I remember reading an interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger years ago–heck, I was still a kid at the time, maybe in high school–where the man who was probably the biggest star in the world at the time stated he’d never had a movie bomb. He made one exception: Red Sonja. But, that he dismissed since his role was just a cameo. Sure, he got top billing in the movie’s opening credits and has a good amount of screen-time, and could arguably the male lead in the movie, but he claimed it was just a cameo.
Still, I hadn’t seen it before, so why not check out the one movie Arnold Schwarzenegger once claimed was his only bomb? I didn’t have a whole lot else going on for a Friday night, and it’s not even an hour and a half long. The worst that happens is I sit through a bad movie.
Well, the worst happened: this is a bad movie.
That said, it also isn’t a particularly memorable bad movie. Lots of bad movies are bad due to weak acting, scripts, directing, and so forth. Those are generally bad but dull. Red Sonja is one of those sorts of movies. Then there are the memorable bad movies, the kind that become fodder for Mystery Science Theater 3000 and the who-knows-how-many YouTubers who follow the same basic formula of watching and mocking a bad movie, often with some deal of affection for the bad movies in question. That’s stuff like Troll 2 or The Room or all kinds of other legendary bad movies. Those are fun in their own way. But, again, that isn’t what Red Sonja is.
Anyhoo, inspired by the work of Conan the Barbarian author Robert E Howard, Red Sonja is the story of Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen in her first movie), a redheaded woman whose family was brutally murdered by the forces of Queen Gedren (Sandahl Bergman) after she turned down an offer to go with the Queen. Then the Queen’s men apparently raped her and left her for dead, but some spirit being came to her, recounting all this stuff for the sake of the audience, and then endowed her with the strength needed to one day get revenge.
Yes, that does sound a lot like the opening scenes of Conan the Barbarian, and Arnold may have originally been cast to play Conan a third time except the name was changed to avoid rights issues. Plus, Bergman was the female lead opposite Arnold in the original Conan. Wikipedia tells me they offered her the role of Sonja, but she wanted to play the villain instead and turned the lead down. All this tells me that the people behind this movie really wanted to make another Conan movie and didn’t quite get there.
Regardless, as Sonja trains in the fighting arts, Gedren has a plan to use a certain talisman, a large glowing orb that only women can touch without dying instantly, to gain power to rule the world. Only that would end up destroying it instead. One of the priestesses escapes long enough to inform the passing Arnold, who in turn rides off to tell the priestess’s sister Sonja. Yes, I know the movie told us Gedren killed her entire family before the movie started, but apparently, she had a sister somewhere else that survived for a little while longer. Sonja then has to go on a quest to defeat Gedren, destroy the talisman, and save the world. Along the way, she picks up some allies in the form of Lord Kalidor (Arnold), the spoiled rotten young Prince Tarn (stuntman/actor Ernie Reyes Jr., still working today), and Tarn’s loyal servant/toady Falkon (Paul L. Smith, Bluto to Robin Williams’s live action Popeye).
There’s a part of me that thinks whoever made this may have been trying. Arnold aside, while there aren’t any big name actors in it from the time it was made, the cast does have some somewhat recognizable ones. Aside from the ones mentioned above, Bergman’s top assistant is played by Ronald Lacey, the sinister guy in the glasses and the black hat from Raiders of the Lost Ark while the guy who had a fist fight with Indiana Jones around an airplane propeller from that same movie is there as a big guy for Sonja to defeat in a duel to show off her fighting prowess against a presumably formidable man. But no one in the movie is doing much in the way of what might be considered good acting.
And it really doesn’t help that Reyes’s Tarn is an especially obnoxious kid. That may have been somewhat intended, but the boy’s nonstop verbal abuse of Falkon and anyone else he disapproves of (basically anyone who isn’t Sonja) makes an already problematic character even more so. The biggest problem there is Reyes may be the only member of the cast not giving a particularly flat performance.
The biggest problem for a movie like this isn’t that it’s bad (and it is), but that it is bad in a way that reminds the audience of an actually much better movie: the original Conan the Barbarian. Admittedly, that movie almost certainly had a much bigger budget, but it also benefited from writer/director John Milius’s somewhat unique idea of masculinity that oozes out of every inch of the movie. It gave Conan a very distinct vibe. I don’t expect some 80s sword-and-sorcery flick to necessarily do the same with femininity given the female lead, nor would I really want it to, but something that made this more than just a few actors going through the motions with one really familiar face in the crowd could have made a movie like Red Sonja a really memorable piece of terrible cinema.
Grade: D
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