Hundra

In a mythological land, a female tribe is slaughtered by marauding male barbarians leaving the warrior Hundra as the lone survivor. She sets out to find a suitable male to mate with to re-start a new tribe. Soon, she winds up in a walled city run by a group of chauvinistic men.

Hundra has the one original angle of being a feminist slant on the sword and sorcery cycle of films from the mid-80's. The genre had been usually typified by scantily clad barbarian women with little in the way of political correctness. So Hundra stands out a little from the crowd, although Red Sonja from a few years later was coming from a similar place. That said, it isn't above having the heroine ride her horse naked into the ocean for an unorthodox bath! In fairness, it's hardly the most gratuitous nudity and the film overall is noticeably less dependent on erotic moments than most others from this type of flick. Laurene Landon is spirited in the title role. She clearly does a lot of her own stunts and gives a very physical performance.

It's not a great film though sadly. The main problem is that its pace lags in the middle too much. After a great start the action slows down once the heroine arrives at the city. This means that it feels like the running time could have been reduced by ten to fifteen minutes. But, that said, there are good fight scenes that bookend the film. And the production values overall seem pretty good with some decent locations and a stirring Ennio Morricone score to add some additional class. In the final analysis, Hundra is no classic and is weak in its middle section but it does have some good things about it.

Hundra Needs A Baby - that sums up this film minus the fighting of course. Hundra comes home one day to find her family and own kind killed from a raid on their village. The clan of the wolf is to blame. Hundra hates men - all men BUT the wise sage woman tells Hundra to find of the wolf clan men and to have a baby in order to keep there kind going, since they are the last of their kind. Then our movie really begins... Hundra goes out to hunt for a man of the wolf clan to have a baby with.

The movie is alright - not too bad. The acting is lacking a bit but it's not so awful that the characters are flat.. everyone in the film was doing their best I believe. It's a sincere film with a handful of comical scenes (like the belching & farting man).

This is a pretty decent sword and sorcery type of movie if you like the Conan types of films - except this one is focused on a female barbarian.

5/10

I think people over analyse the film. Laurene Landon was the original action woman of the 80's. She played a wrestler in All the Marlbes and did several more strong woman roles after that.

People have also said they don't know why the Amazon tribe was attached at the start. Were they watching the film? The female narrator makes it clear that the men feared the women living a life on their own and either wanted to enslave them or kill them.

As for the nudity part. It's obvious is it not? The women were meant to be shown as worthless slaves, pieces of meat for the men to use as they pleased.

The one point I'd make is that ALL the men in the film are for the most part shown to be utter pigs and violent to woman. No one seems to have noted that, instead it's "Oh look a naked woman" I don't think I've seen a film where so many groin kicks were administered by one woman! I think it's a film worthy of a remake. There has been a lack of Amazon style films over the last few years. It seems a shame when there are so many good looking muscled women actors (like Cory Everson) out there.

After her all-woman tribe gets wiped out by some nasty men for no reason, Hundra takes off in search of a man to impregnate her (hopefully with a girl) to ensure the tribe does not die out for good. After giving the aforementioned men what-for, Hundra, her horse and her pet dog that follows her around everywhere, travel in search of the perfect man for the job. After a failed attempt with a drunken slob who Hundra ends up thumping, she arrives in a near-by desert village run by a chauvinist pig and his merry men. This "prince" likes to select the most attractive-looking female residents of the village and uses a hot mistress to teach them how to be the perfect woman, so they can then serve the drunken, brutish town aristocrats. Hundra stumbles upon the plot and tries to stop it, but is abducted and forced to undergo the same "training". Meanwhile, she falls for the village doctor and wants him to be the father of her child, but he is not very willing...

Hundra could possibly be the world's earliest feminist. She hates men and is strongly for women's rights, trying to force her beliefs on every woman she comes across later in the film. She is also well-versed in fighting and weaponry, making her no novice when it comes to taking-on these men. After she is forced into "training" by the prince, she discovers that her teacher has an illegitimate son, which the prince would kill her for. In exchange for keeping this secret, the teacher agrees to help Hundra win-over the doctor so they can make a baby. Hundra tries and tries and finally convinces the teacher to fight back against the prince and his merry men, and stand-up for her rights. There are many women's lib speeches from Hundra, almost as much of that as there is sword and sorcery, so you get my drift when I say feminism...

As for the sword and sorcery, it's a grand old fare with much slicing and dicing. There's a fair amount of blood and heads coming off, and even the poor old pet dog gets into a fight with a prince! There also seems to be a few horses who didn't get the good end of the bargain, falling all over the place. Speaking of horses, there's a strange scene where Hundra rides her horse through the ocean naked, presumably to bathe them both? You've also got a tiny bit of slap-and-tickle and the acting is fairly ordinary. No one stands-out much. The ending is what you'd expect, with the oppressed women rising up against those brutal men. None of them just seem to be as good with a sword as our Hundra! She also does it with the doctor and gives birth to a baby, but when she says "Give me my daughter", the doctor and the teacher exchange concerned glances, as if the baby's actually a boy. But Hundra says nothing of it later, so who knows what that scene was about... It must have been a girl, then! Doing her bit for the women of the village, Hundra takes her baby and rides off into the sunset, ready to try and replenish her tribe so that they may thrive again...

