Red Sonja 1985 Film Review

Comic book fans why is that whenever we have a nice chat together it's about a bad movie this troubling trend needs to stop. As you might as well have guessed the film i'm about to review isn't that good and it is a comic book film to be frank I have no idea why I put this film of for so long but it's been on my list of things to watch for a good six months if not more so let's get this over with here is my review of the 1985 film Red Sonja.

The plot of the film is an evil queen is looking to take over the Kingdom and it's up to Red Sonja to stop her. I'm not going to lie the plot is pretty bad while the film does indeed tell a complete story which is always a plus it's story is just your typical fantasy story and nothing more there's no hint of originality in the story and that's a shame because a fantasy setting is prime for original stories and yet this film doesn't take advantage of that at all instead relaying on a story that's been told hundreds of times in better movies.

Starring in the film is Brigitte Nielsen as Red Sonja , Arnold Schwarzenegger as Basically Conan the Barbarian , Sandahl Bergman as Queen Gedren , Paul L. Smith as Falkon , Ernie Reyes, Jr. as Prince Tarn , Ronald Lacey as Ikol , Pat Roach as Lord Brytag , Terry Richards as Djart , Janet Agren as Varna , Donna Osterbuhr as Kendra , Tutte Lemkow as Wizard , Kiyoshi Yamasaki as Kyobo and Tad Horino as Swordmaster.

Oh boy what do I say about the acting to say it's wooden would be an insult to wooden objects that's how bad it is. It doesn't help that both the writers and the director haven't worked on anything that good altho one of the writers did write Octopussy which is pretty decent at best so I have to imagine that it was hard for the actors to even give a passable performance when none of the key creative crew have made a decent film.

Now for those that don't know this is based on the comic book character Red Sonja and not the Robert E. Howard Red Sonya. It's actually quite a common mistake to make since the characters names are both Sonya they just spell it differently the comic book version first appeared in Marvel's Conan the Barbarian series in issue number twenty three. Since then she has gone to appear in several other comic books by several other companies most notably being Dynamite Entertainment.

Something which i'm going to try and do more often with these obscure as hell comic book movies is to let you guys know that there was also a comic book adaptation of the movie just because not alot of people will know about these books. Yeah this film was no exception in issue thirty eight of Marvel Super Special i've personally not read the adaptation but if it's as bad as the movie then I most likely won't be checking the comic book version out.

Incase your wondering why Arnold Schwarzenegger is in this film alot it's because he actually wasn't meant to be in it that much. He was only meant to do what was basically an extended cameo and was only meant to do about a week of filming however he ended up doing around three to four weeks and due to alot of camera angels and editing he ends up being more of a co-star and it's due this that he ended up breaking his ten year contract with producer Dino De Laurentiis.

We have to talk about the villain because apart from Red Sonja she's the most enjoyable character in the whole film and yes i'm including Arnold Schwarzenegger in that. Saying she's the most entertaining character in the film isn't really a high bar to reach because all of the characters are just boring but she and Sonja are the least boring characters out of them all and that's both a good thing and a bad thing.

It's good because there the leads characters and so it makes sense that they would be entertaining characters. However it's a bad thing because all of the other characters are just boring as hell and so when alot of your main cast are boring you have to try and find the character of in this characters who are the least boring just so you can find some form of entertainment from a film which is what I had to do here.

Now you'd expect locations in a fantasy film to look interesting or at the very least stand out in anyway way what so ever. This film does the daring thing and chooses not to do that and it doesn't really work since if you were to look at any of the locations from this film they look like they belong in any film they just look so bland there's clearly not been any effort put into them and that's a shame because locations in a fantasy film should be visually interesting.

Since this is an action film that means that we have to talk about the action in the actual film and if you haven't been reading this review you have a fair idea of what i'm about to say. The action scenes in this film while indeed pretty entertaining are just flat and standerd fantasy affair you'd think that since this is an action film that they'd put at least a small amount of effort into the action scenes but they didn't they just did the bare minimum and that's it.

Overall yeah this is a bad film but it's also one that's entertaining but for all of the wrong reasons and I for one cannot wait for a new Red Sonja film to happend because they only have one way to go and that's up. This film gets a 4 out of 10 from me and yeah i'm using a poster for the 2009 film that was announced but never happened just because it's a cool looking and I wanted to end this review with something that looked awesome.