October is horror month, so I've decided (at least for me) that April is Sci-Fi/Fantasy month. I watched a couple of movies to start off with...
Red Sonja (1985)Okay, just for comparison, Conan's origin is that his family was murdered and he was sold into slavery and got strong af by pushing a big wheel for a couple of decades. Red Sonja's origin is that her family was murdered and she gets gang-raped almost to death for spurning an Evil Lesbian Queen's advances and then a Valkyrie decends onto the battlefield and gives her strength. I don't have my PhD in Gender Studies (yet) but I feel like there's maybe something sketchy going on there.
As for the movie, well it's obviously no Conan the Barbarian. It compares more favorably to Conan the Destroyer, but I'm not sure that it's the better movie. The main problem is a decent chunk of the movie is taken up with Sonja having to babysit a Short Round starter kit. I'd completely forgotten that kid was on the movie, I would have traded him for Grace Jones or Wilt Chamberlain in a second. Brigette Nielsen does a fine job and even that fat comic relief guy is good, but ugh, that damn little kid. (Who went on to star in TMNT 2: Secret of the Ooze, I can't help but notice.
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Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)This is probably the most expensive movie Roger Corman ever produced, and he got every penny's worth out of it because the special effect shots and the booming James Horner theme showed up in a dozen other movies. If you've never seen it, the plot is "let's remake Star Wars and the Seven Samurai". It's an okay movie, it starts off pretty decent with John Boy Walton going on a mission to recruit some mercenaries to fight about the evil John Saxon, but once the group is recruited the film starts to drag. The "epic" space battles at the end were obviously straining the film's budget as far as Corman would let it go. There are very few ships on screen at once and a lot of shots of one ship shooting and then cut to another ship shooting, then an explosion. It feels low energy.
But Sybil Danning as Saint-Exmin tho.
nuff said, my dudes