Monday, 4 May 2015

Blunt Force Troma: A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell!!!

Everyone loves Troma, the studio that brought you such all-time classics as The Toxic Avenger, Surf Nazis Must Die, and the tender Tromeo and Juliet. Well, come with me and I shall take you on a journey to the far future of the Tromaverse. Yes, despite being populated by dinosaurs, A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell is actually set in a post-nuclear future, like a much lower-budget Mad Max meets The Valley of Gwangi.

An appropriate response to everything in this movie.

Some questions may inevitably arise, like "what's a nymphoid?" and "what's going on?" Well, dear reader, let me advise you to leave such dreams of enlightenment in the dust where they belong. You'll never find out because there's virtually no dialogue. Fortunately, the DVD in which I got this movie (along with seminal slasher movie Graduation Day, which I'll be getting to later), contains a trailer that elucidates the post-nuclear scenario, because I never would've guessed this wasn't meant to be some sort of prehistoric budget Hyboria.

The back of this box actually gives away the ending of Graduation Day, for even less value!!!

Perhaps the reason it was decided that the movie was set in the future is because the dinosaurs don't really look like anything in particular, and Lloyd Kaufman cares about nothing if not saving you the stress of worrying what species they're supposed to be (this sentence is literally true, because Lloyd Kaufman does not give a fuck).

This was the family dog before the war (srs).

A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (a title you'll hear several times if you watch the trailer, which I advise you do because it's better than the film) stars "international cult heroine" Linda Corwin as Lea, the nymphoid barbarian of the title. When we meet her she's in the business of running around in a forest, because her family were killed in the war, and she woke up to find herself in Dinosaur Hell!!! IMDb reliably informs me that she's also credited as "Secondary Reptilian Goon", because this production was damned if it wasn't going to get full value for everyone it had to drag out there and feed. It also informs me the movie came out in 1990, which is a good couple of decades more recent than it looks.

Tromaville would come to regret spending its fallout shelter budget on a giant skull-faced castle. Note that the river in this shot is an effect, for no reason.

Anyway, Lea meets a guy named Marn, and because he's not deformed like everybody else, I guess that makes them a match made in Dinosaur Heaven. Marn spends most of the movie trying to save her from the evil, but inept Clon, with little success. She spends more time being rescued by a masked stranger (who perhaps not coincidentally resembles Toxie), and a giant sandworm out of Dune. There's also a man who reads "The Jabberwocky" and carries a gun, but he is of no consequence, and may just have wandered across the set while they were filming.

This movie is to 1 Million Years BC as Bizarro is to Superman: a weird, malformed imitation. The stop motion stuff is fun though. It's also fun to watch Clon bumble about losing limbs and getting brained all over the place. I don't recommend this movie to anyone, but it meets my criteria for notability, which is a wake-up call I shall choose to ignore as my body continues to decay.

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