MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*
The standard legends about Amazons assert that the warrior-women lived apart from males, except when they raided neighboring villages and kidnapped men for temporary stud service. Alfonso Brescia's Italian trash-peplum gets that part right, but adds the idea that the Amazons ruled by Queen Eraglia (Lucretia Love) keeps some males as slaves.
BATTLE has a rushed look even for an exploitation flick, possibly because the Italians wanted to "mockbust" Terence Young's more expensive production, THE AMAZONS. That's probably why the three credited writers (one of whom was Bruno Corbucci) took the obvious tack of ripping off THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. After the women warriors kill the headman of one village, his daughter Valeria (Paola Tedesco) decides to oppose Amazon tyranny. She hires handsome bandit Zeno (Lincoln Park) and his fellow rogues to train her people to fight.
It's not an irredeemable sin to be unoriginal, but it is to be lazy. Though Valeria is not much of a heroine, most of the Glam-azons are good looking enough to provide the sort of spectacle the movie needs. But the battles, even when not performed by stuntmen in drag, are unexceptional. And since the script has no interest in examining Amazon society from any sort of feminist angle-- which, admittedly, would be very atypical for any Italian film of the sixties or seventies -- BATTLE becomes something of a slog, rather than a fun if mindless peplum.
In addition to the "weird societies" trope, BATTLE also employs "outre outfits" in that the Amazons sometimes fight wearing outsized masks, whose real purpose was to conceal the masculine nature of the ladies' stunt-doubles. Over twenty years later, the show XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS also made frequent use of masked Amazons, though I don't know if the producers did so for a similar reason, or if someone on staff saw BATTLE and thought that the mask-thing was cool-looking.
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