Red Sonja (1985)
AKA Kalidor
Starring Brigitte Nielsen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sandahl Bergman, Paul L. Smith, Ernie Reyes Jr., Ronald Lacey, Pat Roach, Terry Richards, Janet Agren, Donna Osterbuhr
Directed by Richard Fleischer
Expectations: Lowest of the low.
On the general scale:
On the B-movie scale:
Over the course of your journey through cinema, you’re bound to watch your share of thrilling adventures. There’s also a good amount of entertaining misadventures, but even the most careful of viewers will eventually run into a “disadventure.” Red Sonja is unfortunately one of the latter variety, and it is a rather bad one at that. It’s sad, too, because it starts out with such promise. Opening with some quick text about how Red Sonja is on a legendary quest of revenge, visions of the incredible revenge wrought by Arnold in Conan the Barbarian filled my mind. This is exactly the wrong thing to do if you actually want to enjoy Red Sonja, because absolutely nothing in this film is anywhere close to the original Conan film. Well, the production design is pretty good, but it’s still a couple of steps down.
Ugh, where to even start? There’s so much wrong here; I feel like I’ve been confused and blinded by the horrors I’ve just witnessed. Painful as it is, after thinking about all the bad elements I have to say the one that annoyed me the most was the character of Prince Tarn. It’s going to be hard to relate why I didn’t like him without the whole thing coming off as “Will hates kids,” or at least “Will hates kids in movies,” but honestly I wanted to strangle this little pompous kid. It’s frustrating too, because Ernie Reyes, Jr.’s martial arts are actually really great! He could have been a fun, interesting character, but instead he’s a whiny kid who’s always yelling and putting everyone down. Ugh. If nothing else, haters of this kid will get some entertainment out of him being tortured by a villain, and later Arnold picks him up one-handed and shakes him.