Amazons

The idea behind this made-for-TV movie - a group of modern day Amazons who scheme in political ways - was a promising one. I think the best way it could have been executed would have to made it slightly tongue-in-cheek, since the idea is a little silly when you think about it. Unfortunately, director Paul Michael Glaser doesn't seem to have found anything funny about the story, because he directs with complete seriousness. The movie is so dry - along with being remarkably slow-moving - that there simply isn't any fun to be found. The movie also frequently comes across as cheap, with shabby production values (whoever lit the interior scenes should have been fired) and with clearly little time given to set up and shoot scenes. There are a few chuckles coming from the depiction of computers, which would have been silly even in 1984, but other than that, "Amazons" is a tough slog.

I was surprised when I saw this movie, as it's one of the few essentially sympathetic portrayals of the concept of an Amazon culture I've ever seen committed to visual media. When I noticed who the director was, I was even more delighted (and understood where some of the beautiful shots came from).

For all of its nearly black&white villain-hero dichotomy, it has some interesting concepts behind it, about how a shadow-culture could survive for millennia and why.

Given that "Amazons" aired the year Geraldine Ferraro was Walter Mondale's running mate, it's difficult not to see this movie as a cautionary tale by paranoid men (specifically, writers David Solomon and Guerdon Trueblood). The plot has a secret society of voluptuous women plotting to take over the world by wiping out powerful male adversaries (one of the women is, in fact, a political candidate's second-in-command), and framing a young doctor for the death of politico William Schallert. These women (Jennifer Warren, Stella Stevens, Tamara Dobson etc) are descendants of the original Amazons - though how they managed to be descendants, since Amazon women weren't allowed to fraternize with men, is never explained (or maybe it was, and I've just forgotten in the years since I saw this movie) - and anyone who complains about how the likes of Buffy Summers leave men without their genitals is likely to be pleased that heroine Madeleine Stowe has a hunky cop (played by TV veteran Jack Scalia) in her corner.

The movie does sound misogynistic, but given that the heroine is a woman and that there are problems in the ranks of the society it's not sexist enough to qualify; but it's also not as much fun as it could have been. (It's also worth noting that these Amazons have two breasts, even in the prologue set on a battlefield - Amazons generally had one breast removed to make it easier to get out the arrows in battle, but try getting that on TV, even today.) The criminally wasted Basil Poledouris does supply another good score, however; and the not entirely unexpected open ending does, however, come off. But one shouldn't be surprised to learn that Paul Michael Glaser's career has by now led him to be promoting caravans in the UK with his (by now very) old mate David Soul.

"We shall make war as we have lived our lives, as sisters of the bow. And our war shall be the war of Amazons, against the race of Man."

Amazons plot to take control of male-dominated America. The plot moves along, with a sympathetic role from one of the Amazons whose heart may be in the right place. There is just enough suspense and honest emotions that make this movie work. What I don't understand is that Leonard Maltin reviewed it in one of his books, but has since removed it.