With the feminist themes, this film is an interesting twist on the abundant sword and sorcery plot. The locations were very well used and the film was well edited. Can't say much of the music, but there's nothing there that will truly annoy you, except for some of the storyline, of course! Not a bad viewing.

I don't care for the sword-and-sandal fantasy genre that permeated the 80's with movies like the CONAN films and RED SONJA and BEASTMASTER. This was probably because I was only a child with no one to introduce me to them and, growing up, they just looked like live action heavy metal album covers, and I've never gone back to see what I've been missing since. But I've recently stumbled on one that's not half bad. Far from the level of CONAN and its ilk, the low-budget HUNDRA makes up for its flaws with heart and intent. It's set on an alternate world where women are second-class citizens, treated as property or pets. At some point in the past, a band of women broke away from the men-centric society to form a roaming band of nomads that only interact with the world of men when they need to impregnation. Except one member of the tribe, Hundra (Laurene Landon), can't be bothered to contribute a child. She'd rather continue being a warrior/huntress and let her younger sister do all the child-bearing. One fateful day, while Hundra is out on a hunting run, her tribe is attacked by a band of barbarian men who rape and pillage, leaving no survivors. When she returns to find everyone she's ever known and loved slaughtered, Hundra consults an oracle as to how she should proceed. The answer to Hundra's quandary…how she could best avenge her people and such…is to get pregnant. And so Hundra must enter the world of men and find a suitable mate with which to fulfill her destiny.

What I think I enjoy most about HUNDRA is that it feels like a horribly misogynistic film with a main character who didn't get the memo and proceeds to rebel against the script and film itself as the ultimate icon of women empowerment. It would be one thing if the men were just abusive and sexist, but the fact that Hundra's destiny is to find a nice man and get pregnant, and that she's cool with it, means the women don't seem too keen on fighting this imagery. When Hundra first comes face-to-face with Pateray (Ramiro Oliveros), a healer in the city of men where she spends the second half of the film, and he turns her away because he's not the type of dude to randomly sleep with any woman who comes crashing through his roof, her response is to allow herself to get captured and imprisoned in the temple where she knows she'll receive training in proper use of lipstick, eye shadow, and forks. If Pateray won't have her as is, she'll doll herself up and make herself a proper lady. It feels like a major tonal conflict with literally everything else in the movie. I mean, this is the same woman who routinely spits at the very idea of allowing herself to get close to a man and spent a previous scene blowing off some steam by giving a potential rapist the beating of his life. It could just be that I'm having a hard time understanding what it is this movie is attempting to tell me (and, keep in mind, this came out in 1983…it was a different time) and I'm just infinitely amused at how this is the most misogynistic "girl power" film I've ever seen.

This isn't your average low-budget fare either. The production value on this film is actually pretty impressive for what it is. The production design and costuming were commendable. The fight choreography, not so much. Most of the fights were more humorous than heart-pounding, with blows flying slowly and uncoordinated. But we get plenty of them. Hundra is, after all, a warrior. And Laurene Landon is giving it her all, even if her performance is wooden. I think because her heart is in it as much as it is, I found it easier to forgive the fact that she wasn't the greatest actress. Few people in this movie are, with exceptions for Ramiro Oliveros (who was genuinely decent) and Luis Lorenzo (who gave a scene-chewing performance as the high priest's adviser in charge of sex slaves). All combined, I suppose HUNDRA is on par with your average cable TV movie but just a little crazier. HUNDRA was written and directed by Matt Cimber, and I love when low budget movies are written and directed by the same person (bonus points if produced as well) because it means there's a lower chance that someone will stand up to them when things just aren't working. It's how I choose to explain scenes such as Hundra's random battle with a painted dwarf on a pony wielding a pitchfork and Hundra's naked, horseback jaunt along the beach that, again, seemed to serve no purpose other than to increase the film's level of nudity. Cimber thought they'd be iconic scenes and add legitimacy, but they're memorable for the complete opposite reason.

Striving to be more than it is, HUNDRA falls short but manages to entertain in spite (and perhaps in part) of its shortcomings. Of the half dozen Z-grade movies I've treated myself to recently, HUNDRA is probably the only one I'd be willing to acknowledge as genuinely entertaining and not just schlocky fun. The plot's a little stupid, the messages seem confused, and the tones are all over the place (the rapist beatdown is accompanied by music suitable for the sweetest scenes in THE PRINCESS BRIDE) but despite all that, Hundra is a strong female presence in a movie that tries its hardest to whip her in line. Hundra may be destined to get pregnant to save her kind, but she's doing it on her terms. I enjoyed watching her battle against the tyrannical world of men and I'm frankly a little surprised this one doesn't have more of a cult following.