Nineteen ought eighty and six, was a great year. I still remember it fondly. It was the year my favorite baseball player was a rookie on my favorite team. The baseball cards from that season had wooden borders and are still the quintessential design in the chambers of my heart.
Wood paneling made for good baseball cards AND good vehicles.
Also in 1986, Haley’s comet made its way to earth, passing so close that you could see it in the night sky.
I didn’t bother to actually look out the window to see it. My dad said something like, “It won’t be back for another seventy years,” but we were religious so I didn’t worry about it – twinkled resurrected beings always have time for celestial objects.
Also, Top Gun came out and was rated PG, which meant I actually got to see about fifteen minutes of it before my parents realized it wasn’t for kids.
Take my breath away.
Yes, 1986 was a good year. But 1986 was not a good year for fantasy/sword-and-sorcery films. The options were “Amazons,” and “[insert option here].” I’m pretty damn determined to get through all of the 1980s on this list of fantasy films, so I have no one to blame but myself for watching it. Somehow, though, I blame all of you.
Is it fun?
“Fantasy,” as a genre, is a term that can be used somewhat ambiguously. Some people’s “fantasy” is wizards and hobbits, and absolutely no sex. Yet at the same time, “fantasy” also includes this!
A much different sort of fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless.
Amazons, apparently, was someone’s fantasy.
Have you ever, in your deepest and most shameful places, fantasized about having absolute power, with loads of sexy Amazons to serve you, and no one to stop you from taking whatever you wanted? Answer on with me the count of three. One. Two. Three. “YES, SO HAVE – Oh shit. You haven’t? Me neither. Gross.“
But if you have (and you have) then I have the character for you. This is Kolungo.
He is the Darth Vader of tv sitcom dads, seen here talking to his sidekick, Andy Richter.
He uses a mystical force to choke people. Occasionally while holding an apple.
ART!!!
He has magic lightning, an army of marauders, and a pet lioness that turns into a naked blonde woman. In some ways, Kolungo has it all, but he’ll risk it all to get his hands on the crystal of life.
Why? That’s unclear. Roger Corman made this movie. The crystal of life probably holds Thanos’s bikini together.
So while Kolungo’s fantasy might be a tiiiiiny bit silly and self serving, it’s still very much a fantasy in a “don’t yuck my yum” sort of way. The only problem of course is that Kolungo is the villain, not the protagonist. This is not Kolungo’s fantasy.
If instead, your fantasy is telling the story of the two brave warrior women who stood against him, then I simply must ask…
…Why do you hate them so so so much?
Are the character gewd?
These are our main characters, Dyala and Tashi.
Dyala is a hot blonde warrior who has been trained since birth to fight in defense of her people. Tashinge is also. The differences end there.
They are both very attractive. You get to see their boobs! I mean, that’s better than not seeing boobs, right? No one likes an Amazon tease.
So yeah, the characters are fine.
Does it hate women?
I know I don’t really shut up about this, and maybe I should. It’s not like I treat women all that great. I mean, I’m fine. I haven’t done any of the things this movie does to women every five minutes. There’s rape. So much of it. I think rape might actually be a subgenre of 1980s fantasy. As a cautionary tale, some of the guys in this movie who rape get killed immediately after they rape. Lesson learned. But then again, they died doing what they loved.
You also might be interested to know that this film doesn’t just hate women, but also hates its extras. More specifically THIS extra.
He’s lashed to the wheels of a slaver’s/raper’s wagon, cuz you y’know… evil! But he shows up in multiple scenes, usually upside down, and wholly committed to the craft of being a corpse.
He’s my favorite. I think he might actually be dead.
Is it worth watching?
If you love old sword and sorcery movies as much as I do, and if you’re determined to write one up from every year in the 80s, and if you know you’re only two away from finally getting to do Willow, then maybe Amazons is worth watching. Maybe. You can find it on Tubi, which somehow became the unofficial resting place of every movie that screened on USA Up All Night. This means you can watch it for free if you don’t mind seeing the same ad for laundry detergent played 37 times during your 90 minute experience. And sometimes it’s nice to remember that movies really HAVE gotten better over time, even if recently they’ve gotten worse.
Next one is Princess Bride.
