Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Red Sonja!

If random stills from your movie don't look like Helloween album covers, you're doing it wrong.

There is perhaps no less useful term in the bloated field of Writing On The Movies than "camp", which can mean anything from the leering grotesquerie of Joel Schumacher's Batman to the prototypical Airplane! shenanigans of Adam West's Batman. While recognisable cousins, one is unwatchable and the other is enduringly endearing. Remove "camp" altogether and you get the unutterably awful THE Batman, in which a world-famous celebrity billionaire played by the guy with the most recognisable face shape in the world stands two feet away from a dozen cops wearing a bat costume and you have to assume they're all just humouring him by pretending they don't know exactly who he is. What we can accept in the psychedelic cartoon reality of the Adam West show becomes so absurd in a sovlless grimdark iteration that the exercise becomes contemptible.

POV: you have the gall to like THE Batman on my bloggue. Also, for zoomoids who use this meme template: this is what a POV shot actually is. It stands for Point Of View, not Any Random Camera Angle.

Perhaps then "camp" is like a seasoning that, when applied judiciously, renders mere footage into entertainment, but in excess renders it inedible. The more "camp" you add to something, the more entertaining it becomes until the "camp" component overpowers the meat and potatoes and makes you want to hurl. Like a Roger Moore James Bondkino, Red Sonja daringly teeters on the brink of that event horizon. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who plays not-Conan, declared it his worst film, which might mean he's successfully mind-wiped Batman and Robin from his memory. Yet Red Sonja's goofy excesses are tempered by titular heroine Brigitte Nielsen's oaken inability to emote, and by its lean runtime of 85 minutes, so that it settles nicely into the Goldilocks just-right zone between crass and dull, which we'll call "entertainment".

Arnold yeeting Short Round would have been worth ticket price alone.

Mixed praise for a greatest movie of all time, perhaps, but shut up. The story begins on an incongruously dark note, with Sonja - sole survivor of a war party led by the evil and deliriously hammy Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman, also of Conan) - being BRUTALLY GANG RAEPD in punishment for spurning the queen's sapphic entreaties. Nielsen and Bergman are both six feet tall so doubtless this is someone's fetish bingo card. Fortunately for Sonja, she's approached by magic gods or something which offer her superpowers that amount to being able to hit people with a sword, so she can seek her revenge to the strains of Ennio Morricone's why-the-fuck-is-Ennio-Morricone-scoring-this-flick score.

A pyramidal temple held aloft by carven naked hoes is where I imagine Frank Frazetta had his studio.

But first, Queen Gedren makes another stop at this temple where Sonja's sister works as a hot priestess tasked with keeping the MacGuffin safe. It's a glowing green sphere that causes earthquakes in the presence of light (why not?) and in their ritual to seal it, the priestesses do this:

Shot from above, this looks like an eyeball dilating; a powerful symbol of the joy that entertainment brings, or sexual excitement. Hey, you'd buy it from Rob Ager.

Queen Gedren's goons defeat the priestesses but Sonja's sister escapes by ziplining (why not?) to warn Arnold's not-Conan so he can pass the message onto Sonja, none of which is necessary since Sonja was going to go after Gedren anyway. You might think an 85-minute movie wouldn't fit much padding, but you'd be wrong: everything in this movie is padding. Anyway, not-Conan finds Sonja training to be a gladiator or whatever under this guy:

Who lives here:

I highlight this because the movie is charmingly over-designed. Every costume and location is festooned with totally unnecessary flourishes unthinkable to srs bsns g*me of thr*nes fans, because fantasy entertainment once aspired to the fantastic, not to 95 IQ umm-ackshually takes on half-remembered history books written by le cockwombling fuckcrustable beard-cultivators.

Random shit like this litters the landscape like a prehistoric version of those roadside kitsch attractions signposted on Route 66 roadtrips.

Arnold and Sonja team up off-and-on-again through a series of vignettes ranging from vidyaesque boss fights to such surreal scenarios as rescuing Short Round from teetering on the dismembered hand of an enormous statue while berating his manservant.

This scene might be equally at home in a Buñuel piece or a Harryhausen adventure.

Meanwhile, Gedren brings the MacGuffin back to her evil castle, where to maximise its seismic impact she's constructed a room full of candles (why not?)

Just filling a room full of candles renders a more striking and impressive set than anything anyone's been able to do with unlimited options with CGI greenscreens.

Gedren's castle is a great location rich with overwrought designs and she has a cool pet spider:

This will be my castle too when I reign.

It's a shame then that her plan will necessarily destroy her ornate lair, because her plan goes:

    Step 1: Expose the light-powered earthquake machine to a room full of candles.

    Step 2: ???

    Step 3: Profit!

Neither Gedren nor the writers thought that far ahead though, and who cares besides? There's a perfectly good formula for entertainment: hero, villain, love interest, wise mentor, sidekick, MacGuffin, three setpieces, climactic fight, lair explodes, roll credits. If you're not named Ozu, Sjöström or Paradjanov, you should probably stick to it.