’s chamber, and that one of them will steal the large pearl that triggers the water level to rise high enough for The Machine to work? Did George W. Bush come up with this plan or something? And exactly how does Gedren normally entice people into the cave when she hasn’t got a storm-creating Talisman to do it for her? Anyway, Kalidor shows up again, rather astonishingly realising that The Machine is a, well, a machine and finding an unlikely way to defeat it.

While resting up later (and after Gedren has thoughtfully turned the storm off) Kalidor reveals that his line are the owners of The Talisman, but gave it to the priestesses because of the whole thing about how only chicks can touch it. Kalidor and Sonja clearly have the hots for each other, but she won’t have sex with anyone who can’t defeat her in battle first. The pair fight each other to an exhausted standstill, but there is no clear winner - hey, didn’t the Goddess say that Sonja would have no equal? Who does this guy think he is, Conan or something?

The good guys finally make it to the castle, where Sonja must fight it out with Gedren and destroy The Talisman - which she eventually does by dropping it into a burning lava pit - which if you think about it is sort of the opposite of sealing it off in darkness, supposedly the only way to destroy it. And Sonja and Kalidor decide to forgo the whole ‘duel to the death’ thing and just get it on. Ahh, a happy ending.

When Red Sonja was originally being proposed as a movie, Schwarzenegger was supposed to reprise his role as Conan. Somewhere along the way this idea was thankfully dropped, as if what they did to the character in Conan The Destroyer wasn’t bad enough. But Schwarzenegger was already on board, so he became Conan-Lite, later renamed Kalidor. There’s no difference in his performance of course, just the name, in fact in France the movie was actually released as Kalidor. Danish former model Brigitte Nielsen in her first film role does a great job, but only of making Arnie look like Olivier in comparison. It was nice to see Sandahl Bergman again, but her performance here isn’t a patch on the one she gave in Conan The Barbarian.

The only decent actor in the thing is British character player Ronald Lacey, best known as evil Gestapo officer Toht in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Lacey hams it up amusingly as Gedren’s number two Ikol, but he suffers an ignoble fate; death at the hands of the annoying little bastard. Yes, Tae-Kwon Do expert Ernie Reyes Jr. may have looked awesome wiping the jungle floor with The Rock in The Rundown, and may also have been in bizarre kung fu-Motown flick The Last Dragon, but that can’t excuse his fingers-on-blackboard grating performance here. Still, it’s clear even back then he had some impressive fighting skills, and gets the chance to show them off in this movie. In fact the swordfighting choreography is one high point in a movie of lows.

Apart from the obvious flaws of script, acting and some half-baked production design, the main problem is that the whole thing feels so tired. This really was the last gasp of the barbarian film, at least from a big-studio perspective, and it’s a shame that it had to come from people (Schwarzenegger, Dino De Laurentiis) who starting the ball rolling in the first place.

Dave Thomas, 3^rd October 2004