PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological. sociological*
Trust your power to the daughter of such
Who held it in another time,
Trust to me what no man can touch
Without the blessing of womankind.
With the above bit of doggerel, was schlockmeister-writer Howard R. Cohen trying, even in a crude manner, to follow through on the quasi-feminist content of BARBARIAN QUEEN? To acknowledge this possibility is not to state that QUEEN II-- a sequel-in-name-only-- isn't one of the most dire sword-and-sorcery flicks to come down the pike. But one must give credit where it is due. (To be sure, this time Cohen is partnered with one Lance Smith on the script, though his credits are no better than Cohen's, while QUEEN II was the only directorial credit for film editor Joe Finley.)
It's possible Cohen subconsciously cadged from 1985's RED SONJA in coming up with a "power" accessible only to women, and which is fought over by a "good girl" and a "bad girl." In QUEEN II, the powerful talisman is a magical sceptre that's controlled by the royal family of Some Damn Kingdom or Other. The princess of that family, Athalia (Lana Clarkson), is evidently a bit of a tomboy, while her only relation, her king-father, has left the castle to lead a foray against an enemy. Athalia shows up at the throne room, and her father's counselor Ankaris reports that though the kingdom's (never seen) army has returned, the king has gone missing. Thus Ankaris and his cohorts decide to usurp the throne. They want Athalia to give them the secret of the magic sceptre that occupies some cynosure in the castle. When the princess refuses, they lock her up.
Enter the film's rather unusual "bad girl," pretending to be a good one: Tamis (Cecilia Tijerina), the 14-year-old daughter of Ankaris. Pretending to be Athalia's friend, Tamis frees the princess and takes her to the cynosure. After reciting the doggerel, Athalia is able to remove the magic sceptre, and have access to its unspecified power-- though she also claims that using it will cause her father's death, if he's still alive. I guess the writers threw this in so that she wouldn't be able to call on the power right away, thus ending the movie too soon. Tamis swipes the sceptre, and as Ankaris and his stooges waltz in, they all have a good laugh at the gullible princess. However, Athalia steals the sceptre back and puts it back in place, after which Ankaris and his guards can't touch the weapon. On top of that, Athalia escapes the palace and makes common cause with a band of forest-rebels-- though only after a mud-wrestling bout with one of the women warriors. (Yeah, even I'm not going to argue against that bit being gratuitous.)
While the villains lay their next plots, the Cohen-Smith script spotlights the bratty evil of Tamis, She seems convinced that her father's only good looking ally Sir Aurion (Greg Wrangler) is earmarked to marry her, though he looks less than enthusiastic at the prospect. Later the audience learns that Aurion proposed to Athalia several times, though she refused to marry him for reasons never disclosed. A few scenes later, though, the forest-rebels capture a band of royal knights, including Aurion, and we get to see that the fire of romance still burns between hunk-knight and hot princess.
Athalia is captured when she and her rebels attack Ankaris' forces, and in a blatant callback to BARBARIAN QUEEN, the princess ends up on the rack as Amethea did-- although Athalia has to put up with nasty quasi-rival Tamis watching. Also, her torturer is evidently gay, baring the princess's breasts but calling them "disgusting."
Aurion tries to rescue Athalia, but she frees herself first and once more seeks out the magic sceptre. She experiences deep conflicts about using its power, though, since she doesn't know if it will cost her father's life. Ankaris captures her again, so apparently the only point of the escape was to underscore the heroine's reluctance to imperil her daddy's life, even though Ankaris tells her that the king is dead.
This time Athalia endures Tamis threatening to drop spiders on her. Aurion comes to her rescue, but so do members of the forest-rebels after they sneak into the castle. The rebels take Aurion and Athalia back to their camp. Meanwhile, Tamis belatedly reveals that she has a magic talisman given her by her mother, and uses some of Athalia's doggerel to activate it. Presto, change-o, Tamis becomes a full grown woman.
Belatedly, a coterie of knights show up at the rebel camp with the body of Athalia's father, and now, despite her grief, Athalia knows she can use the magic sceptre against her foes. However, Grown Tamis infiltrates the camp at night, and after a weird attempt to get Aurion to make love to her, almost kills him. When the rebels attack the castle, they take Tamis along, hoping she'll be killed by her own forces-- and indeed, at the castle she's stabbed by her own daddy, because he doesn't know her. Meanwhile, Amethea kills the gay torturer and finds that Ankaris has killed himself over the body of his once more youthful daughter. After all the fuss about the magic spectre, it doesn't really do anything to resolve the main conflict, though Athalia says something about using it to cure a poisonous spider bite.
Unlike all the DEATHSTALKER movies on which Cohen worked, there's at least some erratic mythopoetic material here, which is the only reason I bothered to explicate it. But even if the movie had been given decent direction and fight choreography, the writers didn't know how to really make any of their mythic concepts resonate with viewers, and so QUEEN II-- which certainly wins no points for its cheesy subtitle-- earns only a ranking with the worst of the thud-and-blunder movies.
Odd addenda: at the start of the movie Athalia is seen wearing, very briefly, an outfit with a fur collar. About seven years later, Clarkson played a villain in one episode of the Corman-produced BLACK SCORPION teleseries, and the actress wore what I suspect was the exact same costume for that endeavor.
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