AMAZON WARRIOR (1998)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

If AMAZON WARRIOR isn't the worst post-apocalypse film, or even the worst just from the nineties, it'll do until a worse one comes along.

While there can be some virtue in low budget films that come up with clever ways to skirt their production values, WARRIOR suggest a bunch of wannabes who carelessly threw this project together on a dare or a bet. 

Having seen many post-apoc flicks, it's not objectionable that the script barely establishes any ground rules for the cataclysm that reduces all humanity to small primitive, quasi-medieval enclaves. That's almost a given of the genre. But even a dopey film like AMERICA 3000 came up with a rationale for the rise of an Amazon society. WARRIOR just tosses in the notion that an Amazon society arose for some reason, though we know nothing about its history even in a general sense. We only know that when protagonist Tara (J.J. Rodgers) is a child, her Amazon tribe is wiped out by a vague band of male "marauders," who are also nearly a given in this genre. Like a really crummy retread of Lady Snowblood, this last Amazon then devotes her life to exterminating marauders, to the point that they deem her "the Angel of Death."

To her good fortune, Tara meets a hunky guy, Clint (Jimmy Jerman), who also has a plot to take down the marauders, though Clint has a more long-range goal, to keep a general named Steiner (played by one of the producers) from uniting all the marauder tribes. Tara doesn't team up with Clint immediately. She takes a commission to guide a group of whiny girls, the daughters of a rich man in one of those enclaves, from one place to another. This plot-line falls apart when the writer gets tired of it, having the girls betray Tara to her marauder enemies. The traitors are then executed by the nasty villains, and this sets up Tara's teamup with Clint to take down Steiner. 

What makes this no-budget dreck egregious is not the predictable plot-- which does have a couple of adequate fight-scenes-- is the fact that the writer constantly has all the character use modern idioms of speech, This might have even been funny under the right circumstances, but the overall impression is that the author couldn't be bothered to write anything else. I hope this is the worst film in its genre, because I couldn't take anything worse.