Le guerriere dal seno nudo

A very strange and anachronistic movie of 1973; it feels like it should have been made a decade before, at the height of the sword and sandal boom. As for Terence Young directing...who knows?! I saw the English dub, which is pretty bad, but then so is this overlong and rather aimless film. It highlights Amazon society, following their new queen as she engages with a male tribe for procreation, but the acting is limited at best and the dialogue pitiful. Some nice acrobatics here and there and one battle scene, but the focus throughout is on showing skin, most notably in an explicit nude catfight, so this is more a skin flick than anything else.

What can one expect of a film about raving amazons from 1973? I expected something really terrible but it wasn't at all as bad as I expected. The basic story of a competition between two female leaders is kind of silly, but it has not at all the campy weirdness one would expect with all these big breasted women doing naked oil wrestling, throwing javelin, riding on horses, sleeping together, fighting, et cetera.

There are even sincere dialogues, nice looking sets and mass fight scenes. It has the looks of an expensive film. The story line of Antiope finding affection of a man, and being troubled by it, is not very interesting, but believable in a sense, also thanks to the reasonable acting by Angelo Infanti. All other acting is not very good, but never the cringing kind of bad.

But how to watch this? It is not too bad to get the predicate 'camp'. It is not funny enough to be a comedy (only a slight bit, when women are torn between aversion and lust for men). And it is certainly not factual to be enjoyed as an historical drama, as many others already have pointed out.

And what about an erotic film? There are pretty women in it, often naked. But the characters themselves HARDLY seem to enjoy sexuality. They have to ENDURE it in order not to die out. Which was perhaps the whole joke of the film, I guess, but only director Terence Young could have told us that. I rate this 5/10.

There is no sense of fun or logic or pacing to this "movie." The first half is pretty much as bad as they come, then Luciana Paluzzi shows up for about ten minutes then the rest is lousy again. Terence Young, Bob Simmons both did some of the best Bond films, Simmons being stunt man/coordinator. I hope they were off drinking and whoring around and aren't responsible for most of this movie because that's about the only explaining it. There is virtually no style to the film, barley even C grade film school work and F grade acting other than Paluzzi who does her own dubbing-but sadly keeps her clothes on. All the fight scenes are poorly done with people pretending to be impaled on spears and the ladies struggling under the weight of their own armor. Certainly women can be athletic but I guess none could be found to be in this movie. Humor? The fact that it's unfunny when it's supposed to be doesn't make it a success. It's just so shoddy. Composer Riz Ortalani at least doesn't shame himself and turns in a fun main theme and a few other good tunes, but his music is choppily edited. There is a fair amount of mostly brief nudity but most of it is shot from far away with no erotic or exploitation generated--it's like they didn't' even care about showing off the nudity. Best scene is a naked fight during a thunder storm which has a bit of style and exploitation, almost nothing else in the movie works. It's inept, though the sets and number of extras are large what they do with them is poor. 2 decent glass matte paintings. The DVD from world class bad filmmaker Fred Ray is full frame scratched up choppy and froze in my DVD player when I desperately tried to fast forward to the next badly staged battle scene or through the horribly acted non funny talk scenes that outnumber battle and gratuitous nude scenes--this print is missing the opening "joke" titles other reviews refer to. It's just about totally worthless. Lead non actress has large natural breasts and no ability to carry a scene let alone a whole movie, lead dark haired villainess has large fake ones. A few dolly shots, very few,are the only attempts to direct a scene and again the cast of women can't act and can't fight and the nude scenes are usually shot so blandly--there is just virtually no reason to watch it. Shockingly it's listed as Terence Young's (fill in the blank for the title as there are several to choose from) perhaps the producers insisted on using this credit or for some reason Young actually wanted to possess this film in that way. Wow, hard to believe he ever did anything worthwhile from seeing this, it's almost beyond understanding--other than perhaps whatever big parties the cast and crew may have enjoyed and their pay checks--too bad they kept all that fun to themselves. I'd really like to know what they were thinking, or perhaps they were hoping the movie would go unseen, Sad sad. Young has made other bad films but rarely one so inept and clunky.

This movie's greatest selling point is the sex. There is tons of it, even for an exploitation film. I wouldn't go out of my way to review this if that was all it had to offer though. It presents minimal plot yet an interesting take on politics in the city of Amazons. Most impressive of all however, is the acrobatics.

For some reason, women in American movies at this time were, more often than not, poor fighters. Even in the 80's, Sandahl Bergman, the queen of fantasy adventures, could just barely pass as someone trained with a sword. She was in at least three I can think of in which swordplay was important to her character, yet she never once sold me that she could use it. Against the odds, every major and minor character in War Goddess can fight. On foot, horseback, and in mud, these women can wield any weapon and perform any feat. It's very impressive.

This movie does NOT take itself seriously, I figured that out in the first three minutes. An opening title informs us "This movie happened, if it happened at all, about 3000 years ago." That means it takes place in 1000BC. What's wrong with that? Well the heroes are Roman soldiers and the Roman empire did not begin until 750BC. Therefore these soldiers represent an empire that will not even exist for over 2 centuries! I'll bet no one went to see this movie for a history lesson though. The real heroes are Amazon warriors who have to mate with men once a year or they will die out. Practicing selective breeding they only mate with tough Roman soldiers and they make love while chanting "Men are pigs, men are filth." (Which is something I and the other girls in my sorority did in college. I guess some traditions never die.) No monsters, dragons or giants. The battle scenes are okay and there is a mud wrestling scene that all the men will enjoy. If you want a plot that makes sense, or at least pretends to, try any of the HERCULES movies.