Hundra (1983) – A pseudo-feminist sword-and-sorcery flick? A nomadic all-women tribe (whose members often visit random men for procreation purposes — they toss back the boy-children) is attacked by a bunch of male barbarians. It doesn’t say much for the idea of the self-sufficient grrl-power tribe that they’re completely slaughtered, all but Hundra (Laurene Langdon), the warrior princess who was out hunting at the time. She wants to turn her whole self to revenge… but the tribal wisewoman (who doesn’t live with the tribe — I guess maybe there’s a retirement home?) says, No, to keep the idea of the tribe alive you really gotta have a baby. So Hundra travels to a town to find a mate, even though men are icky.
The town she chooses just happens to be more than normally misogynistic; the head of the temple regularly abducts young women and forcibly trains them to be charming and submissive for periodic purchase parties. Hundra is naturally upset, but when she catches sight of the man she actually wants to make babies with — who dismisses her out-of-hand because she’s a nasty barbarian — Hundra willingly submits herself to the temple’s charm school so she can get her man. (Alternate title: “My Fair Barbarian.”)
A big part of the problem with the whole premise is that Laurene Langdon is gorgeous. The other two ’80s titles you might recognize her from, if you delve into this end of the movie pool, are Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold (1984) and America 3000 (1986), in which her Barbie-like appearance is the whole reason she was cast. It’s hard to pretend that she’s unacceptable running around in a “sexy barbarian” costume from Spirit Halloween, and then magically becomes acceptable when she brushes her hair and wears marginally more eye makeup. (Got to hand it to Langdon, though — she performed all of her own stunts except one building fall, and swung her sword with energy, if not skill.)
This movie was shot in Spain, thus giving it access to all kinds of ruins; unfortunately, that means that literally every actor except the star was Spanish, and rather than spring for dubbing, the producers were happy with everyone repeating lines learned by rote and pretending they knew what they were saying.
Cube (1997) – In one of the most popular cult “brain puzzler” movies (completely distinct from the “mindf*ck” movies recently referenced), a handful of strangers wake up in a bizarre environment: A cubic room with hatches on all six sides, each leading to an identical room (save for the lighting scheme). But some of the room are boobytrapped. Who put them here? Why them, specifically? Can they use tenuous clues to figure out a pattern and get out before they starve to death?
People like to reference this as a “smart” movie, and it is, if you keep your attention on the puzzle. However, too much of the script centers on manipulated drama and bickering (gotta do something while you crawl through hatches, after all) of the kind that actors like to perform more than audiences like to listen to.
Nevertheless, it spawned two sequels and a Japanese remake, so the pluses outweigh the minuses.
(Familiar faces? Not just Nicole de Boer, who played Ezri Dax on the last season of ST:DS9, but also Wayne Robson, who had a long-running recurring role on The Red Green Show.)
Invitation to a Gunfighter (1964) – Yul Brynner is a taciturn hired gun — a stretch, I know, but this time he’s Creole named Jules with a faint French accent — hired in a New Mexico town to kill the one former Confederate soldier in a town that otherwise went all Union. Of course, there’s the town boss who has his fingers in every machination (Pat Hingle), plus the girl the Confederate left behind and his rival, now her drunken husband… and the added drama that Jules is a quadroon with reason to hate the slave-owning South…
(Brynner, whose own given name was inspired by his grandfather Jules, seems to have played just about every ethnicity — Siamese, Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabian, Cossack, Native American — which makes him the perfect actor for a character who can credibly claim to be mixed-race but nobody notices until he states it. From what I can tell, Brynner’s entire parentage was Swiss, German and Russian.)
Abandoned movies:
The Young Tiger (1973) – The early ’70s Hong Kong fashions and haircuts are bad enough on their own, but the version on Amazon Prime is also rescored with generic trailer music tracks — the clash is just too violent.