BARBARIAN QUEEN (1985)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological. sociological*

Of the dozens of Roger Corman-produced films featuring gratuitous female nudity, BARBARIAN QUEEN may be the only one in which such concessions to the evil Male Gaze are entirely necessary to the plot and the main character's arc.

As the title suggests, QUEEN takes place in a standard barbaric cosmos, with lots of swords but no sorcery, except for the fact that the world itself is a made-up place with no connections to our reality. The plot takes the form of a straightforward rescue-mission, but one in which the female characters are indispensable to the defeat of the male villains.

Raiders of the evil lord Arrakur invade a peaceful village, where main character Amethea (Lana Clarkson) is about to be married to handsome hunk Argan (Frank Zagarino, long before his ascension to B-movie stardom). Argan and other villagers are captured and taken away by the raiders. But the women of the village are as hardy as their men, and Amethea and two others females escape. Their number grows to four when they track a smaller party of raiders who have taken Amethea's sister Taramis (Dawn Dunlap). After killing the raiders, Amethea and her allies continue their pursuit of Arrakur, though Tamaris has clearly been traumatized by gang-rape.

As the quartet nears Arrakur's walled city, they fortuitously encounter a small band of would-be rebels against the evil lord. The rebels help the four barbarian women enter the city covertly, and Amethea learns that the male villagers have been pressed into service as gladiators alongside other male captives, and this suggests a force that may be used against Arrakur's guards. However, Amethea and her warrior-allies are taken captive for questioning. Tamaris is separately spotted by Arrakur himself, who recognizes her from the raid. She saves herself from the torture-sessions given to Amethea by feigning craziness. In due time Amethea breaks free and paves the way for the gladiators to take on Arrakur and his men. Though Amethea battles Arrakur, Tamaris-- with whom the warlord also took his pleasures-- has the honor of killing the author of her despoilment. 

While the cinema boasts any number of gratuitous rape-scenes, the ones in QUEEN are not so easy to dismiss. It's a rude, crude, barbarian world, and when male soldiers take female prisoners, they rape them as a matter of course. Critics who have called the film problematic for showing that particular "fact of life" might as well call the entire history of human sexual dimorphism "problematic." Now, one might argue that QUEEN's most notorious scene, in which Amethea is spreadeagled on a rack by a torturer seeking info on the rebels, is not strictly necessary. However, without that setup, QUEEN would lack its most memorable scene, in which the torturer, in the process of trying to rape the warrior-woman, finds his member caught in a new version of a "man trap."

The director was Argentina-born Hector Olivera, who produced, wrote or directed some esteemed art-films alongside various trash-movies, while the script was entirely credited to American Howard R, Cohen, who to the best of my knowledge never wrote a non-exploitation script. Still, some of the actors' lines-- like Arrakur explaining the significance of pain to Amethea-- sound a little too sophisticated for Cohen, and I suspect they might have come either from Olivera or were adlibbed by the actors. (One of Amethea's warrior-girls is played by Katt Shea, who would go on to a number of writing and directing projects of her own.) The feminist message boils down to, "even if a man rapes a woman, she can still kill him," which is not without some appeal on the fantasy level.

Since Corman almost certainly did not spring for fight coordinators, no one looks all that great in the fight scenes, but there are a lot of them, and Lana Clarkson essays her most famous role with great gusto. Just for its unique place in the realm of sword-and-sorcery films, BARBARIAN QUEEN would probably make my top ten in that category.