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.
Ah, yes: Hundra; I remember seeing that back during the times of transition between VHS tapes and DVDs (the late nineties to early aughts, in case anybody too young to remember that time might be reading this), and I managed to get a copy that came with a commentary track from some of the cast and crew, which included Laurene Langdon herself. Something she mentioned on that track that’s always stuck with me (since I’d learned some Spanish in college by then) was mentioning that in a scene involving a failed sexual encounter with a decidedly unattractive (and flatulent) barbarian guy out in the wilderness, the actor playing that disgusting character was actually a rather nice guy who didn’t like having to beat and mistreat a gal even just as an act, so she actually to goad him into playing rough with her as the script required. She says she yelled at him something like “C’mon mariquita, I know you can do better than that!” which (if you know your Spanish vulgarities) was a very stinging insult indeed.
Of course, from the general direction the story took, I get the impression its writer(s) didn’t like men very much. I also get the impression it was actually intended to be a somewhat serious story pushing a feminist narrative, but that between all the men involved in producing it and its relatively low budget, they just decided to embrace the cheesiness of it all and make it kinda campy and silly instead so its target audience (lonely and primarily male film geeks) could enjoy it. As the (male) director and his fellow crew on that commentary track pointed out concerning the religion of the town where Hundra learns some of the finer points of grooming herself to attract a man, they called it the “Cult of the Bull” with the winking implication that this cult and its adherents were full a different kind of bull, so to speak.
On the whole, I’d say they succeeded in softening what could have been an obnoxiously misandrist movie to make it more broadly enjoyable; but when it comes to entertaining low-budget flicks about the war of the sexes, America 3000 was a lot more fun. While both are based on the rather dubious premise that a sustainable society composed entirely of women who try to have as little to do with men as possible could actually exist, at least America 3000 broadly hinted at how such a society could have arisen in the first place (with the wise old woman in that movie reciting some of its lore as part of the new ruler’s inauguration ceremony). One also has to put one’s suspension of disbelief through quite a workout to accept the idea that any reasonably attractive gal (let alone anyone as easy on the eyes as Laurene Langdon) would have much trouble convincing a nice normal guy who doesn’t seem to have any other prospects for getting some feminine action to impregnate her; whereas one can easily suspend disbelief that the ruler of a society of men who are the escaped former slaves of a ruthless matriarchy might have some difficulty convincing the ruler of that same matriarchy (who’s been raised all her life to view all men with contempt and loathing) to let him love her rather than just “seed” her (although he’s quite willing to do that too).