reiher@ucla-cs.UUCP (07/05/85)
"Red Sonja" could be worse, so I can't complain too much
about it. Basically, it's a sword and sorcery potboiler, just as
I expected. It has some unexpectedly good points and some un-
necessarily bad ones. If one likes this sort of thing, the bad
points won't entirely ruin it. Oddly, though, some the good
points won't make too much difference to fans of this sort of
film.
Red Sonja (having very little relation to the character in
one of Robert Howard's Conan stories) is a woman warrior who
seeks to avenge the death of her family. An evil queen
slaughtered them all when Sonja refused to be her lover. After
the massacre, Sonja meets up with something suspiciously reminis-
cent of Glinda the Good. Whatever this special effect is sup-
posed to be, it somehow gives her strength to become a powerful
swordswoman. While she's off training, her sister, who must have
missed out on the massacre, is helping neutralize a powerful
green globe which, unless kept in darkness, will shortly destroy
the world. The evil queen bursts in at the appropriate moment,
slaughters all the priestesses, and steals the globe for her
predictably nefarious purposes. Sonja's sister escapes, fatally
wounded, to the arms of someone who isn't Conan but is played by
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who takes her to Sonja, who swears to re-
cover the globe, and we're off to the races. Silly plot compli-
cations, in the form of a child prince and his loyal protector
and a romantic subplot between Sonja and Arnie (hindered by
Sonja's hatred for men and her oath to give herself only to a man
who can beat her in a fair fight) serve only to pad the film to a
sellable length, 88 minutes, in this case.
Bad points first. Most important is Brigitte Neilsen, who
plays Red Sonja. She is beautiful and well trained in the mar-
tial arts. Unfortunately, she makes Tanya Roberts look like
Katherine Hepburn. Boy, is she bad! Most unfortunately, laugh-
able as her line readings are, she isn't the worst performer in
the film. That honor goes to Ernie Reyes, Jr., who plays the
young prince. By the end of the film, I was almost praying that
his character would be killed so that I wouldn't have to listen
to him mangling any more lines or watch another of his excruciat-
ing expressions. His only apparent qualification for the part is
a proficiency in martial arts, but even in his fight scenes his
grating personality comes through like fingernails scraped on a
blackboard. The greatest disappointment of "Red Sonja", though,
has to be the performance of Sandahl Bergman. Ms. Bergman was so
good in "Conan the Barbarian" that it is saddening to see her
give such a bad performance as the wicked queen. I find it hard
to convince myself that she is the same actress.
Getting back to Master Reyes, who receives my coveted Clint
Howard Award for worst new child actor of 1985, even without see-
ing the rest of the year's films, his inclusion points out anoth-
er flaw in "Red Sonja". I have no doubt that all connected with
the film found him just as annoying as I did, but I suspect they
had no choice. Why? Because screenwriters Clive Exton and
George McDonald Fraser wrote a vital part for a kid who could do
martial arts, and I doubt if any other boy actor was capable of
handling this requirement. This is a fundamental error in the
script, one of many. Budding screenwriters take note: never
write a part that is too hard to cast, or you may see your pic-
ture ruined by the likes of Ernie Reyes, Jr., or, for that
matter, by Brigitte Neilsen. Other flaws with the script are
lack of inventiveness, poor to mediocre dialog, muddled logic,
and some outright continuity gaps. As an example of the latter,
Sonja is told by the prince's henchman that she can get to the
wicked queen's domain by a long safe route or a short dangerous
one. Naturally, she takes the latter, survives it (whoops, a
spoiler), and moves on, only to find ahead of her ... the prince,
who was taking the long route. I am particularly disappointed in
Fraser, who writes a fine adventure novel (I recommend his Flash-
man series) and wrote the screenplay for "The Three Musketeers"
and "The Four Musketeers" some years back. I expected a lighter
touch and a bit more imagination from him.
Richard Fleischer's direction is neither a plus nor a minus.
He does a competent hack job. I would have hoped that the son of
one of the Fleischer Brothers, crazed animators of the 1930s,
would have had a bit more imagination. The vacuity of the pro-
ject seems to have sapped out of him whatever ideas he might have
had, as it did on "Conan the Destroyer". On the other hand,
Fleischer is a very old hand on sword epics, going back to "The
Vikings" in 1958 (one of the beloved films of my mispent youth),
and the experience shows when it comes time to draw the weapons
and start hacking about. Moreover, Fleischer deserves a break on
the basis of age, being nearly 70. Few directors have the stami-
na left to do even a polite, low key drawingroom comedy at that
age, much less a big special effects/action film. Ennio
Morricone's score is another neutral item, but a disappointment,
as it proves that Morricone, too, is a mere mortal and cannot be
counted on to always come up with a great score.
On the plus side, Arnold Schwarzenegger is really developing
a flair for this sort of thing. He starts off a bit shakily, but
eventually gets on track, giving a convincing enough performance
as the brawny hero. He's given less opportunities for humor, a
talent he began to show in "The Terminator" and "Conan the Des-
troyer", which is a pity. Paul Smith is fairly good as the young
prince's bearlike servitor. Ronald Lacey is superb as the evil
queen's henchman, giving a nicely calculated performance with
just enough camp and just enough menace. It's a pity the picture
doesn't use him more effectively.
The swordfights are quite well staged. They result in pre-
cisely the maximum amount of blood, severed limbs, and disgusting
sounds of weapons entering flesh to avoid an R rating. The ef-
fects are fair to good, with some shaky matte work, some good,
etc. The production design is excellent, really strange and
creepy. Most fans of this sort of film will barely notice, but
Danilo Donati (Fellini's favorite designer) has really done a
splendid job in created a very foreign environment. Cinematogra-
pher Giuseppe Rotunno, another Fellini alumnus, contributes good
photography.
Sometimes I like to speculate about unlikely directors and
projects. The presence of Donati and Rotunno makes me wonder
what "Red Sonja" would have been like if, somehow, producer Dino
de Laurentiis had persuaded Fellini, his old colleague, to direct
it. Now that's a movie I'd like to see. Or how about if George
Lucas talked Ingmar Bergman out of retirement to make the next
Star Wars movie? I consider it a minor tragedy that it is too
late to see a Luis Bunuel James Bond movie, or a Sergei Eisen-
stein Friday the 13th sequel. And what, I wonder, would Orson
Welles do with "Third Blood"? Alas, producers aren't gamblers
and most auteurs don't have the sense of humor required to get
involved with this kind of project, but it's fun to speculate.
Fassbinder could have done some very strange things with Indiana
Jones, I'm sure.
But, getting back to the subject at hand, taken as a whole,
"Red Sonja" is a slightly better than average adventure picture,
marred largely by dreadful performances in key roles. Fans of
the genre will probably like it, non-fans will be unsurprised to
hear that they might as well skip it.
--
Peter Reiher
reiher@ucla-cs.arpa
soon to be reiher@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU
{...ihnp4,ucbvax,sdcrdcf}!ucla-cs!reiher