Warrior Queen

I've gone deep my friends. I mean I've been chasing bad 1980's era Sword and Sorcery styled flicks around for years, and I have seen some bad ones. But no matter how bad a sword and sorcery flick that I had seen might have been… I always had the feeling, that somehow, it could still be worse. Thanks porn director Chuck Vincent, I don't have that feeling anymore after seeing your epic 'Warrior Queen'. I'm pretty sure that there's not a picture in the genre that I could see that could be worse than this one. And if there is, I don't want see it. On the positive side, and there are some positives in this movie that we will discuss, I don't think there's a picture in the genre that has a better box cover.

Pompeii, 79AD. Mind you, as I write this in early in 2014, there's a big Hollywood movie out called Pompeii which I believe is failing at the box office. Now I could go spend ten dollars and go see that movie… or I could watch this Pompeii movie for free. In retrospect, that might've been ten dollars well spent. Anyway, high queen Berenice (Sybil Danning) is riding through the woods on her way to Pompeii when she is attacked by some bandits. She lays them to waste using her deceptively lame sword fighting technique. Berenice is badass in this movie, just so you know.

Next we see slaves on the auction block. Just to keep you informed, there is no discernable plot to this movie. Say like free the slaves, or put down the rebellion, or oust the ruler or nothing. Anyway, we get some full frontal action of some slaves getting strung up and sold off, but the slave of interest in this pile is the super cute Vespa the Virgin (Tally Chanel) who is sold off for a nice tidy sum to some one-eyed brothel operator. Eventually we will make it back to the brothel, because if this film has any value, it takes place in the brothel, but we have other stops to make before we get there.

Particularly, we have to stop in on Clodius (Donald Pleasance), the mayor of Pompeii, who is showing Berenice around town. I've always liked Donald Pleasance, and after seeing his turn of pure, unadulterated buffoonery in this movie, I only like him more. I mean… this is a terrible movie. Mr. Pleasance, being the veteran that he is, had to know this was a terrible movie… but did he mail in his performance? Sleepwalk through it? When the idiot director told Donald to flail around like a retard and retrieve doves in a net, did he scoff at this? Maybe. But he did it, and he did it with Shakespearean vigor. My man. Berenice is bored of this. We all are Berenice. We all are.

Back to the brothel. Now we get to the main reason I personally wanted to see this movie, that being the presence of one Josephine Jacqueline Jones. In the movie 'Black Venus' Miss Jones' beauty and body took our breath away. This would be her last movie and Chuck Vincent, a porn director, failed to take advantage of this opportunity. Of course we are on record here at the FCU decrying the exploitation of females in cinema… that being said… One topless scene? You're killing me over here Chuck. The beautiful Miss Jones did have a lot of screen time, and not a single line of dialog, but mostly she wanders around looking severely dazed and confused. But she's dazzling even doing just that. Then an orgy breaks out at the brothel.

We have a bad guy in this movie in Goliath (Marco Tullio Cau) who is some kind of gladiator who is slated to fight our kind of hero, Marcus (Rick Hill) in the arena. Until then, not that this arena battle ever happened, Golaith is just wandering around town being a dick. He wants to buy Vespa, gets outbid, then shoves the coins of the dude that outbid him down his throat, then tries to rape her. As a proprietor of a business, I personally would find this kind of behavior unacceptable. Please don't gag my paying customers with their own money, sir… and please try not to rape my employees. How hard is that? Vespa wants to gift Marcus with her flower. I guess. This won't happen because, as we mentioned, Goliath is a dick and he really, really wants to rape her.

What's Berenice doing during all of this? I don't know. Being bored. At first I thought it was Berenice being bored, but then I figured it was actually Sybil Danning being bored. She did not rise to the late, great Donald Pleasance' style of manic performance in this terrible situation.

The one good thing about this movie, other than the orgy scene, were the gladiator battles which featured probably the lamest gladiator game I've ever seen, in the sharp Frisbee toss. I throw a razor edged Frisbee at you, you dodge, you throw it at me, I dodge, and then we do it again until one of us forgets to step to the side and dies. What a terrible game. The next game was almost as bad, the swinging punch game, where we swing on ropes towards each other and punch each other as we pass by, but the Frisbee dodge was the worst.

Eventually Mt. Vesuvius erupts and destroys Pompeii, or rather Chuck Vincent stole scenes from some other movie and spliced them with his, not even bothering to make these two film stocks look remotely close to each other. Why bother, right Chuck?

Significant as it was Josephine Jacqueline Jones last film, before she went on to presumably become a wife and mother and pray her kids never unearth this mess, 'Warrior Queen' has to be the worst Sword and Sorcery movie ever. But not the worse movie I've ever seen Sybil Danning in. I know, right?